My “Before”

Saturday 18 July 2026

It happened the way these things apparently always happen. Brushing my teeth. Lights off in the bedroom. About to get into bed. And the idea arrived fully formed in my head in the time it took to put toothpaste back on the shelf.

A website. By kids. For kids. Surrogacy-born kids.

That was the whole sentence. I sat down on the edge of my bed and I wrote it on a Post-It. Which I then stuck on my desk. Where it still is, next to the AGES 9 TO 22 one.

The shape of it, the morning after, looks something like this:

• A homepage that doesn’t look like an agency.
• A glossary so that nobody has to spend a month reading the way I have just been.
• A map of which countries do what — written in plain language, by someone who actually has to live in those countries.
• A series of interviews with other kids and young adults who came into the world the way I did. Each one answers the same handful of questions. Same questions, different lives. Over time you get a real picture.
• Maybe a yearly survey or report, although I do not know how to make one yet.

I have not built a website before. I have built a Geometry proof, a 50-metre freestyle that finally cleared the qualifying time, a French horn part for the spring concert, and a twenty-page prompt library at the internship. So I’m starting from a position of I will need help, but I have built things before.

But the idea is sitting on my desk on a yellow square and it is not going away. I have learned to take that seriously. The last time something refused to go away, I broke my knee skiing and learned that the most important thing you can do is keep showing up.

I’m going to sleep on this. Properly this time. I have one week of internship left, and then a long stretch of August where I have actually got time.

— D.