Blog

I have never been good at letting people in.

Not because I don’t care. Because I have been in this industry long enough to know that personal information becomes ammunition in the wrong hands. So I kept quiet. I kept things close. I stayed professional. I thought on things, then thought some more. I do not react in real time. I never have. The Libra in me, I suppose.

On the outside, I held it together. I always hold it together on the outside.

But at home, in private, in my own head, it was a different story. There were moments during the worst of it where I thought that maybe Dana and the kids would be better off if I just stopped fighting. If I was not here to drag them through all of this every single day.

I am telling you that because it is true, and because I am still here, and because that is the part these people who came after me will never understand. They almost won. Not because of what they did to my business. Because of what it did to my family and to me, when I was already on the floor.

They almost won. And I am still here anyway.

That ends today.

Here is the truth. All of it. And I make no apology for finally saying it out loud.

On the night of May 9th, 2024, I spent hours in agony while a hospital tried to figure out what was happening to me. By morning, I was airlifted to another hospital and rushed into emergency surgery with a blood clot in my aorta.

My surgeon told my husband afterward that if they had waited even one more hour, he would have been delivering him the worst news of his life.

I required a fasciotomy on both legs. I am still learning to walk again. I take medication every single day as a direct result of that surgery, and I will for the rest of my life. I can no longer drive. My husband is my caretaker.

This is not something I recovered from and moved on. I am living the consequences of that night every single day.

I want to be clear about something: This did not just happen to me.

It happened to my family.

My son Cameron was in Grade 11 that spring. Navigating everything that comes with being a teenage boy, friends, a girlfriend, figuring out who he is. He was out when it happened. He came home to an ambulance in the driveway.

It took a long time before he was okay going out again. Even now, if I am out, I get a few texts checking that I am okay. My teenage son checks on me. Because he came home to an ambulance once and he is not going to let that happen without warning again.

My daughter was in Grade 8. Already navigating the cruelty that comes with being a teenage girl, and she was doing it while watching her mom fight to survive and her family slowly fall apart around her. She carried more than any kid should ever have to carry. And she came out the other side, because she is extraordinary, and because strength runs deep in the women of this family.

Let that sink in for a moment.

If you are a parent reading this, I want you to stop and think about your own child. Think about your teenager coming home to an ambulance in the driveway and not knowing if their mom is going to make it. Think about your daughter holding herself together through one of the hardest years of her life while everything around her was falling apart. Think about what that does to a kid. Think about whether any child deserves to have that weaponized against their family by adults who knew exactly what they were doing.

Because that is what happened here.

This is far worse than anyone on the outside has ever imagined. And the people who have spent the last year attacking me have done it without knowing any of this. Without caring to know.

That strength, in all of us, came from my mother, Joanne.

Joanne was Canada’s first surrogate. I grew up watching her give the most profound gift one person can give another. I stepped into this work because of her. I have been doing it, in one form or another, since I was four years old standing beside her.

I started Little Miracles Inc., our egg donor agency, with my mom in 2007, the same year Cameron was born. Canadian Surrogacy Options grew from that same place, that same mission, that same belief that families deserve someone in their corner who genuinely cares about what happens to them. From hope to heartbeat to home. That is what this work has always been about.

Some people have said I talk about my mother too much. That I should be over it by now.

I work every single day in her shoes. Of course she comes up. Of course I am not over it.

To grieve is to know love.
I hope everyone has someone in their life they love that much. Because that kind of grief means you had something real.

While I was in that hospital bed, barely stable, someone in this industry, someone people trust and turn to, made a choice.

She took that shot because she knew I couldn’t fight back. She knew that if I were standing, I would have. So she moved while I was down.

She called my employees one by one. She told them they would face fraud charges if they stayed. They would be implicated if they stood by me. Most of them left. I was in surgery. I was in rehab learning to walk. I could not defend myself, my businesses, or my name in real time.

What I could not fully explain at the time, and what I am only now able to speak to, is that the delays were not about disorganization or indifference. They were about survival, and then about recovery, and then about trying to hold everything together while my body was still deciding whether it was going to cooperate.

What followed the emergency was not a few weeks of rest. It was months of hospitals, procedures, dialysis, and a team of doctors who were not sure my kidneys were coming back at all. It was my partner Dana managing my care while I was barely able to sit upright. It was physiotherapy and daily wellness management that continues to this day. It was learning to rebuild my capacity from almost nothing, while simultaneously trying to keep this agency breathing. As someone who is as independent as me, asking him to make me a coffee was incredibly humbling…

And then there is the part I can speak to the least, and yet the part that has cost the most.

