I hope and pray someday he will read it with pride. We both share in our love for India and our forever connection we will have with it. We have always been very open and honest about our journey and were one of the first few blogs about surrogacy in India. It was a long and emotional journey filled with major highs and unbelievable lows. In the end we won the battle and reaped the rewards of a precious little Angel born to us almost 15 months ago. I still look at Blaze and cannot believe he is here with us.
While putting all the information into Blaze's blog book I had to review each and every post and comment from the very beginning... April 2008! Seems like a lifetime ago. What started as merely a journal and some FYI info. for others who may be interested in Surrogacy in India, became SO much more:
- 50,000 plus blog views
- Personal emotions and details shared
- Thousands of photo were taken
- Ultimate joy and heart-wrenching pain
- Endless memories we will hold dear to our hearts for a lifetime
- Intimate connections made from people all over the world
- Friendships were made and friendships were lost along the way
- Media coverage: photos, interviews, news clippings and magazine spreads
- Helping to create and be a part of an ongoing India surrogacy support forum (certainly giving and taking my punches at that)
- Criticism, opposition, and conflict
- Support, encouragement, gratitude and love
Do we have any regrets??? NO! We couldn't change things now anyway. As the saying goes...What does not kill us only makes us stronger. We all learn from our mistakes, failures and experiences. This is who we are...love us or hate us, in the end we have ultimately changed others lives with sharing our story. We weren't the very first couple to have done this, and we won't be the last. We took a chance and we succeeded.
We are forever indebted to all the people in India, including our Doctors who had any part in giving us our greatest gift, our son. We will continue to sing their praises and remain proud of how we overcame our infertility challenges with their help. Our story is unique, but not so uncommon anymore. We have never been ashamed or embarrassed to share our story and experiences with anyone, we have tried to help others with their own personal journey's, as we knew how foreign and unfamiliar this territory was when we began. We only wish at that time, we had so many others to pave the way for us. We did this voluntarily, and contrary to others opinions we have never received so much as a dime. As crazy as others have called us for advertising our story, we felt like we had found hope when all else had failed. We had won our own personal lottery.
We remain in constant contact with the incredible people who made our dreams come true...Blaze's Godparents, Dr. Sudhir and Dr. Yashodhara the owners of our Mumbai clinic, Surrogacy India and our amazing surrogate KT. From day one we were blessed with a positive and fulfilling view of India and all its beauty and culture. To this day both Doctors continue to thank us for believing in them and say we are apart of co-founding Surrogacy India and their dream to make babies possible. We created a friendship, a bond, for life with our Doctors for what we have shared with them, we now consider them family. We were their first international clients. We were thrilled to have taken a leap of faith and found in them, an incredible, affordable and manageable solution to our dreams of having a family. We were over the moon, we wanted to shout from the highest roof tops that our prayers had been answered. We wanted everyone to know there were other options, and so we shared this gift with others in hopes that they too would experience the joy of fulfilling their dreams. What a wonderful feeling it is to have someone tell you, that 'because of you opening up and sharing your story and experiences, their dreams have come true', both from IP's and from our Doctors. To now, be one couple of many who are a referral for our Doctors, for their superb treatment of us, our surrogates and our son throughout our entire journey, was the least we could do for them, as they gave us the ultimate payoff, our greatest reward of all... our beautiful and perfect child, Blaze.
We hope that our pride will be shared by our son. He may not announce it to the world that he is an IVF child born in India via egg donor and a gestational surrogate, and that's perfectly okay with us, it will certainly be his choice to share all or nothing. But we do hope and pray that he personally embraces his conception, origin and common bond and love for India as we both have. We still consider India a second home to us, and we will return with Blaze when he is old enough to understand and hopefully enjoy and join in our pride of this amazing country.
To each and every person who has shared in, learned from, followed along or lurked from afar in our journey from day one or even just today, we thank you for being there. They weren't all happy times, but they were ours. Good, bad and indifferent times, we are forever changed because of you.
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