Episode 80: Transcript

You are listening to episode 80 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.

Hello and welcome to the Path to Motherhood podcast. I'm your host Sarah and I am super

excited to be talking with all of you today. For those of you who have been following along

with our podcast for a while, you know that we have been on a couple of months hiatus

and while it's been amazing, I'm super, super excited to be back and talking with you guys

and supporting all of you guys and yeah just connecting. So welcome. I'm so happy to talk

to you. I'm so happy to just you know get back to a routine with things. I think this

might be maybe the third time that I've recorded this episode or tried to record this episode.

I haven't quite known like how I wanted to restart things

and I would get myself some time to sit down

and try to start recording it

and it wouldn't go right or whatever.

But tonight we are getting it done.

It's raining really hard,

but I think I've got my mic set up in a way

that that shouldn't affect things too bad

and we're getting it done because it's time.

I'm ready.

I've been missing you guys.

I have been getting messages from you guys

on Instagram, on social media,

and it's been nice to keep up with some of you there,

but I'm missing you.

And so here we are.

Before we dive into kind of just a little bit of an update,

I heard of a new feature on my account for my podcast,

where I host my podcast, it's called Budsprout.

And they launched a new feature

where I believe you guys can text me, text the podcast.

So as long as I get it turned on by this episode,

you should be able to click the link in the show notes to text me and let me know what's

going on. Just say hi, send me a message. Let me know what you think of the episode. You

will probably hear that as long as I get it turned on, I'll do a little kind of like drop

in ad, if you will, on all the podcast episodes to just let people know that it exists and

encourage people to message me because it's really going to be a great feature because

A lot of this is just me talking at you guys, right?

And I'm excited to be able to hear from you guys.

Tell me what you love about the episodes.

Tell me what you disagree with about the episodes.

Tell me why you really loved a certain guest,

who you wanna hear from next.

So I'm super excited to make this more of a two-way

conversation rather than a one-way conversation.

So make sure you check the show notes,

look for that link and send us a message.

Just so you know that message you can put,

I think like a name if you want to, but it's anonymous.

I don't get your phone number.

I actually cannot message you back.

So if you're concerned about that,

I won't be able to even see your number.

Anyways, I have some plans to have a couple

specific episodes coming up over the next couple months

that really dive deep into more honestly

what I would consider my experience of pregnancy,

post infertility and loss, motherhood post infertility and loss.

So I'm not going to spend a ton of time doing that today, but I am going to give

you guys just a little bit of an update.

For those of you that don't know if this happens to be your first episode,

surprise, I am coming off of maternity leave with my amazing IVF miracle baby.

We are coming up on just about a week, week and a half out from

our transferversary, I guess you wanna call it.

So I'm in the heat of newborn life

and living with a newborn and caring for a newborn

and coming out of kind of some of that postpartum fog

that happens and honestly we're doing really well

and I couldn't be more grateful to be here

and to be on this side of things.

It's definitely not been easy.

There has been a lot of challenges,

whether that's been like feeding challenges,

weight gain challenges,

dealing with different medical providers that I have

or haven't gone along with challenges.

And now I'm dealing with a little stubborn miss

who is refusing to take a bottle.

And that sounds like not the end of the world,

but when you are expecting your kid to go to daycare

for a handful of hours a day,

it's become a pretty stressful thing.

And my daycare person today actually said,

I've dealt with bottle refusal before,

something I've had to deal with before

with a lot of babies we've had in the past.

And now I know none of them were actually bottle refusers.

They were more like fussy around a bottle,

but they finally would give in and take a bottle.

And then she said, "Yours, she's an actual bottle refuser."

So she's been to, I think, four days of daycare,

five days of daycare, and has yet to take a bottle.

So we're working with lactation,

we're working with occupational therapy,

I'm waking up and feeding her extra through the night.

So don't stress about her.

She's gonna be okay.

It's more about me losing my sanity going through this.

But yeah, it's been a lot.

And I'm reminded often that doesn't matter where you get to,

there's always gonna be struggles.

There's always gonna be things to work through.

Some of them are gonna be more fun to work through than others.

Some of them are gonna be more painful

to work through than others.

But there's always good and there's always bad.

And that's just part of life.

and I'm just often reflecting on that in this period.

So I'm doing well.

I think that I had higher expectations of myself,

of what I was gonna be able to balance,

and really did not think I was gonna take this long

of a time to come back onto the podcast.

But the truth is just,

it's hard to find time to yourself,

find time that you can really dedicate to yourself

and your passions and your roles,

and then to even more specifically find quiet time

to record a podcast.

So that's been hard.

And the time that I was able to dedicate to myself

and my passions really was given to my clients.

So coaching my clients resumed pretty quickly post-barn,

just 'cause I didn't wanna leave them stranded.

And I've been meeting with them on a regular basis

and that's been going amazing.

But that has meant some of the things

have been on the back burner.

So I haven't been quite as often on social media.

I haven't been up to date on my kind of

sending you guys newsletters and emails.

Haven't been on here in a while, but I'm back.

I am around and I'm excited to kind of dive back into things

and keep going and talk about some really important topics

and share amazing guests with you.

I have quite a few really, really awesome guests coming up

over the next couple months.

And yeah, that's the plan.

So I can't believe that we're on episode 80 of the podcast.

I am really truthfully recording this podcast

because I'm passionate to share with the world

of infertility and pregnancy loss

that there is a way to navigate hard stuff

and still live a good life and still enjoy life

and feel capable of doing it.

And I think that in the depths of things,

I feel like it can be like,

that's not even a possible task.

I can see that, you know,

women struggle with keeping their identity,

finding ways to enjoy their passions,

really just relating to themselves anymore,

because they feel like they've lost themselves to the journey.

And I can relate to that,

because I've experienced that on my own journey.

But I really hope through this podcast,

through working with each of you

that I get to work with on a one-on-one basis,

we get to see how true it is that you can have both.

You can enjoy your life and grieve this journey.

You can have passions, purpose, and focus in your life

and feel hopeless in other areas.

That is possible.

And the goal, you know, some people might trick themselves

and think the goal is to just be happy.

And they think either one of two things or both,

either the only way they can be happy

is if they get that baby at the end of the tunnel,

or they have to stop wanting that baby

so they can just be happy without it.

And the truth is neither of those are necessarily true.

You get to be happy now.

You get to enjoy life now.

You get to pursue passions now

and honor the pain of the fertility journey.

If you're navigating loss, infertility,

struggles with any of this process,

it is 100% appropriate, reasonable, fair,

and just part of life

to be allowing the painful emotions.

And I think we trick ourselves into believing

we need to be like circumventing them.

And that's really not the idea here.

And so that's really the backbone

of what I teach on this podcast

is how can we go about this journey,

honoring the painful moments,

so that we have room for the joy.

And the joy can be now, in the moment,

where you are, regardless of the outcome,

regardless of successful pregnancy,

you can enjoy your life.

That's possible.

I know because I was there, I felt that,

I experienced that, my clients experienced that,

they tell me that on a weekly basis.

So that is really my goal.

I'm excited to be back with you guys

and be sharing with you and working through things

and talking about difficult topics

and just hoping to inspire all of you

to find a less painful way to go about this process.

Pop me a message in the texting little feature

in the show notes.

Let me know that you're here, you're listening.

Tell me your favorite things that you like to hear from me.

Tell me what you wanna hear from me next on the podcast.

your ideas and I will be back with you next week with our next episode of the

Path to Motherhood podcast.

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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