Episode 49: Transcript

You are listening to episode 49 of the Path to Motherhood podcast.

Welcome to the Path to Motherhood podcast.

I'm your host and fertility life coach, Sarah Randell.

Join us each week as we walk through navigating your trying to conceive journey.

My mission is to share the skills of managing your mind, processing emotions and living a a full life to create a more authentic path to motherhood.

Hello, hello.

Welcome to part two in a series talking all about what it's like to navigate pregnancy after infertility or loss.

I have three amazing women with me who have been willing to open up, be vulnerable, share their stories, and I'm super grateful to have them.

The first part, if you didn't listen, was last week.

Please go back and listen.

They share so much and really truly share what it's like to navigate this experience, right.

Like it's not all sunshine and roses.

It can be difficult, it can be anxiety provoking, it can bring up a lot of emotions.

And I think if you're in it and you're feeling that way, it can feel really odd and it can feel really isolating.

So just to know that you're not alone and that those are common feelings to be feeling can be really helpful.

But also, I see this as such a beautiful episode to share with someone who maybe just doesn't understand what you're going through to hear some of these stories and just honestly build some empathy.

So I'm grateful to these women for being willing to come on here.

And I'm super excited for you guys to hear the second half of our discussion.

So without further ado, we will dive in.

(upbeat music) Another question that I got requests about, and you may be like, no, I don't have any to share about this.

But after infertility, after recurrent loss, sometimes we do some weird things in our pregnancy that may be the average pregnant person that's just pregnant for the first time doesn't do, you know, crazy pregnancy test protocols, testing super early, testing a million times, feeling like we have to have the home doppler going and doing all the outside private ultrasounds.

Those are just some examples.

And I thought that would be a fun evening to kind of share if you can think of anything that you did that maybe the average pregnant lady doesn't do.

Just because I don't know, it can be eye-opening to share those.

So people think, okay, I'm not the only one who did that.

But two, if you aren't aren't going through it and you're hearing this conversation, just to hear why we're doing those things.

So if you have anything like that to share, Anybody want to speak about that.

Yeah, Crystal.

Yeah.

I would.

I took regular pregnancy tests, I think for my entire pregnancy and it made me feel like a crazy person.

Even if it's like feeling movement and still was like, "Oh, that's a test.

" I mean, it was a weird, probably people at the grocery store or the drug store were probably like, "Why is this visibly pregnant person buying a pregnancy test that probably looked a little bit crazy.

" But it was was just almost a reassurance just to continue to see the lines made me, I think when you guys can probably all relate to this, but when you see only one line for months and months and months and just seeing those two lines gave me a reassurance for a minute that it was okay and I was still pregnant and I can laugh about it now, but at the time it just made me feel a little bit crazy that I was visibly pregnant weeks from delivery you got a pregnancy test, you know, kind of a crazy, just, that's one of the weird things I did through the whole, the whole thing.

Yeah, at least.

Well, I did.

Well, I took a lot of pregnancy tests in the beginning as well.

But I did go and I got ultrasounds every two weeks, like up into, I think around the anatomy scan, because like that's about when I get to start feeling him.

But I went regularly.

And I remember I did yoga outside.

And I felt like I stretched like a little too hard and I had the, I had my ultrasound text phone number and I texted her and was like, can I come in and see the baby because I'm scared that I like pull the muscle or I hurt him or something, you know.

And I went in, he was fine.

You know, like all the time I was like thinking like, oh, I just need to get an ultrasound and just make sure.

So that was something I did.

I also was like very limited in my activity.

I kind of felt like it was like, it is weird to me 'cause I was like fairly active before, but I did not really work out at all because I was so afraid of straining my body and somehow hurting the baby.

So I was very sedentary, which probably went itself to more anxiety because I was sitting and just thinking about all the things that could go wrong rather than trying to have some sort of physical manifestation of getting it out of my system.

But I was so scared.

And I cried to the ultrasound tech about it because I was saying, I was like, I feel like for the next however many weeks that I'm pregnant, I have to just sit here.

