My spouse and I have been living together for over a decade and we have been actively trying to conceive the whole time. I was able to get pregnant several times, but I was not able to carry a baby, which was a real tragedy for me. For the last five years I haven’t been able to get pregnant. We have spent a lot of energy and traveled to many clinics and doctors, but no one could help us, and meanwhile my biological clock is ticking faster and faster. Every year the chance of carrying and giving birth to our own baby became more and more remote.
We were advised to adopt a baby, but my spouse refused because he dreams of having a baby of his own and keeps saying that we can adopt a baby even after age forty. We considered surrogacy, but we don’t have that kind of money. I held on and enjoyed babysitting my nieces and nephews since my sis has three little ones. My sister didn’t have a spouse, each of her husbands ran away when they found out they were about to become a father. Of course it was hard for my sister and we helped her as much as we could.
Somehow, during another family feast, we got into a conversation about procreation. My relatives don’t have much of a sense of tact, so they say whatever they think. It happened the same way this time and the in-laws started actively hinting at the ticking clock, they started reproaching us for refusing to adopt someone else’s child and insinuating that it was not in our position to go overboard. Their words really hurt me. I kept quiet, my spouse did the talking and he had to endure all the attacks from the in-laws as he understood that it was very hard for me to talk about it.
Unexpectedly, my sister suggested:
– I don’t understand why you need to pay someone, because I can give birth to you myself. For a small fee. You’d save money and I’d make some money. You’d know it’s your baby, not somebody else’s. You know all my sons are real beauties. This won’t be my first delivery, I’m having a normal pregnancy. We can relate to each other in a family way.
My husband and I were speechless. While my husband and I were trying to figure out how to discreetly opt out of having a baby sister, our in-laws jumped on the idea and started talking about the pluses. We did not promise anything and said we would think about it. Of course we had nothing to think about, because we wanted our own baby. First of all it was embarrassing that my sister would see her baby very often which could arouse maternal feelings for the baby. What if she gives birth to the baby and then says she’s not going to give it to us. What if she starts telling us how we should bring him up?
Another problem is that my sister doesn’t lead a very healthy lifestyle: she often drinks, smokes, and eats a poor diet. I am not sure that she can carry another perfectly healthy baby.
Also, I have always believed that any monetary relationship between relatives always leads to the collapse of the relationship. Then my sister will start complaining that we didn’t pay her enough, and I’m sure that during the pregnancy she will pull money from us beyond what was agreed upon and blackmail us for carrying the baby.
On top of everything else, we won’t be able to control her sister during her pregnancy, she will most likely control us. During our second and third pregnancies, we kept telling my sister that she should stop smoking, but the relative told us each time that she would figure out her own needs. This is one of the main reasons we didn’t want my sister to carry our baby. After coming home, my husband and I discussed everything and decided that we would not accept my sister’s proposal.
The next morning when my sister called and asked when we would start the IVF preparations, I told her that we wanted to have the baby ourselves without any help. My sister was not too happy about the rejection, because she had already spent the money she received from us in her mind. She said a lot of hurtful things to me, and then told me that we would never be able to have our own baby and that we would eventually have to take an unwanted orphanage baby anyway. Her words caused me to have another bout of depression.
However, this was only the beginning of the terror, because my sister had turned the whole family against us and they all began to insist in one voice that she be the one to give birth to us. Everyone felt it their duty to insult us and reproach us for refusing such a generous offer.
Gradually the relatives calmed down, but my mother and sister continue to terrorize us. My husband supports me as much as he can, but I am thinking more and more about adopting a baby from an orphanage.
