Latest / Mom Wars / Infertile but Fruitful

Transcript

Infertile but Fruitful · Mom Wars

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: From the front lines of the mom Wars.
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: Here's Bethany Mandel and Kara Kennedy.
• 0:08
  Speaker 3: Hello and welcome to another episode of your favorite podcast.
• 0:13
  Speaker 3: My name is Bethany Mandel. I am the only host
• 0:16
  Speaker 3: this week because my handy, wonderful, amazing co host Kara
• 0:21
  Speaker 3: had her baby. She had a baby about a week ago.
• 0:24
  Speaker 3: Hence why there's been a delay because I couldn't figure
• 0:27
  Speaker 3: out how to record on zoom until now because that
• 0:30
  Speaker 3: was her territory. I have not discussed with her what
• 0:34
  Speaker 3: our plan is when she's coming back because she's kind
• 0:37
  Speaker 3: of busy. She's got a new baby. She's got a
• 0:39
  Speaker 3: new baby girl. So I'm just going to be hosting
• 0:42
  Speaker 3: with wonderful guests until she deems herself able to come back.
• 0:47
  Speaker 3: So yay, Caara, I'm so excited for you guys. We
• 0:51
  Speaker 3: sent them enough diapers and wipes to last them approximately
• 0:54
  Speaker 3: six months because that's my favorite baby gift ever. So
• 0:57
  Speaker 3: I am joined this week by my first my first
• 1:03
  Speaker 3: guest that I'm taking solo. So here let's see how
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: this goes. Her name is lese Is Do you go
• 1:08
  Speaker 3: by a leaf? It's patrick'sned or just lease?
• 1:10
  Speaker 4: Need you know either one I do like the sort
• 1:14
  Speaker 4: of like lots of continents in the middle to kind
• 1:16
  Speaker 4: of break up the soft l's and s's and e's sounds.
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: So yeah, I hear all right, So leif it's Patrick Snead,
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: the author of the new book Infertile but Fruitful from
• 1:27
  Speaker 3: Sophia Press, which I read, I think in one sitting.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe to be the common threat. People get in
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: there and they just stay.
• 1:35
  Speaker 3: In I said that to someone once and they got
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: offended because they're like, oh, I'm like, no, it just
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: means that it's easy to turn the pages. That's a compliment.
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: So I just wanted to make sure that you knew that.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: No, totally.
• 1:47
  Speaker 4: It's an easy read's little book. And I think it's
• 1:50
  Speaker 4: uh you, I mean you want to know what happens next.
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah you do. Although I will say I was
• 1:59
  Speaker 3: bracing myself in the same way like you read Anne
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: Frank and you're like, you know that she dies at
• 2:03
  Speaker 3: the end. Yeah, I know the title of the book.
• 2:05
  Speaker 3: I know that, like there's not this like miracle forty
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: two forty five year old pregnancy at the end. So
• 2:12
  Speaker 3: I at least braced myself in that way. I kind
• 2:14
  Speaker 3: of knew what was coming. But it was a fascinating
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: tale of your journey to motherhood through infertility, and it
• 2:22
  Speaker 3: was it was a fascinating read, and I kind of
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: wanted to ask you, like what inspired you to decide
• 2:29
  Speaker 3: like this is a story that needs to be written,
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: because what I loved about it was there was sort
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: of these vignettes at the end of like these are
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: the lessons to learn, So like, what inspired you to
• 2:40
  Speaker 3: go down that road as opposed to like doing a
• 2:41
  Speaker 3: substack with a bunch of essays.
• 2:44
  Speaker 4: Yeah, well, you know, I haven't really figured out substack yet,
• 2:48
  Speaker 4: so that's probably part of that.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: It's still new to me. I like it.
• 2:52
  Speaker 4: I keep subscribing to people, but I think just sort
• 2:55
  Speaker 4: of generationally age wise.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: You know, it didn't had You're not eighty.