Like I have to do nothing other than like bake this baby, essentially, and I'm so scared that I'm going to do something bad that I'm sitting on my hands and just saying like, "All right, like, and you know, we'll see it 40 weeks.

" So there was that.

I also was really weird about like products that I used and like chemicals and things.

And I think a lot of us, you know, myself included, blame themselves for the miscarriage in some fashion.

Did I do this.

Did I take too hot of a shower.

Did I use the wrong type of shampoo that had some sort of chemical.

And I remember I was getting my nails done and the nail tech had said something about, I think I wanna say it was like arsenic or something, which they used to give women back in the day to like induce labor or something.

And I had gotten the new Lady Gaga highlighter and it was like made with arsenic or something.

And I was like, oh my God.

And like I like threw them in the back of drawers.

Like I was like, oh my God, I used these while I was like seven weeks pregnant.

I somehow am going to like cause a miscarriage because of this.

And I was like so worked up about the smallest things.

I've read every bottle.

There was a website, it was like 15 minute beauty or something that you could look up the ingredients and if it was safe for pregnancy, nursing, you know, et cetera, someone had like really tracked down everything.

And I would go to that and I would be like, okay, what kind of shampoo is safe.

and I would go to Sephora and I would be like on it, on my phone, like trying to see what was safe and what wasn't and I was very specific in it.

And I remember maybe when I was like 30 weeks and I was like feeling him regularly and stuff, I pulled out a body scrub that I didn't know 100% if it was good or not, but I used it anyway.

And I told myself that was a really big step for me because I wasn't like checking things.

And I mean, even when I went to the hair salon and I remember telling them, you know, I was visibly pregnant.

I was like, well, could you use like only pregnancy safe products.

And they're like, what are you talking like that's not a thing.

And I was like, no, it is like, I looked it up on 15 minute beauty and I can't have you using this, this or this.

And if you know, in that first trimester, I remember if I did use something that I wasn't sure about, I went and got an ultrasound because I wanted to make sure I didn't do anything.

And like Crystal said, it's lastable in retrospect because that you think something that small is going to have such a great impact, but I was just so scared.

And I remember thinking at the time, you know, if I can just get through this pregnancy, like, I'll never ask for anything else.

Like, I'll never, you know, like, God is my witness, I'll never ask for anything else.

I just need to get through this.

But yeah, I mean, that's, that's, I was very obsessive in that regard.

And I struggle with OCD and anxiety.

So it just kind of exacerbated that.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

I, so my IVF cycles, I take a trigger shot the day of the transfer, which means there's HCG fake in my system.

So pregnancy tests will test positive.

And so I got into a protocol of like the day after transfer doing a morning test every day to watch it go out of my system and then hopefully watch it go back up.

And I remember one of my friends that no fertility issues at all.

She is like, what the heck are you doing taking a pregnancy test every single day for two weeks.

Why would you do like just like it doesn't make sense at all.

Because to her it's like you take it once at two weeks.

If it's positive, great.

If it's not, it's not.

Let's move to the next one.

So I just think it's, you know, again, helpful to hear those stories of those crazy things that we do.

So I appreciate that.

I think what would be really, really helpful to kind of move on to next is if any of you have any pieces of advice, any pieces of your story about what did you do to kind of overcome some of these things.

How did you maybe not eliminate it, right.

That's probably not really what we're aiming for here.

But how did you deal with the anxious thoughts.

How did you deal with the fear.

How did you work through the guilt, the anger.

Like what were the things that you did that made it somewhat manageable.

Yeah, go ahead, Elise.

I think there was, and I don't know if you've shared this Sarah, but there's like a pregnancy manifesto or something of that nature that I saved to my phone during pregnancy that I would continue, especially in that first trimester to reread over and over, which was like, my like this pregnancy is healthy until a doctor tells me otherwise.

And that was the biggest thing that I continued to remind myself was this pregnancy until someone tells me there's a reason to be concerned.

I have no reason to be concerned.

And again, that doesn't always, you know, there, there were days where that was harder to harder to take on than others.

But for the most part, that did help me a lot was to remind myself this is a completely different pregnancy.

This is a completely different set of circumstances, you know, and, and I had, because I had had the DNC, I did have a lot of testing done to me personally to make sure that, you know, like I was RH positive.

