My “Before”

Sunday 21 June 2026

Five days into the internship and I’m using this Sunday morning to think. I made a list yesterday. Two columns. One column was “Things I know for sure about how I came into the world.” The other was “Things I don’t know but probably should.”

The first column was short:

1. I was born by surrogacy in California in May 2011.
2. My dads are my dads.
3. The surrogate’s first name. (I know it. I won’t write it here.)
4. The town: Lancaster.
5. That I am a US citizen because I was born there.

The second column was much longer:

1. What the surrogate looks like now.
2. What the surrogate kids look like now and how old they are.
3. Whether she remembers my birthday.
4. Anything about the egg donor at all. Anything.
5. Whether I have, somewhere, biological half-siblings who are also surrogacy-born. (Possible. Genuinely possible.)
6. What it felt like for her, in the days after.
7. How my dads chose her, and why.
8. Whether she ever wonders about me.

Seeing the lists next to each other was strange. The first column contains facts. The second contains people. I thought I was missing one or two facts. It turns out I have a lot more questions than that.

I do not think I can demand answers to the things in column two. Some of them are hers, not mine. Some may not have answers at all. I also do not want to turn real people into clues in a mystery about me. But I want to understand what I can, and I want to ask carefully. Right now, that is about as far as I have got.

The internship has been good. The work is interesting. But this feels harder than the internship.

— D.