When Your Best Friend Gives Birth to Your Babies—All 4 of Them

Each installment of The Friendship Files features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.

This week she talks with Stacey Beehler, the mother of quadruplets, and her best friend, Debbie Vibber, who gave birth to them in 2001. Debbie offered to serve as Stacey’s surrogate after seeing her friend struggle with miscarriages. Nineteen years later, the kids are grown up and the friends—and their kids—are still as close as family.

The Friends:

Stacey Beehler, 54, a mortgage-loan officer who lives in Glendale, Arizona
Debbie Vibber, 49, an account manager who lives in Surprise, Arizona

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Julie Beck: How did you meet and become friends?

Debbie Vibber: I met Stacey for the first time at my wedding.

Stacey Beehler: Our husbands worked together.

Beck: So Debbie’s husband invited Stacey’s husband to the wedding?

Debbie: Yeah. Very soon after that, we really started hanging out and doing our little weekend trips and stuff like that.

Our husbands had some work thing at a hotel in town and that was the first time that we really hung out together for the weekend. We had a great weekend, and from then on we were just the best of friends. It just was a