And if you, if you've never struggled with infertility or pregnancy loss, you probably don't even know what RH positive is because I didn't.

And I walked in and they said I was RH positive.

And I was like, oh my god, what is that.

Is that like an STD or something.

Like, what is this thing.

And it was, you know, and they were like, no, no, no, it's a good thing.

It's a good thing.

But I didn't understand any of that.

And so basically, they ruled that it was a genetic abnormality.

And so for me, I was trying to continuously remind myself from my personal experience that that was not a healthy pregnancy that was meant to come to to fruition and that this was a completely different pregnancy and I had no reason to believe that there was any genetic abnormality until I was told otherwise.

So that was a big thing that I did.

My husband and I played a lot of Mario Kart to distract ourselves, which it's like, it was winter and it was cold out and we didn't want to do a whole lot.

And like, I just remember we played a lot of Mario Kart just to distract ourselves and have a little bit of like childish fun, keeping my mind busy to some extent with that.

And I think just talking about it and meeting other women who had experienced it, I leaned on a lot of women, Sarah yourself included, because having those relationships and knowing that I wasn't alone in what I was feeling, if I could give one piece of advice, and I mean, I've said this on the podcast before, it's just to be kind to yourself because what you're going through is so big.

And I also had a friend who was pregnant at the same time as me.

We ended up having babies a day apart.

we had both had loss and you know, we're on our own journeys.

And I remember she would text me and say things, you know, like that she was anxious about.

And I found it so easy to be kind to her and so hard to be kind to myself.

Even though I was feeling the same things that I would tell myself to suck it up or to feel guilty about it.

And when it was her, I was like, no, don't feel those things.

And so just trying to remind myself, you know, if this was someone else, how would you respond to them.

And that helped me be a little bit kinder to myself.

Thank you.

Rebecca, what about you.

There's so much that I can relate to in everything that was just said.

The number one thing that I wish I could tell my then self is probably one of the hard things to do just in general, which is just surrender in my story.

So much of it was of my control.

There there wasn't control and so when I when I was trying to find something it was the control helped me manage My anxiety, but it wasn't helping the situation.

It wasn't helping the situation It was just putting it in a different basket.

It was still there It was still anxiety, but I was just calling it something different.

It became a problem of something else to solve and for myself then what I ended up doing after being on bed rest for a long time was literally just surrendering like laying back and saying look all of this is just going to happen the way it needs to happen All of this is unfurled the way it needs to unfurl and just kind of thinking back on some of the things you were just talking about about pregnancy testing strips and Hcg levels and ultrasounds those were all things that were part of my pregnancy with my son from the beginning We were testing each cd levels from the beginning blood test blood test blood test blood test And so that wasn't a part of my it was already built into the system the medical system That was my that was my pregnancy.

I was having weekly ultrasounds.

I And those were prescribed through my OB and reproductive endocrinologist.

So there were these things that were just built in, structures, just like weird tertiary things.

Like that doesn't matter.

I just wish that I would have just kind of released it a little bit and just recognized that it's going to happen the way it needed to.

And it truly did.

It's hard.

It's so hard because we want nothing more than to know what the next step is.

And it's not fair.

It's not fair.

But just releasing that stress, I wish I would have told my, knew that I should have released that stress earlier.

I love the playing Mario Kart.

Like I watched all of X-Files every single one.

You know, like I tried to disconnect and dissociate in a healthy capacity to remove myself from that pregnancy because there was nothing that I could do.

There was nothing else I could do to help find or help coordinate.

So yeah, does that answer that question.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

What about you, Crystal.

Probably some combination of what Rebecca and Elise just said.

I spent a lot of time reminding myself that until old otherwise, your baby is safe, your body is strong.

And actually, so I had to say this a minute ago, but I had a really traumatic delivery that I saw a birth trauma therapist for after, which was so helpful.

If anybody out there had a traumatic birth and is looking for assistance, that there's an incredible website that you can do that with.

But one thing she coached me through was I struggled a lot with my body after not my body not doing what's supposed to do, my body not showing up the way it was supposed to do, my body failing in ways that I couldn't control.

