My “Before”

Wednesday 30 September 2026

This evening I sent the emails to Brilliant Beginnings and Family Equality. The ones that have been sitting in drafts since the middle of the month — the ones I wrote in the last stock-take that I was deliberately holding until Professor McLean replied.

She has not replied. Thirteen days. So I want to be straight about this: I changed the rule, and I want to write down why, so that future me can tell the difference between changing a rule and getting impatient.

The rule was: McLean first, because what she says changes how everyone else reads the project. That was true when the partner emails were going to say “named after her book, with her blessing.” It is less true now, because they do not say that. They say I have asked her and am waiting to hear. That is a weaker sentence and an honest one, and it does not depend on her answer.

What did change is the school. On the 25th the sponsor question was settled — which was the thing I had actually promised myself, and the thing a partner organisation would reasonably want to know before talking to a fifteen-year-old. The emails can now say something that was not true two weeks ago. Waiting for a second thing to become true before saying the first had started to feel less like discipline and more like an excuse to not press send.

So: Brilliant Beginnings in the UK and Family Equality in the US, by email, before AP Physics homework. Both emails ask the same three things, in the same order as the McLean one: is this worth building, or does it already exist; how do you keep young people safe when they tell their stories; and, later, would you consider being a named partner.

One thing I found while writing the second one, and I am annoyed about it. Family Equality works with an organisation called COLAGE — peer-led, by and for people with LGBTQ+ parents, running for decades. It was not in my map. It is not for surrogacy-born people specifically, but it is the closest thing to the shape I want that exists on the US side, and I should have found it in July. So I asked Family Equality directly whether that is where this belongs. If the answer is yes, that is a good answer. It would mean the thing I want exists, and I have somewhere to go.

Three emails out now, plus a sponsor in. The calendar says the McLean follow-up is the eighth. Until then: the glossary, and Episode 1, which I have now avoided for five Sundays and am naming here so that I stop.

— D.