Battles of Epic Proportion

I've often said if someone told me three years ago that it would take us this long to get where we are now, I am pretty sure we would have walked in the other direction and decided to not move forward with our dreams of being fathers.  Yes, it would have sucked big time, but at least we would have made a decision based on something, anything, that resembled an actual proven fact in the process of trying to adopt, or conceive, or be successful at IVF.  But for some reason, even after initial failures and dead end after dead end, and years of trying, something gave us the strength to continue.  Call it divine intervention or a strange alignment of the stars, but one of those strengths I feel came from our experiences in India, at a clinic in  Mumbai, with a particular doctor named Gautam Allahbadia, who gave us a piece of the Hindu faith in the form of a trinket, or what I readily call "happy crap"...but crap I don't believe it was.  It was something more...

Dr. Allahbadia gave us a plexiglas DURGA that was sitting on his desk as we left the clinic (only to enter our anxiety-ridden and tortuous two-week-wait).  It was handed to us in an almost spontaneous fashion, but with a lengthy description of what the Hindu goddess DURGA represented, one of "strength and determination, manifesting fearlessness and patience, never losing her sense of humor, even during spiritual battles of epic proportion" (you can say that again, doc...to call our battle EPIC would be an understatement!).  Most importantly, though, it was a gift from a man who would have a hand, one of many I might add, in helping us become parents.  We were appreciative, but we really had no idea how important this second-hand, chipped and worn plexiglas cube would be to us as we placed it in our bags.  Our two weeks inched by and were finally up, and we didn't get pregnant.  We actually failed twice in India.  And to be honest, I really felt like throwing that plexiglas piece 'o happy crap Durga out the window.  I decided to keep it, though (being the closet hoarder that I am), but tucked it away, because to be honest it was becoming painful to look at it.  I mean, I could barely even look at our photos from India without a pang of hurt and sourness jolting through my body. But eventually that jolt turned in to a small shock, and a shock in to an irritating poke, and then eventually, it disappeared...and we renewed our strength.  And the Durga came out again.  I actually wrapped it up as a Christmas present to Bill over a year after it was given to us, confirming that we were on this journey for the reward at the end -- a baby.  And we weren't stopping until we were successful, what ever "EPIC" battle we had to face.  Little did we know there were two more battles to come, two more pregnancies that ended in an early miscarriage...which absolutely crushed us.  Sourness and bitterness ensued, the Durga went back in to hiding, and I had yet another birthday and thought..."WTF?!!!!!"  It was at that time that Bill and I sat down and had some serious conversations about how we were going to get pregnant with a capital "P" before the end of 2011.  It was August, time was ticking, and we felt we had one more shot in us a la "turkey baster method" and then we were going to go back to IVF.  We decided to do our research, choose a clinic, get all the testing completed, and even went as far as choosing an egg donor, when, well, we got pregnant again, for the third time.  "This was going to be it", we thought.  Once again, our strength was renewed.  And the Durga came out.

I feel that strength comes from many places.  But I never thought it would come in the form of a piece of plexiglas.  The Durga has been on a shelf in our media room for several months now.  The other day I took a picture of it, and I knew that finally this Hindu god had looked down and smiled upon us, rewarding us for our courage and bravery, during one of the most EPIC battles of our lives.

At this point it feels awesome to have survived the fight, to have gained the knowledge we have in the past several years, and to think that one day maybe we could tell this story of perseverance to our daughter.  The story of how her daddies fought with everything they had to bring their little princess in to this world.  And how they learned a lot about themselves and what they could ultimately endure.  I'm hoping it will be her favorite bed time story.  Wouldn't that be just the happiest ending ever?