This past week, while sitting around the campfire, I had one of those epiphany moments. I have them often when I get a quiet space to reflect.
For years I’ve talked about the importance of relationships in surrogacy. I have always believed that people come before processes, and that connection is what makes this journey so extraordinary. But it wasn’t until recently that I realized there had been an unintended blind spot in my own journey as the founder of the Canadian Surrogacy Community.
When I first started CSC, my heart naturally gravitated toward the surrogates. It wasn’t intentional. It simply made sense because I had been a surrogate. I understood the emotions, the appointments, the sacrifices, and the incredible privilege of carrying a baby for someone else. Those women felt familiar to me because I had walked in their shoes.
I always tried to be “Switzerland.” My role has never been to take sides or favour one person over another. My job has always been to support everyone equally and help each relationship thrive. But if I’m honest, in those early years I spent more time nurturing the relationships with the surrogates. Some of those women became wonderful friends, and many of them still are today.
Over time, though, something shifted.
As I got to know more Intended Parents, I realized that if I was truly going to serve them well, I needed to understand them just as deeply as I understood my surrogates. I needed to know who they were beyond the paperwork. I wanted to hear about the years they had spent trying to build their family, the losses they had experienced, what they were afraid of, what gave them hope, and what they needed from me as they stepped into one of the biggest chapters of their lives.
The more I invested in those relationships, the more I genuinely loved them.
Today, my relationship with our Intended Parents is every bit as important to me as my relationship with our surrogates. They aren’t simply people who join a program. They become part of a community that I care deeply about. That realization around the campfire made me smile because I suddenly understood what has quietly become one of the greatest strengths of CSC. The relationships don’t end when the baby is born.
I’ve been welcomed into homes to meet babies whose journeys I had the privilege of witnessing from the very beginning. I’ve watched families grow, celebrated milestones, and stayed connected years after their journeys were complete. I have Intended Parents who tell me that if I’m ever in their city, or even their country, their door is always open. I have families who continue showing up in our community long after they’ve had their baby because they still want to support the people walking the path they once did.
Some of those Intended Parents have become people I genuinely call friends. That isn’t something I ever set out to create. It happened because relationships became more important than transactions. When Intended Parents see me, I don’t want them to see the owner of an agency. I want them to see a person. A mom. Someone who understands what family means, who celebrates alongside them, who holds space for them when things are hard, and who is fully invested in helping them reach the finish line.
One of the most important parts of building those relationships has been learning that honesty is one of the greatest gifts I can offer. From our very first conversation, I believe Intended Parents deserve to know exactly what they are stepping into. I don’t make promises I can’t keep, and I don’t sugar-coat the realities of surrogacy. There are incredible highs, but there can also be heartbreak, waiting, disappointment, and unexpected detours. Being honest from the beginning grounds us all in the same place. It creates trust because everyone knows we’re working from the same set of expectations. I am deeply invested in every family’s success, but the only thing I can truly guarantee is my commitment to walking alongside them. Some journeys unfold quickly. Others take far longer than anyone hoped. Every path is different. My role isn’t to force a journey in a direction it was never meant to go. My role is simply to keep the path lit, offering guidance, honesty, and empathy until they reach the end of the path – no matter what that looks like.
During our travels this past week, I had a conversation with one of my Intended Parents that has continued to sit with me. He said, “It must be difficult to scale your business when you’re doing so much of this by yourself.” I smiled and replied, “I know. But the truth is, I don’t want to scale it.” For years, I thought growth meant getting bigger. More Intended Parents. More surrogates. More staff. More everything. Somewhere along the way, though, I realized that wasn’t what fulfilled me. What fulfills me is knowing the people in this community. It means answering the phone, remembering their stories, celebrating their victories, and walking beside them when things don’t go according to plan. I have to earn a living, of course, but that is no longer the measure of success for me. Success is one match at a time. One family at a time. One life changed at a time. That perspective keeps me grounded in why I started CSC in the first place. I’ve come to realize that this community isn’t meant to become a massive organization with hundreds of Intended Parents moving through it at once. I want it to remain intimate. I want to continue serving twenty families at a time because that’s what I can wholeheartedly manage on my own. It may never be the most scalable business model, and it may mean sacrificing growth that looks impressive on paper, but I’ve learned that contentment isn’t found in building the biggest agency. For me, it’s found in building meaningful relationships and serving people well. That has always been my purpose, and I hope it always will be.
I think all this is what makes CSC different. Not because we have a different process or different paperwork, but because we choose to invest in people long before there is a baby to celebrate, and we continue investing in them long after that baby is home.
I will always have a special place in my heart for the incredible women who become surrogates. That will never change. But today, I can honestly say that my heart has grown to hold Intended Parents in exactly the same way.
And perhaps that wasn’t a blind spot after all. Perhaps it was simply the next chapter in becoming the kind of leader this community needed me to be.
M(Other) starring Angela