My best friend promised me she would have my baby and now I’m a mom

Georgia Barrington just became a new mother, but she wasn’t the one who gave birth to her daughter. Instead, that moment belonged to her best friend, Daisy Hope, who carried the baby for her after a promise made when they were teenagers.

The women have been inseparable all their lives. They call themselves “soul sisters” and have grown up together because their parents are best friends.

Their childhood closeness would later become the basis for an act of generosity that would change their lives.

At age 15, Georgia was told something no young girl expects to hear: she was born without a uterus and would never have a child.

The diagnosis, Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, affects approximately one in 5,000 women, and for Georgia, it seemed as if her future had been rewritten in a single moment.

“It was devastating, my whole world had fallen apart,” he recalls. “I always grew up thinking I would be a mother and that was ripped away from me and everything I ever dreamed of was gone.”

Daisy was not particularly maternal at the time and vividly remembers the diagnosis and how “unfair” she felt that her friend, who had always wanted to have a child, couldn’t.

“I wanted to make him feel good and give him some hope that it wasn’t the end of the world, so I told him that one day I would bring him a baby,” she tells Ready to Talk with Emma Barnett.

“I don’t think I understood what he was saying then, but I always knew this was something I was going to do for Georgia.”

More than a decade later, Daisy kept that promise and in 2023 the two women began the IVF process.

Georgia had trained as a midwife and immersed herself in the world she feared she would never be a part of.

“I was once asked if this was the right career for me,” he says. “But it actually helped me heal and deep down I knew I would have a child one way or another.”

Years later, Daisy had her first child, with Georgia as her midwife, and becoming a mother reinforced her conviction to keep her promise.

“The love I felt for my son was incredible and I thought everyone should be able to feel that feeling,” she says.

She admits that at first she was “a little naive”, since she had a simple pregnancy with her daughter and therefore “took for granted that everything would be fine again.”

She became pregnant with the first embryo and everything seemed to progress normally and both women allowed themselves to believe that the future they had imagined was finally happening. But a scan at seven weeks revealed an empty uterus.

Georgia remembers the time the nurse said she couldn’t see anything on the scanner.

“I had a sinking feeling and all hope just vanished,” he says.

A week later it was confirmed that the embryo had not become a baby.

“I thought it was all my fault,” admits Daisy, who found the pain overwhelming, feeling like she had let her friend down, while Georgia struggled to realize that even her most promising attempt had not been successful.

Still, they tried again and the second time, something felt different, as Daisy says: “When I found out I was pregnant again, I thought the world can’t be this cruel twice.”

Six weeks later, the couple sat in a hospital room holding their breath as a small heartbeat appeared on the screen, but that same day, Daisy began bleeding profusely.

“I thought it was all happening again and I was terrified,” she says.

She bled for six hours and was convinced she had miscarried, but when doctors examined her, the heartbeat was still there and the pregnancy continued to the end.

Daisy went into labor a little earlier than expected and gave birth to a baby girl a few months ago.

Georgia was so overwhelmed at the moment that she “forgot to check the sex of the baby.”

“As soon as I saw the baby’s head, I lost it and we were all crying.”

She says she still finds it hard to believe she actually has a child and wishes she could “take this moment and hand it over to my 15-year-old self, sitting in that GP surgery.”

While Georgia talks about how “lucky and grateful” she feels, Daisy says she always knew she would help her best friend in any way she could.

“We have this bond that no one will ever have with their friends because we’ve been through something very personal.”

All episodes of Ready to Talk with Emma Barnett are available on BBC Sounds and new episodes are released every Friday.