Episode 60: Transcript

You are listening to episode 60 of the Path to Motherhood podcast.

Welcome to the Path to Motherhood podcast.

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

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 full life to create a more authentic path to motherhood.

(upbeat music) Hello, hello.

Welcome to another week of the Baths of Motherhood podcast.

I'm super excited to be talking with you all.

I am actually recording this episode at night, which is different for me.

I typically don't do that.

It's just been a little bit of a different week.

My husband, I don't know if I've talked about it on the podcast, he took a new job back in August.

And this is a pretty big deal for us just because it's a big change.

He's pretty much been in the same career field in the same job his entire life.

And this was a big change that kind of came on his heart in the last year and he made that change.

And I'm super proud of him.

And the first month has been like very extensive training.

And he's been doing that, not the first month, the first three months.

So he's been doing all that training over the last three months.

And it kind of caps off with this trip to Chicago or everyone that's in the training for the past three months, which I think there's like 40 of them, all got to Chicago and they all kind of do some additional training, but also get together and mingle and connect with people that are being onboarded from all across the country.

And so yeah, before this, Jason would never have had a reason to travel for work.

So it's been weird to have him gone.

I do not necessarily envy those of you that have a spouse or a partner that's gone more often depending on what their career is, but yeah, we're getting through it.

I am just not someone who really likes to lounge around and watch a bunch of TV.

I know that's weird.

I know a lot of people love to do that, but it's just not me.

So I've read a lot of books.

I've caught up on some cleaning.

But in the evenings when it's real quiet and it's just me, I feel very bored.

My husband and I, we have been together some capacity for 16 years.

We have pretty much lived together ever since moving out of college and in college living with roommates.

So I'm not used to being by myself and it being so quiet.

So that being said, I literally was thinking I have nothing else to do tonight.

I can either go to bed at eight o'clock, which is probably a little bit too early, or I can and report a podcast.

And so that's what I'm doing is I'm recording a podcast.

But yeah, that's what's up.

Things are going well.

I'm feeling good.

I honestly am grateful to say that I am feeling like my energy really has come back in the last, maybe six weeks.

And it's funny, like when you're in it, it's not like you know that you're finally out of it, but like you just get a couple of weeks down the road and you're like, oh, I actually feel myself again.

Actually feel normal again.

And that's been nice.

Yeah, that's what's going on.

We're gearing up for the holidays as I promised.

We're gonna do a handful of episodes about just different topics about navigating holidays and the emotions around the holidays and such.

And this one relates to that a little bit loosely, but something I always want to do is not every episode that we share has to be an episode that is talking about a tactic, a tool, something that we need to be doing.

Sometimes it's beneficial to just reflect on what's hard.

And to do that in a way that says, "Hey, if you're going through this too, I see you.

I feel for you.

You're not alone.

" And it's totally fine to be feeling this way about your journey.

And that kind of speaks to what I wanted to talk about today is that I really don't have advice for you today.

I really don't have tools or tactics for you.

I share those often on this podcast and if that's what you're looking for, you can go back to so many other episodes to gather some of that.

But today, really what I wanna do is just honor something that I think a lot of us can relate to and just shed light on it and bring awareness to it.

And like I said, just help potentially make you feel less alone if you're going through this.

So what I wanted to talk about today is secondary losses.

And I know that can kind of sound a little bit confusing of exactly what I mean by that.

But what I'm referring to is the fact that, I think from the outside world, and maybe even from ourselves when we're early in infertility experience, when we're just going through a loss and we're in the heat of the grief of the loss, it's easy to distill our pain and our struggle and our loss and our grief down to just, hey, it's harder for me to have a baby.

I've had to go through a loss and the grief and the pain surrounding one of those things.

But the truth is, is that's the primary loss.

having infertility, going through a pregnancy loss, those are the primary losses, and those create their own versions of trauma, and pain, and difficult emotions to handle.

And I hope that what I share on this podcast over the past year, and then some is helping you navigate, processing all that that is going on.

But the thing I don't think that many people who are outside of the infertility experience really realize that we're going through is all of the secondary losses.

All of the other things.

It's all interwoven.

