How Surrogacy and Egg Donation Helped Lara Herzer Build Her Family—and Inspired “Me the Great”

As Told By Lara Herzer, ConceiveAbilities Intended Mother

How Surrogacy and Egg Donation Help Build Families

Some stories stay with you long after you hear them. They shift something. They open something. They remind you what motherhood really means.

In a special Mother’s Day episode of the All Things Conceivable Surrogacy Podcast, Lara Herzer joins the conversation to share her deeply personal journey to motherhood, a story built through egg donation, surrogacy, and the extraordinary women who became surrogates and made her first Mother’s Day possible.

Lara’s story reflects the journey many intended parents experience when building a family through surrogacy and egg donation. After infertility changed her path to motherhood, she discovered that family isn’t defined by biology alone—it can also be built through the extraordinary generosity of an egg donor, a surrogate, and the love that brings everyone together.

It’s a conversation that will give you all the feels. Because at its heart, it’s not just about how families are built. It’s about the people who make them possible. The surrogates. The egg donors. The women who quietly, powerfully, and selflessly help create the gift of motherhood in all its forms.

Because for some families, Mother’s Day doesn’t just arrive.

It is made possible. It is carried. It is chosen. It is given.

Listen to the full episode here.

The Beautiful Chaos of Parenthood

When you meet Lara Herzer today, she’s in it, the life she once dreamed of, now fully alive around her, “It’s chaos. It’s beautiful chaos, and I love every second of it. It’s exactly what I signed up for.”

Two young kids. A full life. A home filled with noise, energy, and the kind of unpredictability that only parenthood can bring. Lara shares, “Every day’s crazy… you never know what you’re going to get, and it’s a lot of fun.”

But this life, this “beautiful chaos,” didn’t come easily. It was built. Piece by piece. Decision by decision. With the help of other women who stepped in when she couldn’t do it alone.

Stepping Away to Find the Way Forward

When Lara first heard the words egg donor, it didn’t feel like a solution. It felt like a reckoning.
She thought, “We’ve got to go to the woods and we’ve got to hash this out.” So she did.

She and her husband stepped away from everything, into the quiet, into the uncertainty, into the grief.
“We hiked, we camped… I screamed into the woods.”

Because the truth is, choosing a different path to motherhood isn’t just a decision. It’s letting go.
“I tried to interrogate why this felt so hard… why it felt so wrong.”

And what she found was something deeply human: “Part of it is ego. You want a mini version of yourself in the world.”

But slowly, something shifted, “Maybe it doesn’t have to be like that.” Maybe motherhood wasn’t about sameness. Maybe it was about intention.“Maybe the fact that I get to choose the person who steps in for me… that’s still a major role.”

She calls it what it was: “An ego death. And the ego does not go down quietly.”

But on the other side of that moment, there was clarity, “If I want to go forward, this is the only way.”

Welcoming Another Yes

When surrogacy entered the conversation, something unexpected happened. It didn’t feel as heavy. Because the hardest part, the shift in perspective, had already happened. And her husband said something that reframed everything:
“We’ve already invited one woman into our family building… there’s room for one more.”

What once felt like loss began to feel like something else entirely: An expansion. A collaboration. A quiet, extraordinary kind of generosity.

A Connection That Became Family

At first, Lara thought she might keep emotional distance, “You think it’ll be more transactional…a little more business-like.”But that didn’t last long.

“We were surprised how quickly we moved past that.” Because when you meet the woman who will carry your child, when you trust her with something this sacred, something shifts. “She felt like a friend. Like an aunt.”

And that relationship didn’t end when the baby was born. “We want them in our lives… they’re invested in our kids.”

There’s a quiet, beautiful truth in that: “There’s not many people you can send pictures of your kids to who are as excited about them as you are… but our surrogates are those people.”

They are part of the story. Forever.

A Gift Beyond Words

When Lara talks about surrogacy and egg donation, she doesn’t talk about it clinically.
She talks about it the way it feels, “It’s truly a gift.”

A real one. A life-changing one. “I would not have this family without it.”

And when she looks at her children, her “beautiful chaos,” the meaning becomes undeniable, “If you see them, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, what a gift.’ And I say, ‘Exactly.’”

Why Lara Herzer Wrote Me the Great

Out of this journey, and the many conversations that came with it, Lara saw a gap she couldn’t ignore.
“Parents kept asking, ‘How do I tell my child this story?’”

But when she went looking for resources, what she found didn’t reflect the truth she had lived. “There just wasn’t much out there… and what was there centered the parents’ struggle, not the child.”

So with the help of two other moms she met in a peer support group on Resolve.org, she set out to change that.

Me the Great was created as a way to help families tell these stories early, simply, and with pride, centering the child as something extraordinary, not complicated.
“When I look back at what we went through to have our kids, I’m incredibly proud… and I wanted them to feel that too.”

The book reframes surrogacy and egg donation not as something to explain away—but as something to celebrate: the idea that many people can come together to make one incredible life.
And in her own home, that message is already taking root.
“My daughter just started saying, ‘Ruby the Great, Ruby the Great,’ and wanted to bring the book to school the next day.”

When You Become the Miracle Maker

f Lara could say one thing to the women considering becoming a surrogate or egg donor, it would be this: “It is truly the most beautiful, selfless gift you could give.”
Because before this journey, she had heard the phrase “the miracle of life.” But she didn’t fully understand it.
“Now I get it. It is a miracle.”

And the women who make it possible? “To be someone who can make a miracle happen—how amazing is that?”

This Mother’s Day

Motherhood doesn’t always look the way we imagined.
Sometimes it asks us to grieve.
Sometimes it asks us to change.
Sometimes it asks us to trust someone else with everything we’ve been hoping for.
But sometimes, beautifully, it brings more people into the story.
And this Mother’s Day, we honor those women.
The ones who say yes.
The ones who step in.
The ones who help someone else hear the word “Mom” for the very first time.
Because behind so many first Mother’s Days…
is a woman who made it possible.