I Became A Surrogate For My Brother — But When He Saw His Newborn Daughter, He Said, “I Can’t Take This Baby,” And The Reason Made My Knees Buckle. PART 1 My twin brother, Desmond, and his wife, Renee, had been trying to have a child for five long years by the time they finally worked up the nerve to ask me the question I’d already half expected was coming. Would I consider being their surrogate. Desmond wasn’t just my brother. He was my best friend, the person who’d shown up at every hard moment of my adult life without needing to be asked twice, especially in the eighteen months after we lost both our parents within a single terrible year of each other. I already had a son of my own, Eli, and I understood exactly the kind of love Desmond and Renee were aching for, the specific shape of the hole it left behind when you wanted it and couldn’t seem to get there on your own. I said yes before either of them finished fully explaining the process. Renee and Desmond came to every single doctor’s appointment over the following months, sat through every ultrasound together, holding hands in the dim exam room while the technician traced the outline of the baby growing inside me. When we found out it was a girl, Renee cried right there on the exam table, and Desmond had to steady her by the shoulders, both of them laughing and crying at the same time. They painted a nursery in soft yellow that spring. Bought tiny dresses long before there was any real reason to, the way excited parents always do. Renee kept a running list, in a notebook she carried everywhere, of names she liked, crossing off one after another until she and Desmond finally settled on Nora.

PART 10
I stayed close through those first several months, partly because that’s simply who I am with my brother, and partly because I understood, better than almost anyone else could, exactly what those first months were costing him emotionally, watching him work through grief he’d apparently been quietly outrunning for five years.

“I used to think I’d dealt with losing Mom,” he told me one evening, about four months after Nora was born, the two of us sitting on his back porch while Renee put the baby down for the night inside. “I went to the funeral. I helped clean out her house. I thought that was dealing with it. I don’t think I actually let myself feel any of it until I was standing in that hospital room looking at the exact same mark on my own daughter’s back.”

“Grief doesn’t really work on a schedule,” I said. “I don’t think either of us fully processed it either, honestly. I just happened to have five years of a toddler keeping me too busy to notice how much I hadn’t.”

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