And so that was one thing she said was, you know, look at your baby, your baby is here, your baby is safe, your body is safe, your body is getting better, your body is strong.

And so I wish I had more of those tools during pregnancy.

But I definitely spent a lot of time doing that.

And then also spent a lot of time, like Rebecca said, distracting my mind.

Just so I see, I watched a lot of TV, a lot of shows, obviously with our first kids.

I didn't have really anyone to taste that.

But I spent a lot of time just distracting my mind, trying to keep my mind off of spiraling, because it's so easy to do.

I, myself, proclaimed control freak.

And so, so many of those things are just out of your control.

And like Rebecca said, that would be my, probably my first or biggest piece of advice would be to just try to surrender that, because there are so many things that you can't control.

and there's so many things that are, it's going to happen the way it's happening.

And there's very little you can often do to change any of that.

And I wish I had just released a little bit of that tension through the whole thing.

Mm-hmm.

Thank you.

I think those are all beautiful pieces of advice and like they always say, new pregnancy, new possible outcome.

So I love that.

Yeah, Rebecca, Go ahead.

Yeah, I just want to throw in here.

Continue a relationship with a therapist or seek somebody out that has experience in this realm because during your pregnancy, find somebody who is not related to you, is not your friend.

While it's really nice to have the support friends and family, having somebody that is external of your situation and can hold that space for you.

You don't have to feel like you're on load bad that you're unloading on them or that you're still talking about this pregnancy that's scary to you to have somebody that you have unbreakable appointments with.

So bi-weekly once a month every day whatever it looks like for your mental health in that moment.

I feel like pregnancy in general even if you're having the best pregnancy ever comes with so many questions and seeking out that kind of stability of somebody who's able to listen to you might not be able to answer all your questions and that's okay, but able to kind of hear your story and how you are in that moment is just it's important and it's a necessary tool.

So find somebody to talk.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

When I talk with my coach and talk through things.

I always think I'm grateful that I'm able to almost do like a first pass here rather than like bringing that always to my husband and then creating more stress and more anxiety for him because I feel like it tampons it down and now I've like had time to talk it out and think about it and now I go talk with him and it's maybe not as intense.

So I agree with that totally.

Absolutely.

So one of the last areas I really wanted to talk about, I kind of alluded to at the beginning is for someone who's not been through this, it's hard to relate to, right.

And I have experience.

I don't know if any of you have, you know, just don't stress about it.

You're pregnant.

Be happy, you know, like enjoy it, those types of comments.

And so I just wanted to hear if you guys had any stories of how you navigated, maybe connecting with or being around people in your life who didn't fully understand all the drama that your mind was going through during this pregnancy and kind of how you dealt with that.

Yeah, Elise, go ahead.

I think something that really like irked me during pregnancy after loss was how many people would tell me that pregnancy was the easy part because like I didn't have a baby yet.

So I didn't know what the sleepless nights we're gonna feel like and the whining and the crying and the diapers and all of that.

And I am here to tell you pregnancy after a lot is still the hardest thing I've ever done.

You can wake me up at 3 a.

m.

, 4 a.

m.

, 5 a.

m.

I don't care.

And I always wanted to respond to that.

I mean, this sounds so bad and like maybe petty and stuff but I always wanted to be like, at least somebody's waking you up.

Because I had a loss.

I was like, I would give anything to have a baby waking me up at three in the morning.

I would give anything for that.

And I felt like those comments were so insensitive.

But what I've realized is there's so much ignorance around pregnancy loss.

I can't speak to infertility as much, but just with pregnancy loss, I think it was hard because I would get so angry because to me and to other women who have experienced loss or infertility, we know how insensitive it is.

but nobody is saying it to hurt you.

They're saying it because in their experience, pregnancy was the hard part or was the easy part.

You know, the actual having a child was the hardest part because in pregnancy, they didn't experience that loss.

They didn't have that trauma.

You know, and then there's also the postpartum depression that some women experience and that is traumatic in its own right and is the hard part for a lot of people.

So, you know, it's understanding that every journey is independent of one another.