Beginning in the fall of 2024, while I was still in the thick of physical recovery, someone took a deliberate shot at me and at this agency. I will not name her here, and I will not detail what was done, because I am not willing to jeopardize a legal case before it is even filed. What I will say is this: she is almost certainly reading this. And she knows exactly what she did.

What I want the rest of you to understand is that navigating that situation quietly, carefully, and without the ability to defend myself publicly has been one of the hardest things I have ever done. Every instinct I have wanted to speak. My lawyers told me to wait. So I waited. And the waiting cost time, energy, and capacity that should have been going to you.

The delays you experienced were not born from one thing. They were born from the collision of all of it at once. A body that nearly did not survive. Kidneys that almost did not come back. A recovery that is still ongoing. And a legal situation I have had to protect in silence while someone counted on me staying quiet.

I am not quiet anymore. But I am still careful. And when the time comes, the full story will be told.

So when I say the delays stretched across almost two years, I want you to understand what those two years actually held. Not as an excuse. Not to ask for grace I have not earned. But because the truth matters, and you deserve to have it.

My emails went unanswered. My response times collapsed. My website and email systems went down during a move. From the outside, it looked like we had closed. Like I had vanished.

I had not vanished. I was fighting to come back to my family.

And then the rest came.

A contractor defrauded us. The market dropped. The bank called the mortgage. Sold our family home to try to save another. Instead: We lost two properties.

One of them was my mother’s home. The house she moved into in 2005. The house I bought from my dad in 2021 because I could not bear to let it leave our family. Someone leaked our home address when we listed it for sale. Our family home. I still do not have words for that.

We did not make money on the sale. We just lost it.

Through all of it, I have stayed honest. If I am anything, I am honest. I do not have a lying bone in my body. There were times I covered for people who did not deserve it, thinking I was protecting them. All it did was cost me more. People have suggested I stole from others. I want to address that simply and directly. If I had stolen money, do you think I would have lost two properties? Do you think my family would have gone through what we went through financially? Thieves do not lose everything. I did

I am done with that.

From this point forward, it is honesty. Transparency. No holding back. No more protecting people at my own expense.

I am telling you all of this because there are people who have been filling my silence with their own version of my story. A version that does not include a woman being airlifted into surgery. That does not include a teenage boy coming home to an ambulance in his driveway. That does not include a teenage daughter holding herself together while her family fell apart. That does not include a contractor fraud, or a mother’s home, or nurses fighting through the night to keep someone’s blood pressure up.

Their version leaves all of that out because it is more convenient without it.

Canadian Surrogacy Options and Little Miracles are still here.

For everyone who has said they miss Joanne, or wish things were still the way they were with her, I want to share something I have kept to myself for a long time.

Joanne received her diagnosis in 2013 and began training me to lead this organization from that point forward. But I had been working alongside her since Little Miracles launched in 2007. By the time many of you were in contact with “Joanne” between 2015 and 2019, there is a very good chance you were actually corresponding with me. I was answering emails, having conversations, and doing the daily work of this agency while she guided and directed. That chapter of our history has never been told publicly.

I understand that some people are not ready to sit with that. Because if the person you trusted and loved during that time was largely me, then the story about who I am becomes harder to hold onto.

Joanne did not leave this work to a stranger. She left it to the person who had been doing it beside her for over a decade. AND, most important, to her Daughter. That is the truth, and it deserves to be part of this conversation.

I am still here.

Even now, today, this minute, I am talking to people every single day who are trying to find their way to a family. People navigating one of the most vulnerable and hopeful decisions of their lives, wondering who to trust, wondering if this is really possible for them. People who need someone honest in their corner.

That is still me.

This work is my mother’s legacy and it is mine. I have given my life to guiding families from hope to heartbeat to home. That does not stop because someone tried to burn it down while I was in a hospital bed. That does not stop because I almost did not make it back.

If you have questions, reach out. Directly. I will answer.

If you have heard things about me, I understand why they may have unsettled you. I hope this gives you the full picture.

And if you are wondering whether you can trust us, I want you to know this:

I have been through the worst stretch of my life. I almost did not make it back to my family. My husband takes care of me. My son texts to make sure I am okay when I leave the house. I take medication every day that reminds me of how close it was. And I am still here, still doing this work, still picking up the phone, still answering the questions, still showing up for the families who deserve someone who actually gives a damn.

I am not defeated. I do not know how to be.

That is who I am. That is who my mother raised me to be.

— Robyn Canadian Surrogacy Options Inc. | Little Miracles Inc.