My “Before”

Sunday 27 September 2026

Ms. Shafqat said yes. On Thursday, by email, after I had emailed again to check she had seen the first one — she had been away, and a week of silence from a teacher who is away is not silence, it is a teacher being away.

The reply was three words and a thumbs up. Yes, yes, yes. I read it on the tube and had to look out of the window for a bit.

Then her first question, before anything else: do your parents know about this?

That is exactly the right first question. Not “tell me more,” not “how exciting” — do the adults responsible for you know what you are doing. It is the question a person asks when they are already thinking about the ways this could go wrong, and it is the reason I asked her and not someone who would have been nicer about it. They do know. I told her so.

She also suggested something I had not thought of: that the legal side of this — the laws that made surrogacy possible at all, and whether they count as revolutionary or merely reforming — could be my research project for World Civilizations this year. I have been building a country-by-country map of those laws for the website without once thinking of it as history. It is history. I am going to think about that properly rather than say yes on the tube.

Here is what her yes means. The last line on the list of things I am not going to do says I will not start properly until there is a teacher at school involved. There is now a teacher at school involved. The thing I have been calling “an idea with a reading list” since July is allowed to be a project.

Here is what it does not mean. Nothing is built. Episode 1 is still not written. And she said yes to being the teacher attached to this — she did not say yes to the idea. She said she was proud of me for thinking of it, which is a different thing and, I think, a more useful one.

Because it was an email and not a conversation, I have written her one page for when we sit down. Bullet points. What it is, what I won’t do, what I think her role is with an invitation to change it, what I need from her now, and three questions I want a straight answer to.

Professor McLean has not replied. Ten days. The rule is three weeks, one follow-up, then move on. The follow-up is in the calendar for the eighth of October, mostly so that I stop checking. Wait well turned out to mean put it in the calendar and close the tab.

Swim season started yesterday. The project gets Sundays, and this week it got a yes.

— D.