And so when I would hear that so often, and it would be so easy to jump to the conclusion that that person was out to get me or meant to say it to hurt my feelings or something of that nature.

But the reality was that person just had a completely different experience than I did.

And all I can do is educate them on what my experience was like and maybe why saying something like that hurts my feelings as opposed to my reaction which in the first trimester was one of anger.

And then as pregnancy continued, and as I grew and felt more comfortable, I was able to reconcile and understand those feelings.

I wish I had understood them sooner so that I could be the best version of myself handling those conversations.

But the reality was it was very easy to get really flustered.

>> Yeah.

Absolutely.

It's interesting.

That tendency shows up in so many different ways of the like, I'm so ready for the newborn phase to be over just wait for a toddler who you know like there's always this like a warning of the future kind of thing it's kind of unfortunate that that's what we tend to do.

Well like there was so much negativity around like the aspect of actually having a child and it was it was really frustrating for me as someone who genuinely wanted that more than anything and you know experiencing it now I I love it and I don't know if that's because of the loss and it's made me more grateful or if I was always going to feel this way.

But all I know is that pregnancy was the hard part and that's okay.

Yeah, because we're all again different.

Somebody just posted a story, a reel recently that said she was talking about like pregnancy exhaustion in her first trimester and like everybody that she got asked about, they were like, just wait till the third, you know, it's always that.

So absolutely.

Crystal, what do you have to say about interacting with other people.

So for me, when we finally got pregnant, it wasn't a secret that we were trying to conceive, but we also weren't probably as open about our journey and back then as we are now.

And so we were married for four years when we started trying out the baby and we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary when our son was six months old.

So we were married for a really long time when we got pregnant.

And so we dealt with a lot of well, it's about time or, you know, took you long enough.

And which was really hurtful, because you know what I wanted to say was, well, it took six years to get here, you know.

Yeah.

And that's what I wanted to say.

And, and, and pregnant hormones also can make you a little bit crazy too.

So that's what we dealt with a lot of that, a lot of the about time it took you long enough to get here.

We thought y'all weren't going to ever have a baby, you know, and I kind of wanted to say, we thought we weren't either.

And so I had to just kind of like at least said, try to in a kind way, you know, educate people that it's not always as simple.

You don't get married and here comes a baby like that's not always the case or it's not always as simple to get pregnant as other people around you may have been.

So just try to kind of find kind ways to say, "Yeah, we worked really hard for this or we waited a long time for this or we, you know, and my husband lately has been taken to.

We're giving it our best shot, which kind of makes people a little bit uncomfortable and so they kind of pull back.

But just trying to educate people that the story's not always linear.

And I know the thing is, they almost always are coming from a good place, right.

They're almost always coming from good intentions.

And a lot of times they are happy for you, you know, they're just the way that they're saying it makes it like they're, you know, they're not or they're coming from a bad place.

And that's not always true.

So just trying to educate people that pregnancy and getting pregnant and staying pregnant and all of those things are not always easy for people.

And so if you haven't experienced it and you know, you're not necessarily close to someone in your life that's doing it, my advice to those people would just be to spread carefully with your questions and in the way that you are speaking to someone about their children or their lack of children.

I mean, sometimes I have a friend who has a lot of children and she kind of gets office people are giving her a hard time about know how you get those and things like that and that's hurtful also.

And it's really just kind of a struggle all the way around.

So that would be my advice to people with just try carefully with your with your pregnancy and children questions.

And everyone needs to do more listening and less asking.

Yes.

Yes.

Let's talk more listening.

What about you, Rebecca.

Well, you just took words right out of my mouth.

[LAUGHTER] Like, more listening, more listening.

And the hard thing is with folks that are just on their journey, they don't know what they don't know.

But be open and ask people in an empathetic, sincere way to share their story.

So I think that our culture really does us a disservice in how we communicate about loss and miscarriage.

and we communicate as in like something terrible is wrong with you.

And don't worry, it'll be okay.

That's problematic.

It's really interesting because I think that people experience miscarriages without knowing it.

And I feel that younger people are experiencing this without knowing how to talk about it.

