Friends & loved ones,
May this find you looking back fondly on memories of the year quickly drawing to a close.
For me, 2019 was the year of the baby.
I’ve hinted in my last two annual updates that surrogacy could play a role in my life this year. To my delight (and that of her fathers), it defined it. I conceived on January 16th and gave birth on October 3rd. I’ve just reached the end of the “fourth trimester”—that time of healing and recovery post-birth. I’m long-distance breastfeeding, and the baby—Nalerie Renae Sutton-Talley—still feels very near as a result. I had the great joy of gathering not just with my family, but with hers, at Christmas this year.
The experience has taught and touched me deeply, in ways I’m still wrapping my head around. People have babies all the time, so it seems normal, but it was the hardest and most amazing thing I have ever done. The fact that our bodies can make another human is extraordinary, and that she came to us in every way we hoped she would assures me that the Divine had a hand in it.
I did some other things this year, too. I took animation and acting courses, finished a painting or two, and took part in three theatre festivals in which plays I wrote were workshopped/performed as staged readings. I traveled to Florida, Utah, & Iowa for family weddings and quality time. I helped Bryce & Ronda’s family move into a new home in March and joined them on vacation to Branson in June. I took some lovely walks. I helped with a couple Brookings Community Theatre plays and joined the board. I took part in the Christmas dance performance for the third time, this year in SDSU’s beautiful new performing arts theatre.
I also finished my fourth year as a Residence Hall Director at South Dakota State University. Leaving that role meant the end of on-campus housing, so I moved across the street to live with Beth. Our other sisters and I were delighted to be at her side when she married Alex in October, and it’s been a joy living together these past seven months. I stayed on at SDSU within the same department, now as a Secretary for Student Conduct & Residential Life. This mostly clerical role is wildly different from the multidirectional pull and juggle of RHD life, but it’s been a welcome reprieve, creating space for baby and for me in the time of her transition from my body into the bigger world.
The beginning of the year was filled—with pregnancy, travel, classes, extra duties at work, excitement, fatigue. These past few months have been rather the opposite—work, sleep, and breast-pumping for hours a day, but little more. Recovering from the physical work of labor was harder than I anticipated, and lactation can be all-encompassing. It has been a good opportunity to exercise grace and change my expectations for myself, accepting new limitations, at least for now.
Everything I’ve done this year is in direct relation to Baby. Changing my job, moving, and taking a break from classes and hobbies—all were done in consideration of her needs and doing my best to care for her. Having become “plural” for a time, I’m still adjusting to being a singular entity once again.
What comes next after the thing you’ve long hoped for comes and goes? The answer is not yet clear to me. I’m throwing my hat back in the ring at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor for consideration as an MFA student. I'll miss Beth as she joins Alex in Nebraska in the coming days, yet I'm looking forward to Anne taking her place as my housemate. I’m enjoying Brookings while I’m here, though I sense a coming change in the winds.
My life is a little quieter, but my heart is full. I am beyond grateful to the Sutton-Talleys: Jacob, Andrew, and Isaac--for bringing me into their lives and allowing me to be part of Nalerie joining their family. Our surrogacy partnership was a dream come true—hopefully for them, and undoubtedly for me. I am uncertain where the future will take me. I suppose such is always true at points like this, of reflecting back and peering forward. Yet, if hope is the thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson suggests, certainly that thing is still perched in my soul—singing the tune without words, and never stopping at all.
Please know how grateful I am for the kind support and love shown to me, baby, and her family throughout this past year. I hope that you and yours are in good health and high spirits as we enter 2020.
With love,
Andréa
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