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: I'm not eighty, No, but it's it's it's like a
• 3:05
  Speaker 4: possibility in a way that it never has been before,
• 3:08
  Speaker 4: crossing a certain threshold. You're like, huh, so it is
• 3:11
  Speaker 4: not maybe as old as I thought. Anyway, I had
• 3:14
  Speaker 4: written some essays for the National Catholic Register on it
• 3:17
  Speaker 4: in the last few years, and they got more responses
• 3:21
  Speaker 4: than I kind of thought, like it was like DMS
• 3:24
  Speaker 4: from people I knew who were suffering that I didn't
• 3:27
  Speaker 4: know were suffering from priests, from you know, from strangers,
• 3:32
  Speaker 4: all kinds of things. And I just had a mentor
• 3:36
  Speaker 4: that said, hey, I think this is it.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: This is your book.
• 3:39
  Speaker 4: Yeah, just at the right time, the right place, like
• 3:42
  Speaker 4: that whole thing, Like, yeah, I'm not going to be
• 3:44
  Speaker 4: one of those miracle pregnancy stories like after twenty five
• 3:48
  Speaker 4: years of trying or whatever. You know, you get like
• 3:50
  Speaker 4: yours in the daily mail, you know, women for men
• 3:53
  Speaker 4: forty you know, you're and like what right, like owning
• 3:58
  Speaker 4: it and be like, okay, yeah this is me. I'm
• 4:00
  Speaker 4: that's not my story any like, there's not even a
• 4:02
  Speaker 4: glimmer of that anymore. And yeah, it just worked out
• 4:06
  Speaker 4: and I was lucky enough to have the right people
• 4:08
  Speaker 4: to work with, and then you know, a publisher wanted
• 4:10
  Speaker 4: to publish it, and you know, getting that sort of
• 4:13
  Speaker 4: contract before you've written the whole thing is like a
• 4:15
  Speaker 4: nice you want to deliver.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: So it worked out good. It was a good point
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: in my life.
• 4:19
  Speaker 4: I was ready to tell it, and I you know,
• 4:21
  Speaker 4: and over the years people had sent like younger people
• 4:25
  Speaker 4: that they knew, like to my husband or I like Oh, hey,
• 4:29
  Speaker 4: these are infertile people. They seem all right, why don't
• 4:31
  Speaker 4: you talk to them? Or oh you're thinking about adoption
• 4:34
  Speaker 4: these people adopted, go talk to them. And it was
• 4:36
  Speaker 4: something that I don't think we ever thought about doing
• 4:42
  Speaker 4: like this book, or like doing it in any sort
• 4:44
  Speaker 4: of like professional official way.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: But I do.
• 4:48
  Speaker 4: I definitely welcomed those moments, Like I wouldn't have advertised myself,
• 4:51
  Speaker 4: but when people got sort of passed to us, those
• 4:54
  Speaker 4: felt like real good human connection moments and something that
• 5:00
  Speaker 4: we were both really comfortable talking to. In fact, we
• 5:02
  Speaker 4: had actually had a run where I wished more people
• 5:05
  Speaker 4: would talk to us because the more people talk, Like,
• 5:07
  Speaker 4: we had several couples who talked to us about infertility,
• 5:10
  Speaker 4: and they all got pregnant. So I'm like, maybe this
• 5:12
  Speaker 4: is our gift.
• 5:14
  Speaker 3: Yes, here is the good luck term.
• 5:16
  Speaker 4: You unloaded to me, and the baby follows, so you know.
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: There you go. Yeah, So walk the listeners through a
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: little bit sort of your story. So when did you
• 5:26
  Speaker 3: get married and when did you guys start trying get married?
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: I was twenty I just turned twenty.