Younger women are getting pregnant without trying to be pregnant and experiencing spotting or bleeding and then they have them, they do have a miscarriage and this thing happens, but they don't know how to have a conversation about it.

I think younger people are, we have these platforms now, TikTok, social media platforms where people are starting to say their story.

People are starting to tell these things that are happening to them in real time.

And I think a younger generation has the really potent ability to start having these conversations about what the fertility journey looks like in a younger age range.

It's socially more acceptable to have that conversation as well about having kind of experiencing some of these things out of the confines of law or having these conversations what's happening.

And so if people were doing more listening to the stories that are already in front of them, or asking more conscious questions, or more real questions, not like, "Oh, how far along are you.

" Or like, ask real questions.

Ask, ask, "What support do you need right now.

What did you experience this week.

Is a different question than, "How are you feeling.

" You know, like how do I begin to answer that.

Like what did you experience this week that you wanna share with me if you are pregnant.

Or how did that miscarriage show up for you.

People, women wanna share their stories, especially with people that haven't experienced the beginning of their journey, because we want to do a lot of, let me coach you, not let me tell you a war story, not let me tell you about my wounding, but let me share with you a space you can be safe telling me about your pregnancy, but let me encourage you to maybe hold off for a couple more weeks to share that information with everybody else.

And so kind of how we ask questions needs to become more microscopic and not so macroscopic, and the amount of listening that we need to do needs to become more microscopic as well.

We need to fine tune how we're absorbing information about this stuff.

I love that advice.

I love it.

And I totally agree.

I know I said we were closing out, but there's one last topic I wanna bring up before we really do finally close out.

And that is, if any of you would like to share about how those emotions, those experiences, that past trauma showed up in motherhood.

And that's a whole can of worms.

You could do a whole two hour podcast on that.

But if there is anything that you would want to share about that experience, I think that would be a nice way to close off.

Yeah, Rebecca, go ahead.

Yeah.

And I'll make this quick.

I think that, um, my experience with the delivery of my, my Oliver, allowed for me to give myself space and being a, a little bit of a, of like a helicopter pilot, like parent.

It showed up as me being hyper aware, hyper sensitive, a little restrictive of what was going on, who was seeing him where he was going for childcare.

It became very controlling, but I'm also glad that I had that.

It was a control that I had and something that I was able to manage.

So what it showed up for me was being very concerned in the first couple months.

And then it showed up for me as, I can't continue this trajectory.

I'm exhausted, not from not sleeping because my newborn's not sleeping, because I am making myself a little bit of an extra hyper nervous wreck now.

So now I need to surrender because I know he's okay.

So it showed up for me in some somatic releases, which looked a little bit like a lot of flappiness.

like just moving my body and making sure everything was organized and scrubbing the floors and wiping down the windows and making sure everything was washed.

But that was okay and healthy way to express it.

And then once I realized everything was okay and did my nesting and did my postpartum scrubbing, then I was able to step back from it and accept that that was the control that I had in now that I had this baby I can control what's happening with and to and for him right now.

And that was very healing.

That was a really OK thing.

And so, yeah, that's how it showed up for me, control.

But that was OK for me.

And then I realized where it was and what was healthy for me, the level of control that needed to happen.

And then I kind of compromised with where I was with what was healthy for me.

I think that's such a beautiful way to share that of, like, it was showing up that way and that was OK, that it was showing up that way.

I can relate to that.

Elise, I saw you had something to share.

Yeah, I think for me, it's really weird.

I felt like when I wasn't pregnant anymore, we had an experience where we had to go to the NICU for a few days as well, just him being that early kickstarting his system.

But for the most part, he was extremely healthy and I was so grateful.

And after that, I think I was just like on cloud nine because the hospitals were done.

It was like that chapter was behind me and there was anxiety as far as, should we ever have to go back or because he was a month early, there were some things, you know, if he had gotten sick, he would have had to go back to the hospital just because of his, you know, gestational age and things like that.

So I definitely had some anxiety about that, but I felt like it was a healthy level of anxiety.

It wasn't anything out of the realm of being a new parent.

