If
@Telegraph were to tell this story from the child’s perspective 25 years from now.
I came into the world already loving someone I would never know. For nine months, I grew beneath the heartbeat of a woman named Carole-Anne, the only person who ever truly kept me safe. I didn’t know her name then, only the sound of her voice, the rhythm of her pulse, the warmth of her laughter. Even in the womb, I knew her. When she grew sick, when her blood pressure rose, when she was confined to bed and her body bled to keep me alive, I felt it all. We were one. And then, suddenly, after whispering something I don’t remember but that was infused with love and apology, she was gone. I was handed to strangers, carried across borders, and placed in the arms of people who had paid for me. I would never again know the woman who had been my first home.
I later learned that my beginning had been a deception from start to finish. The couple she thought she was helping, Todd and Lisa, weren’t my parents at all. Lisa was pregnant with her own child, and I had been conceived with an anonymous egg and sperm from a man named Mark in England, the man who eventually paid $100,000 to take me home. I wasn’t adopted; I was acquired. Before that, I drifted in limbo, a nameless baby caught in a legal fight, sent to foster care while governments argued over paperwork. I imagine I cried for the voice I’d known, but she wasn’t there. Every time I began to attach, I was moved again.
As a child, I sensed a kind of unease that no one around me could name. My mother, the one who raised me, loved me, I think, but with a sort of anxious pride, as if my existence had to justify something. When I asked why I had green eyes no one else shared, or where my red hair came from, the answers tightened the air in the room. “That doesn’t matter,” they’d say. “Do you know what we went through to have you?” The conversation always ended there, with guilt, as if I was wrong for asking questions that every human child asks.
By my teens, I began to understand what they couldn’t admit, that I was not born from love, but from logistics. I had been conceived in a clinic, gestated by a woman who nearly died to bring me into the world, and traded for six figures. Every story about my birth was wrapped in euphemism, “helping a family,” “a gift of life,” but I could feel the shadow behind the words. I didn’t know who I was, only who I wasn’t.
Now, at twenty-five, I know that my life began in a blur of toxic empathy and exploitation. I am a living example of what happens when procreation is outsourced and motherhood is replaced by money. I carry pieces of people I’ll never meet, a donor’s genes, a surrogate’s sacrifice, an agent’s lawyer, all stitched together into a single body that still aches for the mother I was denied.