Adulting - Part 2

For anyone who keeps up with this blog, you will notice that I haven't posted in a while. In fact, you probably are no longer keeping up with the blog since it's been an eternity since I paid any attention to it. I had plans to update our journey on a weekly basis, especially as we get closer to our projected transfer date which will fall at some point in October. But then life got in the way. My new job picked up speed and while I was still adjusting to the 9 to 5 Monday to Friday life, I began putting in a fair amount of overtime on a massive project - this while I kept my old job at the radio station filling in a couple of weekend days a month. The talk about our surrogacy journey and the plans for surrogacy podcast started to fall to the side as I got more wrapped up in the day-to-day tasks of working full time and keeping my old gig. And then at the end of May, after a near two-year search to find our home for the next phase of our life - the #BabyRosenChung2020 phase of course - we finally landed on a perfect property: a 1,300 square foot condo townhouse in Toronto's newly gentrified Regent Park. There was a mixture of excitement and relief, but only a few days later we had to start the next monumental task - getting our small one-bedroom condo of five and a half years ready for sale. 

A word of advice to any other intended parents who are embarking on their surrogacy "project" (I'm using that word only because I've said "journey" too many times already and I have only begun this post) - do not attempt to do the legal contracts and transfer while buying and selling real estate. It's stressful, it's confusing and you can't keep your lawyers' names straight. We began to delve into our legal contracts with Kay two and a half weeks before we purchased our townhome. That paperwork is still sitting in my Gmail inbox marked as unread, two months later. Dennis and I kept saying we would look after it this coming weekend, and then we'd postpone to the weekend after that. When Canada Day weekend rolled around and we still hadn't sold our condo yet, we promised Kay we would look over everything that weekend since we had time in between the dozens of showings to sit down at my laptop and look things over. Those three days flew by without me even opening my laptop. Instead, we spent it enjoying one of the last weekends in our current neighbourhood and soaking in the bliss of not having potential buyers track through our home for two whole days. 

So what were we doing on the weekends in between? We mostly spent it packing, making trips back and forth to our offsite rented storage locker, rejigging our own storage locker in the parking garage of our condo, looking for new furniture as we're nearly doubling our space, and later being forced to stay out of our home for most of the day due to all those showings. There was one particular weekend where I was sent up to the countryside to help with my organization's cycling fundraiser. Dennis joined me up in Alliston, ON., and we stayed overnight. The next morning, we drove 130 kilometres to check the signage for the entire bike ride. We saw our province at its finest in the early morning summer light and it was peaceful, it was quiet and we didn't have to think about the past or the future - at least not that morning. It was our one short break from what has been the most hectic period of my life.  

Through all of that, the baby planning went to the backseat. For me, we had to sell our condo and move first. Despite the fact that the whole reason we were looking for this new home was because of our hypothetical future child, I was completely overwhelmed with the numerous tasks at hand and the amount of money involved in each one. I remember a textbook on anxiety that I read well over a decade ago saying that moving was one of the most stressful events in a person's life, right up there with coping with death. I can attest to the fact that the only time I've felt more stress is when I was preparing for cardiac surgery. There were tears, there were a ton of fights and there were physical aches and pains from all that stress. Some days I felt the only thing keeping me going was work as it has become the best escape in the world for me. In fact, I have never been so happy at a job in my entire life. And after passing the probationary period last week, I can see I have a good future at this organization. 

But as the days went by, my near-daily chats with Kay became brief weekly check-ins. There just wasn't the time to have those back and forth hours-long chats over Facebook Messenger anymore. Here's another way that the entire surrogacy process can be compared to dating: you may speak daily at first, but then once you pass the getting-to-know each other phase, it's really not necessary anymore to spend hours upon hours engrossed in conversation - at least not until there's an actual baby involved. Life continues. Life gets busy. However, in the back of my mind I started to worry: what if our lack of communication meant she was starting to lose interest? What if my complete dedication to the move and my work made her believe that we weren't interested anymore? Kay assured me this wasn't the case and we're still good to go, but her lawyer, our lawyer and our fertility clinic started to wonder why we had gone silent. We received emails on our side asking if everything was okay. I think Kay's lawyer sent a similar note to her. I was at my therapist's office at the time of the most recent email and for what must have been the 1,000th time over these past two months, I went straight into overwhelm. How the fuck are we going to pay for all of this?!?!

Well, of course we're going to find a way to pay for the townhouse, reimburse Kay's expenses and provide a good life for our future child. This has all been in the works since day one. We wanted the bigger home for the past three years, and we've wanted to have children for longer than that. We know it's all going to come together and we know we'll be able to make it work. It just seems like we're at the bottom of a gigantic mountain right now and it's going to be one heck of a climb before we get to the other side. I'm turning 35 in a few months but this entire process of buying and selling while planning for a baby via surrogate makes me feel like I'm barely an adult. Nothing we learned in school prepared us for these responsibilities, especially when they all intersect within months of one another. It's an emotional, spiritual, financial and overall logistical rollercoaster. When so many large life events happen at once, what do you tend to first? 

Before Kay's lawyer could contact our lawyer to ask why we've fallen off the map, I reached out to our lawyer directly and told her what was happening. She reminded me that we had yet to actually pay the retainer and that in order to plan for an October transfer, our paperwork needed to be complete by August 6th. At least that's not tomorrow, but that's just the icing on the cake for what will be the most expensive month of our lives. 2019 has been incredible, no doubt, but stress doesn't differentiate between what's good and what's bad - at least not for me. I've been walking around with a knot in my stomach for weeks and my chronic chest pain has returned, for no reason other than me crumpling into a little ball whenever I feel a wave of anxiety.

In less than 48 hours, we get the keys to our new home - a four-year-old modern townhome with two floors, a balcony and a terrace, across the street from the MLSE sports fields and a block from the Pam McConnell Aquatic Centre - a community development created for the 2015 Pan Am Games. While we won't be two blocks from Lake Ontario anymore, we'll still be in downtown Toronto, exactly 1.6 kilometres away from our original condo. I can see our future child thriving in this environment, continuing to be surrounded by the multiculturalism that makes Toronto what it is: our favourite place in the world. And a few days after we move in, we'll get the ball rolling, sign that contract, pay what we need to and along with Kay, we'll all get started on making #BabyRosenChung2020 a reality.