I don’t think there are any people that know me here, so I don’t think I’m in danger of exposing this little embarassment. You see, for months my wife has been getting progress reports on a freinds baby. She can feel the baby kicking, she’s getting large, and she is afraid of the epidural. Needles to say, we were happy to get the news that she had delivered her baby.
Having been recent parents we know that Hospitols often put pictures of newborns on the web for friends to see. Naturally, we googled the babies name. The first link that pops up is the couple we know describing their experience having a surrogate mother in India carry their child.
I can only assume that she has kept up this “being pregnant” ruse for more people than us. What’s weird is that they had mentioned that they might do it, then claimed it happened naturally. There were a number of odd things going on at the time we found out she was pregnant. It’s a little hard to tell what the truth is now though. I can’t see us directly calling her on it. It would be a bit awkward.
Wow. That definitely seems like quite the charade. Has your wife actually seen her friend in all this time? Seems like the conspicuous absence of any physical signs of pregnancy would take some doing to disguise…
My first thought was ‘mind your own business, it was probably a very difficult thing for them to go through’ but then I realised they have happily put their story up on a website! Very weird!
Is it possible she was cutting and forwarding updates from the woman she bought the baby from? Wait, you said she claimed she was considering buying a baby, then it happened naturally, so she was definitely lying then. That shows a personality disorder. I feel bad for the kid, he’s got a psycho mother now.
If it was me, I’d totally want to call her on it, but my wife would never let me. I think this is a situation where maybe you just quitely tiptoe away from the crazy pesron.
I guess you’re the only one who knows if you’re capable of “letting it hang”, but I’d be inclined to bite my tongue and not let on that I know the truth. If they’ve disguised the fact that they’ve had the baby through a surrogate, then I guess it’s very important to them that this baby is perceived as their baby and not as the baby someone else had for them.
Infertility takes so much away from you; being able to do something “normal” and talk about her pregnancy like everyone else does might have helped this couple feel better about what they’ve gone through and helped them prepare for the reality of finally being parents. I never got to the IVF stage but I got to the planning stage of an IVF cycle, and I remember being bitter at the time that neither my husband or I would get to be present - or together - for our child’s conception. The feeling of being cheated out of something was strong then, but I imagine that’s a drop in the bucket compared to not being able to carry your own child. You don’t say how long they’ve been trying for children or what circumstances lead to their use of a surrogate (and understandably, you may not even know) but I’m capable of projecting with the best of them and I could see how someone might feel that talking about “their” pregnancy is one thing that doesn’t have to be taken away from them.
Thanks, Dio, for providing an example of the sort of reaction some people are dodging when they are reluctant to disclose that they had a baby via a surrogate.
I tend to agree that we should just leave this alone. We havent seen them in over a year, so of course we never actually saw that she was pregnant. We did just have a baby of our own, so I can only imagine that she might feel the need to share.
Both parents are a little bit nuts. We were particularly confused due to the stories that may or not have been concocted just before she wasn’t actually pregnant. She said that they had had split up, and that her husband was flipping out, buying guns and burying gold in the backyard. Based on these stories, I was wondering if he was developing schizophrenia. Then one day he came in drunk, got her pregnant, and they started counseling.
Now I don’t know what is true. Have the others googled it and figured it out? Were we the only ones they told this story? Shouldn’t they know that trying to keep a charade up means not blogging about it with identifying and searchable text?
Was it a blog, or more of a message board like this one? Sometimes people join communities for support (and going through something lifechanging like having a baby, doing it via a surrogate, and maintaining a fiction for people in your life that it came about the natural way is definitely the sort of thing that you might feel like talking about with other people in a similar situation). Perhaps they’ve fallen into the trap of thinking their community is private and don’t realise Google has indexed it?
But yeah, if it’s a plain old blog, and they’re using their full, real names on it then they shouldn’t be surprised about getting busted in their lie. That story about the guns and gold is a big old flashing warning sign (I mean… more of a warning sign than spending 9 months faking a pregnancy), and I don’t know which half of the couple to be more worried about… There’s some heavy duty weirdness going on there.
Anyway, if you want to drop the pretense you could always just sign their blog with your real name and say something like “Congrats on the safe arrival of your baby son/daughter, you sly dogs! We couldn’t be happier for you.”.
Any clues in the blog as to why they were lying to you?
Why not leave a ‘congratulations’ message on the web site with the real story? Then your friends will know you know, but they can address it OR pretend they don’t know you know at their choice.
Er. If you know what I mean.
Edit to add – or what Cazzle just said. Oops.
With your first post my reaction was “oh, that doesn’t sound healthy” - and your second post makes me really feel for that baby. But you need to leave it lie. Nutsy people have raised children before, they will again, and there is nothing that you can do that is really productive here.
We have one we adopted - one bio born later. Not being pregnant does mean that you are ‘missing’ some things. But adoption and surrogacy provide their own experiences to create YOUR story - and its your story that is important. With my daughter, I remember her kicking inside me. With my son, I remember looking at the photo we had while we waited for travel. I kind of think its a healthy thing to accept the reality you have - you don’t have to like it - but not liking it and accepting it seems healthier than inventing a different reality. And there are advantages to no pregnancy - no stretch marks comes to my immediate mind.
Unless they are the type of people who would tell you outlandish stories just to mess with you, that definitely does sound like worrisome behavior. I’d want to be careful not to alienate them just so you can keep tabs on their behavior to make sure they aren’t doing anything crazy enough to be dangerous to the child in the future.
(It worries me that people like this and the octomom are able to get around the psychological screening that are usually required by fertility doctors).
No, the blog is quite specifically about the surrogate process. Beyond names and a photo, there is very little mention of their lives.
I’m not terribly concerned. There were plenty of nutty people where we were acquainted, and they are all successful. Obviously, she had the recources to go through a very expensive surrogate process. I’ll always wonder, what other parts of their lives are just a story though.