I think of it almost like, you know, like, back in elementary school, I'm thinking of like concept maps where you like have like this thing out branching out or like a spider web branching out, yes, the infertility is in the center or yes, the pregnancy loss is in the center and that creates heaps of pain and things that we need to process.

But there are so many other things going on and I only want to talk about this today to bring light to it.

Maybe if you just haven't thought about it this way, haven't realized that that is a a loss that is grief in and of itself or just to tell you if you're feeling that way, if you're grieving those things, you're not alone.

And so what are some examples.

One of the number one things I think of is experiences.

So I think about how many times I have women come to me on a coaching call and say, "I just wish I could have that naive pregnancy.

I wish I could be in that blissful pregnancy state where I can be so happy and so excited and announced to the entire world that I'm pregnant at four weeks and I have no fear and I have no stress or I wish I could just go through the whole process and the gender reveal and plan the shower and be positive throughout that experience or I wish that that the trying to have a baby, the actual act of having sex with my husband could be a fun thing because we're excited and we're hopeful and we're just having fun and it happens that way.

And we don't get that.

This has completely changed our experience of those things.

So our experiences of the getting towards the motherhood journey has changed.

We now are talking about tracking ovulation and using thermometers that we wear on our arm all night or there used to be one that was like an intravaginal thermometer that people would wear all night or peeing in cups on a regular basis to check your ovulation and timing things and putting things into apps and telling your partner we need to have sex these three days to make it happen.

And I am changing that whole experience and it can really quickly feel like you're taking all the fun out of it and it's just this transactional experience.

But also the whole experience of pregnancy.

If you've been through loss, if you've had your trust in your body decimated from infertility, the joy of the positive pregnancy test doesn't hit the same.

It just doesn't.

And we can hold on to the beauty of the joy that we do get to have.

And I do think that it's there, but I will be the first to tell you that it's just not the same, right.

I can reflect back on that first positive pregnancy test and the joy and the excitement I had in those days of celebrating before the bleeding happened and then the experience of the second pregnancy and how different it felt, the anxiety that it provoked, the worries that it provoked, the fear of going to the bathroom, the fear of something being wrong at any given moment, I have episodes that I can link down below just sharing so many women's experiences of what it's like to go through pregnancy after infertility or loss, and it's not fun.

There's a lot there to process and go through that you wouldn't have had to go through if you didn't have the history of loss or of infertility.

And I think of that as a huge area.

These experiences, and these are just some examples.

There's more there, but these are just some examples of experiences that we really are losing having gone through this journey.

And when I say losing, I use that word because it really is a grief process.

I am grieving the fact that pregnancy does not look like I would have hoped it to look.

I am grieving the fact that trying to conceive sure does not look like I had hoped that it would look.

Other examples, all of our expectations about what our family would look like, our hopes and our dreams of how many children we would have, how close in age they would be, what time of life they would arrive in as if we could just schedule all of that.

And for some people, they almost can.

But for us, that's not the case.

And it is absolutely a loss.

It is a grief process of coming to terms with your life.

Pre-infertility, pre-pregnancy loss is not going to look like you thought it was going to look after the fact.

And to be able to keep moving forward, to be able to find joy in what you were dealt, requires you to grieve what could have been.

And that's just one example of secondary losses is these different types of experiences.

So if you feel like you're there, if you feel like you're grieving those things, I see you, I am still there.

It doesn't go away.

I still think about it.

I look at other people that remind me of what I had wanted, how many children I had wanted, the timeline of when I would have wanted them.

I don't know why, but there feels like there's this trend of more people online being these young mothers with these beautiful families and thinking like, man, why couldn't that have been me.

Not that I consider myself old, but I'm definitely not some 20-something with four kids.

And that is a loss to me.

So whatever you thought it was gonna look like, whatever you had hoped for, whatever you had been excited to have and you now have lost, I'm sorry.

really really am sorry that the experiences that you're going to have are gonna be totally different than what you had originally hoped for.

What I think about is the fact that the fact that I'm grieving them, the fact that I'm losing them, does not necessarily mean that I'm not gonna find joy in the future.

