It’s crazy to think that two years ago, we would have been just weeks away from a wedding celebration here in Toronto. What a wild ride the last couple years have been and we find ourselves thinking about the wedding that could have been. The ceremony, the wedding party, the venue, the caterer – the details were all in motion. Yet with a seemingly never-ending global pandemic, we made the difficult decision to cancel our wedding. Even to this day, planning an international wedding seems like a task for only the strongest-willed brides and grooms.

Two years later, life has gotten back to some sense of normalcy. Marc’s clinic is fully operational again and his fascination with creating TikTok videos on our balcony has subsided. From time to time, we still get messages from our 90,000 followers asking us when we’re going to come back (it’s mostly middle-aged moms we seem to resonate with). Thomas started a new job a year and a half ago and is working in influencer marketing. He’s even begun traveling for work again – Las Vegas, New York City, and a few trips to Philadelphia and Los Angeles this upcoming fall!

These past few years have allowed us to think about our life together and what our future holds. From one of our very first video chats, we knew that family was important and something that we wanted. We even had the same name picked out for a son! And so, one year ago, we began the journey of surrogacy with an agency here in Ontario. Last November we found a wonderful egg donor just outside of Montréal, met her several times and finally this March we went through the egg retrieval process. We are thrilled to say that we now have five embryos chilling in a freezer at an IVF clinic here in Toronto. It’s crazy to think that our future children have already been conceived and are just waiting, patiently, unlike their fathers. lol. Every step of this journey is long, costly, incredibly exciting and requires both patience and faith. We feel so grateful to even be at this stage.

The process in Canada is quite different from the United States as commercial surrogacy is illegal. Both egg donation and the process of surrogacy must be altruistic, with any compensation being done only in the form of reimbursement for expenses. For us, that means that the agency is not allowed to match us with a surrogate. The surrogates have access to Intended Parent profiles and they choose who they want to meet. It also means that there is never a bank of surrogates waiting to match. There are many more couples looking for surrogates then there are surrogates looking for couples.

Since the egg retrieval, things have been stagnant. In the past five months, our agency has only had one surrogate come through the process and successfully match with an intended-parent couple; a couple that has been waiting for three years!! One couple amongst 29 others that are also waiting and dreaming of starting their families. To put it bluntly, the odds are not in our favor.

This past month, we began looking into US-based surrogacy and have had several conversations with an agency in Chicago where commercial surrogacy is legal. Already the experience has been vastly different. We’ve had incredible responsiveness and transparency from the agency and there is a pool of 100 surrogates ready and able to be matched with parents. We’ve even been told that should we move forward in this direction; we would likely have a pregnancy within a couple months! With all this amazingness comes one very large difference – the price. Currently, continuing forward with a surrogate in Canada would cost another $60,000 CAD on top of what we’ve already paid. In Chicago, it would be $132,000 USD - we know!! Wild! This includes the medical fees, surrogate compensation, etc.. Of course, there is still a huge part that is altruistic, and the Chicago agency only accepts about 2% of surrogate applicants to make sure that everyone is getting on this ride for the same reason. Having twins is also on the table in Chicago for not much more than having one child - which suddenly makes more financial sense but regardless, is a LOT of money at once!

The thought of waiting for an unknowable length of time - potentially years - to start our family ranges from blissful denial to incredibly disheartening depending on the day. As we consider the added costs of surrogacy in the US, having a big wedding ceremony is something that is no longer financially in the cards. At the same time, we’ve had family members and friends who have expressed their disappointment in not being able to share in our lives and marriage on that special day, some of whom haver asked when we’ll be celebrating so they can give us a wedding gift.

We’ve been taking time to think and talk with one another about how to make this dream come true. While we do have funds prepared for surrogacy, this shift to the United States puts us in a very different reality. It’s easy to get caught in the uncertainty and anxiety of trying to make something work on our own. These past two years have reminded us that we are not on our own. Our community – family and friends – is important to us and while we may not see you all regularly, each one of you is a part of our lives and we want to share this journey with you. The exciting news of having five embryos! The eventual news of a pregnancy, the due date, the birth, and all the baby pictures that are to come. Trust us, between the two of us, there will be many baby pictures to share.

Instead of planning a wedding celebration and inviting you all, we would like to do things a little differently. We would like you to invite you to join us on this surrogacy journey. It’s taken a lot of soul searching and emotional vulnerability for us to land on the idea of asking our loved ones, if they can and are excited for us, to celebrate our marriage by donating to a gofundme campaign that we’ve started to support our surrogacy efforts in the US. Should you be willing and able to help in any capacity, we would be forever grateful to you. Having a family together is something that we both feel so deeply about. And including all of you on this journey to becoming fathers is something that we are incredibly grateful to be able to do. When we think about our child/children asking us how they came to be, we’d get to tell them that their dads, family, and friends wanted them so much that everyone helped bring them into world. It melts our hearts.

This is just the beginning. We will continue to send updates, thoughts, and pictures when they’re available. You do not need to contribute anything to accept our invitation to come along with us on this journey and you can also donate and tell us not to send you a bunch of updates. Please don’t feel pressure. We know that everyone has their own unique financial situation and we understand that money doesn’t equate to your love and support. We want to hold a space for people who have been wanting to contribute to our lives in this way. Equally, we want to have a forum to keep everyone actively part of our lives, regardless of geography.

We hope you are excited and look forward to this as well.

We love you all,

Marc & Thomas