My “Before”

Sunday 5 July 2026

I went down a small rabbit hole this morning. I made a list of every published children’s book I could find that explains surrogacy to a child. There are more than I thought. Maybe fifteen titles. The ones that come up most:

• A Turtle’s Tale by Crystal Henry.
• Sophia’s Broken Crayons by Crystal A. Falk.
• Grown in Another Garden (I actually have this in my library at home).
• Ma famille, la GPA et moi, written by a French author called Fiorella Mennesson — interesting because Mennesson is also surrogacy-born, so this is a book by one of us, but written for very small versions of us.
• A dozen others, mostly American, mostly aimed at ages 2 to 6.

I ordered two of them through the library to read this week. They are sweet. They are kind. They are very much for children younger than me.

The pattern is clear: by the time you can read these books, you are too young to ask the questions they don’t answer. By the time you can ask the questions, the books are too young for you. There seems to be a big gap once the picture books stop being useful. That leaves a lot of years when it would help to read what somebody a little older had thought at the same age. I have not found much like that.

I have written AGES 9 TO 22 on a Post-It and put it on my desk. It is sitting next to a list of AI mistakes I’ve been keeping for the internship.

— D.