• 5:32
  Speaker 4: Three, wow baby, yeah, babies, and my husband was still
• 5:37
  Speaker 4: in law school. I just graduated from Saint John's College,
• 5:40
  Speaker 4: and we moved around a lot. My husband's a lawyer,
• 5:44
  Speaker 4: and so you know, we did like a clerkship and
• 5:47
  Speaker 4: changed jobs, and so we moved back and forth, and
• 5:49
  Speaker 4: then we finally came back to DC and we decided, Okay,
• 5:55
  Speaker 4: I was in graduate school at Catholic you and he
• 5:58
  Speaker 4: was at a law firm, and I thought, okay, I
• 6:01
  Speaker 4: will knock out the first two years of course work,
• 6:04
  Speaker 4: get pregnant during that third year, and then have a
• 6:07
  Speaker 4: baby and pretend to write dissertation. That was sort of
• 6:09
  Speaker 4: my plan, you know, just picture myself nursing, writing at
• 6:13
  Speaker 4: the laptop, and that didn't.
• 6:16
  Speaker 3: Happen, you planned, and God laughed, yes, exactly.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: So we tried different things.
• 6:22
  Speaker 4: We saw a conventional doctor, which was kind of a nightmare.
• 6:27
  Speaker 4: My husband was also working.
• 6:29
  Speaker 3: Can I pause you for a second. Yeah, So that story.
• 6:34
  Speaker 3: So I just want to preface just for our listeners. Always,
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: I never interview someone that I didn't actually read your book,
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: because it makes for a really crappy interview. So sometimes
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: I'm going to ask you questions and play dumb, But
• 6:45
  Speaker 3: I did actually read your book. So the interaction that
• 6:51
  Speaker 3: you had with that conventional doctor I think is a
• 6:53
  Speaker 3: really important thing for all women to learn that lesson
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: because you, guys, I think from my reading of it,
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: swallowed a lot of your concerns and walked into that
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: appointment kind of knowing that maybe you shouldn't have been there,
• 7:11
  Speaker 3: given like what you wanted. But then you like really
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: advocated for yourself. And I think that that is so
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: important for all women, especially in reproductive anything. Can you
• 7:22
  Speaker 3: can you share a little bit about that journey with
• 7:24
  Speaker 3: that doctor, because I think that that's a really important
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: lesson that is very universal.
• 7:28
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I do too, and I think it's always important
• 7:32
  Speaker 4: to know. I sort of jumping ahead, but no matter
• 7:35
  Speaker 4: what the healthcare scenario is, you can leave and find
• 7:39
  Speaker 4: another doctor all the time, even if it's just you
• 7:42
  Speaker 4: get the ick or you don't like it. There's lots
• 7:45
  Speaker 4: of doctors find another doctor anyway. So we went to
• 7:48
  Speaker 4: this doctor because he was close and he had a
• 7:50
  Speaker 4: really great reputation as a really great infertility doctor. Again,
• 7:55
  Speaker 4: you're naive, you're young. You're not thinking that just means
• 7:58
  Speaker 4: IVF success rights. You're thinking and also you're thinking, gosh,
• 8:01
  Speaker 4: we're young, we can there's going to be an easy
• 8:04
  Speaker 4: fix to this. Feel fertile, seems weird that we're not
• 8:07
  Speaker 4: getting pregnant, you know, like all these ridiculous things, you know,
• 8:11
  Speaker 4: And so we went.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: We knew what we were gonna do.
• 8:14
  Speaker 4: My husband at the time, by the time we got
• 8:16
  Speaker 4: to that point, was the General counsel for the President's
• 8:18
  Speaker 4: Council on Bioethics under leadership of Leon Cass and he
• 8:24
  Speaker 4: was working on a lot of assisted reproductive technology regulation
• 8:27
  Speaker 4: issues and things, and so we were learning a lot
• 8:31
  Speaker 4: about everything that could possibly be wrong. But you know,
• 8:34
  Speaker 4: we were also we were very well versed in what
• 8:36
  Speaker 4: our church teaches about, you know, assistant reproductive technologies and
• 8:42
  Speaker 4: human sexuality and marriage and children and things like that.
• 8:45
  Speaker 4: So we thought, okay, we can go to this doctor
• 8:47
  Speaker 4: get our easy fix, sort of put our blinders on.
• 8:50
  Speaker 4: We're not going to do any of the bad stuff.
• 8:53
  Speaker 4: We're just going to get his expertise, you.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: Know what I mean.