So really what prompted this episode was a conversation that I listened to with another coach about something totally different.

Like I said, some of my training came from relationship coaching.

And so they were having a conversation actually about couples who experience some type of infidelity and and talking about how even if the relationship survives and gets through that and works on rebuilding trust and navigates moving on past that experience, that betrayal, there is a grief, there is a trauma that produces a grief and a loss.

She actually referred to it as like a death of a relationship.

So the relationship you thought you once had is no longer.

There will never be a day that you forget that that happened.

You now are someone where that happened in your relationship and you're moving forward, creating a new relationship and learning how to navigate that new relationship post that experience.

And so that's really what I mean here, having the diagnosis of infertility, having the experience of going through a loss is almost the death of what you thought your motherhood journey was going to look like.

The death of what you thought you're trying to conceive journey was gonna look like.

And while yes we can make the new version beautiful And while yes, we can find joy in the new version, it doesn't mean we don't miss the old one.

It doesn't mean we don't miss what we thought we wanted.

And so it's okay to be grieving that.

It's okay to be feeling that.

And I know I'm kind of like reiterating this, but I just, I want to like give every single one of you a hug because I can know that this can be so hard and feel so unfair because it is, it's not fair.

There's nothing about this that is fair.

And I think that it can feel very lonely to be going through the pain of having all of these losses and feeling like you really can't talk about it because no one would really understand.

So I can see that now in the fact that I really don't talk all that much about my current pregnancy.

I don't, with family, with friends, with coworkers, with people around me, because somehow sharing about it and focusing solely on the joy of this pregnancy completely negates everything that I have been through to get to this point.

All of the pain, all of the negative tests, all of the losses, and to me, those are equally as important as the joy of this pregnancy.

And it's really hard, really, really hard for someone not in your shoes to understand that.

So that's the one first example is experiences.

And you can see how we could talk about that for days, just the loss of experiences, but there's others.

So some other examples of secondary losses, some of them are pretty straightforward.

a big one for our family who is finances.

I can confidently say to you that we are not as financially successful as we had hoped, as we thought we could be, as we really should be, because we have prioritized spending money on our fertility journey over other things, over paying off student loans, over investing.

over getting ahead on things, over not taking out a loan to help pay for our infertility journey.

And that it was just a decision that we had to make and we all will make a different decision there.

It's all up to us, but I definitely think finances is one of those secondary losses that people just don't think about.

I've unfortunately heard people talk about, oh, if you're having to spend so much money and fertility treatments, it's just getting you practice for when you have to start paying for daycare.

Um, no, no thank you.

Please do not say that.

If you've ever been around someone that has said that before, please send them this episode.

Uh, that is just such poor thinking, right.

Like the people who don't have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars to have children are so far ahead financially, compared to someone who has spent 30, 40, 50, 60, $70,000 or more, having the chance to maybe have a baby, maybe.

It's not even a for sure.

And then while they're in the process of coming back up for air after having spent all that money, whether that's catching back up, building back savings, whether that's paying that off 'cause it's done in a loan format, whatever it is.

Now, out on top of that, if they do have the baby, they have a whole the cost that everyone else has.

So yes, 100% finances and financial setbacks is absolutely a secondary loss of infertility and pregnancy loss.

I think about our first pregnancy being so excited and remembering like, okay, I'm planning, I'm doing all the right things, 'cause I'm new to this career field, I'm so excited, I'm pregnant, I'm gonna have a baby in nine months, I have nine months to slowly save money to prepare for the maternity leave, and then being blindsided by a miscarriage that required a DNC and having like a $6,000 bill to pay off.

That was a shock, that was a setback.

In a $6,000 bill to have a procedure done, didn't really want to have done.

That is absolutely a loss.

Another one is related to relationships.

Something I work with so many women on is really coming to terms with how their infertility loss journey has impacted their relationship with their partner and how they plan to move forward from that.

What they want to do to resurrect that.

What they have to do to accept the changes that have happened and how to keep on and cultivate love and intimacy and support and kindness and understanding in a relationship that is going through really tough time that is really navigating painful experiences.

