As a trailblazer in the world of fashion and digital, Ruthie once led InStyle.com as its site director and previously served as the deputy editor at ELLE.com. She also co-founded The Chain, a powerful support system for individuals battling eating disorders. As a woman accustomed to helping others share their stories, we asked her to share her own story of becoming a mother for the first time through surrogacy.
Needed: Firstly Ruthie - tell me a little about you, what you do, where you live, how many children you have?
Ruthie: I was part of the “you wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me” of fashion in the 2010s, and after years on the brand side and editorial side at some pretty fab jobs that I loved dearly, I finally got laid off. It felt like I had been holding my breath the entire time. I started my own creative agency, At Large Agency, specializing in storytelling. Depending on the client, we do anything from creating an editorial strategy for your brand to running your Instagram account. Last week, we threw an egg-themed dinner party for a women’s period-tracking app we conceived (pun intended). I live in Harlem with my husband, cat, and almost 1-year-old daughter, Tallulah Gene.
Needed: Often when we talk about the postpartum period the conversation is about physical recovery - how do you think you prepared and approached the experience differently in the early days with a newborn given she arrived through surrogacy?
Ruthie: I was super self-conscious about airing any grievances about being a new mom. I didn't want to seem like I was diminishing anyone’s experience, and I also know that it’s such a wildly different experience. Having witnessed the amazingness and the toll giving birth has on a mother, I never wanted it to seem like I was comparing my experience. With that said, as someone who has pretty publicly struggled with mental health issues, I found it extremely challenging. I did my research. I learned that postpartum is not something exclusive to women, let alone birthing women. That being said, my own therapist did not know that. And even though I read the science, I didn’t believe it. So many people commented on “how lucky” I was that I didn’t have to work to regain my body. How great it was that I didn’t have to deal with the physicality of it all. I felt judged and dismissed and like I couldn’t speak about what I was feeling openly except with other surrogacy parents.
Needed: Would you be open to sharing a little of your fertility journey with me? How did you decide on having a baby with a surrogate?
Ruthie: I have struggled with a myriad of both diagnosed and undiagnosed health problems. They range from cardiac (I have an implant inside of me that tracks my heart rate and sends it directly to my doctor!) to autoimmune issues. I have a network of amazing doctors alongside my mental health team that I formed while in treatment for my eating disorder. Together with my family, we all decided this was the safest way for me to have a child.
Needed: Would you explain a little of what that process entails? Once you had confirmed you were going that route?
Ruthie: Well, the first step is pretty similar to freezing eggs or doing IVF treatment. I found out through that process that I had an extremely low egg count, so I prepared mentally for multiple rounds of IVF. Once I did my various retrievals, we created an embryo and froze it until we found our surrogate.
Read More: Should We Be Prepping Our Bodies for Egg Freezing.
The process of finding a surrogate is wild. It’s like online dating but with MUCH higher stakes.
We worked with an agency. The first step – you essentially write an application of what you care about (i.e., do you want them to live near you? Do you want them to have been a surrogate previously? Do you have feelings about what race or religion they are?)... I feel like we hit the jackpot with our agency – Alcea. Angela presented us with our first “match” within four weeks. Her profile looked great, and she checked the few boxes we had (which mostly just had to do with her being healthy). We did a Zoom call with her. She, too, had to like us. And then there’s a whole lot of legal work. Once the legal work was done (which took significantly longer than finding the surrogate in retrospect), we tracked our surrogate’s cycle and scheduled a time for her to get implanted with our embryo. I can’t share anything about our surrogate for legal privacy reasons, but I can tell you that I was in the hospital room when she was implanted with our embryo. Like, I watched our embryo go in. And then, two weeks later, she texted us with a positive pregnancy test.
Everyone has very different needs in terms of the communication throughout the pregnancy. We attended a few doctors appointments in real life and when we couldn’t physically be there, we would be on facetime or on the phone. Our surrogate was a great texter and I found it super easy to communicate with her that way. She was extremely communicative, which I was endlessly grateful for. We began communicating more often as the pregnancy progressed.
About three weekend prior to our due date, we moved into an airbnb to be closer to the hospital that she was giving birth at. During that time we texted multiple times a day and when she went into labor, she called us and we drove straight to the hospital. Prior to signing our surrogacy contract, we had agreed on a “birth plan,” which meant she had agreed that both my husband and I could be in the delivery room when she gave birth.
Needed: Was there any resources or support for what to expect? Any you would recommend?
Ruthie: My biggest support was my tiny network of other surrogacy families and Angela, the head of Alcea, the agency I worked with. Everything i was able to find on my own – reddit, google, etc – was mostly pretty dark, so I sort of stayed away from it in the name of trying to stay positive.
Needed: Do you think people granted you less grace or have been more complicated in how they treated you as a new mother than say if you'd also carried a child? Was anyone awful or especially amazing?
Ruthie: I found myself always downplaying my experience before other people could. For example, when people would say something about how hard it must be to have a new born, I would get “in front of it,” so to speak and say, “well I’m ahead because I didn’t carry her.” I think I did this because I was so sef-conscious about people having preconceived notions about how much easier the experience was.
There were tons of off-colored comments, most of which I choose to believe were said out of ignorance vs. cruelty. The most common were from other women who expressed concern about the ability for me to bond with Tallulah since I wasn’t breastfeeding.
There was this assumption that I would have such a harder time feeling like she was mine, bonding with her, being a mother, because she didn’t grow inside of me or come out of me.
And that made me very angry for so many reasons, one of which being that there are plenty of birthing mothers that can’t breastfeed or simply choose not to. Honestly, Bobbie (the formula company) prepped me for this in their marketing messaging. I followed them on Instagram before Tallulah was born and knew I was going to feed her Bobbie. They really prepared me for the comments and the science to back it up. I felt like I had the education to respond to people’s stupid comments.
Needed: What has been the hardest part of the transition in terms of your identity for you?
Can I answer, “everything”? If I had to rank it, I would say my work identity. I feel like I’m always having to be better at my job or better at my momming. I never feel as though I can do both at the level that I want to be performing.
Needed: When did you return to work? Have you found that easy to manage?
I took 15 work days off after she was born. As the CEO and founder of my own company, I found it near impossible to manage and felt guilty every day – and to be clear, that was almost entirely self-inflicted guilt. I found that everyone – my clients, my friends – really were pushing my to take more time, but I felt like I really couldn’t. In retrospect, I wish I had been stricter with myself about taking more time off and really taking my email off my phone – not because I feel like she needed me, so much as I think I needed the time to process everything – this huge life change. In terms of me needing to be there for her, I feel like taking time off now (later maternity leaves) that she’s almost a year, would probably be more useful in terms of our bonding.
Needed: Finally, for other families looking into surrogacy do you have any recommendations or lessons learned that you would want to share with them as they start the journey?
Stay off of REDDIT and ask around for experiences from people you can actually speak to on the phone – someone that has a six degrees of Kevin Bacon situation. There are so many horror stories out there, and for whatever reason, they tend to stick out more than the fairy tale ones.
Don’t be afraid to push your agency. We were so lucky to have an agency that was so patient with us, but we had SO MANY QUESTIONS. Do not feel guilty about asking the same thing 100 times in order for you to properly understand it.