And sometimes that was hard to decipher because I would sit around thinking, am I just anxious because I, you know, of what I've experienced or am I anxious because this This is a normal first parent anxiety.

And so I think, you know, there was a little bit, but for the most part, pregnancy, like for me at least, pregnancy really was the hard part.

And I felt so relieved to be on the other side of it.

And I had told myself initially, you know, I will never do this again.

Like I will have one pregnancy and I will be done.

And I will never do this again.

And I told my husband, I will never do this again.

And everybody says, you know, you forget the pain, you know, and all of that of childbirth.

And I'm like, nope, didn't forget it, haven't forgotten it.

And I have not forgotten the emotional toll that it took on me.

But now I do, four months out, I do look back and I think I could do it again.

Well, I don't know, but I will say, I think time heals.

Taylor Swift said it best.

Yeah, Crystal.

And it kind of showed up probably in a similar way to Rebecca for me.

I, we had a short Niki stay also.

So when we finally, we were in the hospital for about a week after delivery in the week, finally we were able to get home.

And that showed up kind of in the control for me.

I could barely let him out of my hands.

I barely wanted anyone to hold him or touch him.

I kind of wanted to have my eyes on him all the time.

And he was a blessedly, luckily a good sleeper, kind of from the start.

We just got very, very lucky.

We didn't do anything to make that happen.

It just, we just got very lucky from the start.

And so my lack of, I mean, we were still up, you know, every couple hours to eat, but my lack of sleep and my lack of just my exhaustion, all of that came from really me not wanting to take my eyes off of him.

And I think kind of like Rebecca said, that was good for me.

It showed up and it was okay because that is how we threw it.

And he's five now.

I have loosened up.

I have, I have pulled back a little bit on my helicopter.

But it was I needed it at the time.

It was like she said, it was something that I could finally have some control over.

And so that's what it looked like for me.

But also, like Elise said, it took me two years to say after the from the minute he was out, I was like, we're never doing this again.

We're never doing this again.

And it took me a couple years before I could be I was in a place where I said, you know, let's try one more time.

And it's such a journey at all.

I don't even I'm not even sure where we're going from here.

but I do feel like if we were to be pregnant again, if we were to have another baby, I think I will be better equipped to handle what that looks like in pregnancy and in postpartum.

Like you said, every new pregnancy, new opportunity, I'm sure things will be different.

I'm sure things will look different, but having a, I guess, a more solid handle on how to deal with that, like Rebecca said, therapy definitely is a huge help in that.

Having someone external to you was a huge help.

And I think that has put me in a much better place to maybe accept those things and surrender those things in the next go round should should we ever get there.

But it did show up a lot like nobody touches them except for me in the first few months at least.

I can relate to that.

I can relate to like knowing deep down I like wanted them to hold hold her, but then also like inside being like, oh my god, what am I doing.

Why did I give her away.

So I know and we had you know, like all of our parents were they waited six years for him to and he was the first grandchild on my husband's side and so I felt guilty but I just couldn't let him go.

Yeah, I totally totally understand that it is what it is, right.

It's what we're going through.

So I just want to say I like so appreciate you all coming on here and just sharing.

I think this is going to be such such a beneficial conversation for so many women to listen to and to be shared.

And so I just really, really appreciate you guys all being on here.

I will be sharing links to all three of these lovely ladies, social media in the show notes.

So you guys could reach out and message them if someone you know you connected with you want to know more about how to connect with them, message them, you know, tell them your story, open up.

I'm sure we would all be willing to chat with anyone.

As you can see, being able to have those conversations is so beneficial.

So I'm just super grateful to have you guys on here.

Thank you.

Thank you for creating this space.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

This was beautiful.

Thank you, Sarah.

Thank you very much.

Of course, of course, of course.

Hey there, Inspired Mama.

If you enjoyed this show, I want to invite you to leave a review in your podcast player.

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Also, if you know of another hopeful mama on her path to motherhood, please share this episode with her.

I would love to get this into the ears of anyone who needs to hear it.

If you are ready to step this work up and not only learn these tools but to apply them to your unique story, head to the link in the show notes to apply for a free consult call.

I would be honored to help you.

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