And anyone going through this type of journey would be wrong to tell you that it's 100% easy on the relationship.

I think we all have different reasons for why it's hard on the relationship.

for some it may be making the individual decisions about what to do next, what is the appropriate decision, etc.

For others it might be about how to properly grieve or how to be properly emotionally available for each other.

Something I run into often with clients is this thing we do where we expect those around us to process things similarly to us.

So we expect our partner to be in pain exactly the way we are and that's just not fair to do to them.

We all process pain differently.

Also, again, back to finances.

Absolutely, we know that finances is a stressor on relationships that leads to fights leads to separation leads to divorce and that is a huge impact on an infertility process.

So yes your experience of your relationship and how it navigates this journey while a hundred percent I hope to make it a positive impact and I think that you know you guys can go back to the episode that I had with my husband on here that we put in the work to make that happen and I'm grateful but that doesn't mean it was easy and it doesn't mean everyone just fares well.

There absolutely are relationship losses from infertility.

On the topic of relationships, the spouse is just one.

I 100% believe a huge portion of secondary losses of infertility is our relationships with our friends, with our family.

These people who mean so much to us, who have supported us through so many things, who now we feel distant from.

Now we feel disconnected from.

Now we may even feel envious of.

We may feel frustrated with.

We may feel like they don't understand us anymore.

They make, you know, inappropriate comments, they're hurting me with what they're doing, with what they're saying.

They absolutely impact our ability to reach out to these people, to connect with them, to show up with them for their important events, to emotionally be available for them when we're going through something so painful.

And it it absolutely can cause us to degrade our relationships, whether they're just not as strong as they used to be, or we completely can lose connection with people because of an infertility journey.

The next area that I see secondary losses happening is honestly in your career.

And what I see happening here is that we can get so tunnel visioned at I have to figure this out.

I have to fix this.

What's the problem so I can find the solution.

I have to make this work kind of really pushing for that.

And what happens is this causes us to end up in a place where we put hobbies, personal interests, careers on hold or second priority to the infertility journey, perhaps just the logistics of appointments and tests and not being able to travel for work anymore, etc.

could be holding us back and potentially impacting our long term success in our career or our ability to maintain our hobbies and our identity outside of a fertility journey.

So many, so many women come to me and they talk about how they feel like they've lost themselves on this journey.

And that is because I think it can become so consuming that we really lose sight of everything else that matters to us.

And this 100% is something that I see women go through that I've gone through as a feeling of a loss of I wonder where I would be in my career.

I wonder who I would be.

What would be my passions.

What would be my interests if I hadn't gone through an infertility journey.

I don't know.

I really don't know.

And so like I said, I'm I'm not here to give you solutions, find ways to eliminate these losses, find ways to decrease the severity of these losses.

I'm honestly here just to shed light on them.

To tell you that if you're feeling the pain of having lost these things, that's totally normal.

That is absolutely okay.

and I'm so sorry that you're feeling that grief and that you're having these losses.

And I'm so sorry that you were dealt these cards that puts that in your path.

But hopefully hearing that you're not the only one, hearing that other women going through this journey experienced that as well, knowing that yes, I can go through X, Y, or Z losses, but also I can find joy in my future, can help us to look towards the future with excitement, with joy, with hope, with possibility.

But today I just wanna honor that like, it's hard.

This is hard.

Not every day is easy.

It's not fair.

And it's okay to be struggling.

It's okay to be sad.

It's okay to feel stolen from, because we really have been.

And sometimes in the day to day, with people around you who just don't understand it, it can feel kind of conflicting or confusing, or like you're kind of the crazy one, and I'm here to tell you you're not the crazy one.

It's okay to be in pain.

And I'm so sorry that you're going through this.

So I hope that hearing these examples, talking through them, is something that's helpful to you.

I would love to hear from you.

If you relate to some of these losses, if you can identify the ones that have been really particularly strong for you, but also what other, let me know what other secondary losses you feel like you've experienced that I didn't mention.

If you know someone going through this journey and you want them to feel less alone, share this episode with them.

And I will talk to you all next week.

Hey there, Inspired Mama.

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

This helps to share the message with so many more women just like you.

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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