• 8:55
  Speaker 4: We're just going to extract the like technical precision of
• 8:58
  Speaker 4: whatever he's doing. We could do this, of course, ignoring
• 9:02
  Speaker 4: the whole idea, like the importance of like bedside manner
• 9:05
  Speaker 4: and caring for like an actual human being as a
• 9:08
  Speaker 4: doctor in that relationship, like you're not just doctor and patient,
• 9:11
  Speaker 4: you are also lee and doctor bad guy.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: For antonymity purposes. I don't know if we're still in practice.
• 9:20
  Speaker 4: But so we went in there and immediately he wanted
• 9:23
  Speaker 4: to put us in the IVF program, enroll us. He
• 9:26
  Speaker 4: used the word, and there was even like a money
• 9:28
  Speaker 4: back guarantee and all these things were like and at
• 9:32
  Speaker 4: first it was like, no, nope, this is what we're
• 9:33
  Speaker 4: gonna do. Okay, okay, So he kind of humored us
• 9:36
  Speaker 4: and threw some clomate at us, some some gesterone supplementation,
• 9:38
  Speaker 4: blah blah. Month after month, Hmmm, you know this really
• 9:42
  Speaker 4: isn't working.
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: Let's do IBF.
• 9:44
  Speaker 4: No, And then you know, we got mocked along the
• 9:48
  Speaker 4: way for you know, the way we did like the
• 9:51
  Speaker 4: mail testing for infertility and the fact that we you know,
• 9:56
  Speaker 4: just wouldn't even open our minds to it. And he said, well,
• 9:59
  Speaker 4: I'm a cradle CAF, as if that was going to
• 10:01
  Speaker 4: make a difference. And and then at the final straw,
• 10:03
  Speaker 4: like I think it was like maybe our we're into
• 10:06
  Speaker 4: like maybe our fourth or fifth month with him as
• 10:08
  Speaker 4: our doctor, and like he just got so frustrated and
• 10:12
  Speaker 4: like pointed back at his like labs and was just like,
• 10:15
  Speaker 4: I'm creating life back there, not destroying it. And I
• 10:19
  Speaker 4: guess maybe he thought we were worried about selective reduction,
• 10:22
  Speaker 4: which obviously we were, and it's uh yeah. So we
• 10:27
  Speaker 4: just walked out and never went back, and it was
• 10:29
  Speaker 4: like it was just a nightmare. But it was pretty
• 10:31
  Speaker 4: empowering to be like, we're not stuck here. Yeah, no,
• 10:36
  Speaker 4: and I don't. I'm really glad that at the very least.
• 10:39
  Speaker 4: My husband definitely always saw it as like even though
• 10:43
  Speaker 4: it was like I was taking the medicines and getting
• 10:45
  Speaker 4: fussed with and whatever, it was like us, we were
• 10:48
  Speaker 4: the patient. Yeah, because I think being you know, probably
• 10:52
  Speaker 4: thirty forty years the doctor's senior, I mean junior, I
• 10:56
  Speaker 4: you know, and just and I think I would have
• 10:58
  Speaker 4: been easily sort of in tim dated and been like
• 11:02
  Speaker 4: I'm going to keep suffering through this. That's sort of
• 11:04
  Speaker 4: my personality anyway, is like I just sort of put
• 11:07
  Speaker 4: my head down and kind of forced through the back.
• 11:09
  Speaker 4: My husband always reminds me whenever I get stubborn like
• 11:12
  Speaker 4: that that during graduate school, the top road letters in
• 11:17
  Speaker 4: my on my keyboard stopped working and it was like,
• 11:20
  Speaker 4: you know, the last week the semester, trying to pump
• 11:21
  Speaker 4: out a bunch of papers, and instead of like asking
• 11:25
  Speaker 4: for an extension or something, I just cut and pasted
• 11:28
  Speaker 4: the letters I needed from other parts that I had
• 11:30
  Speaker 4: already written. Isn't that ridiculous? I hope I'm not like
• 11:34
  Speaker 4: that anymore. But anyway, given that.
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: Why do I hear a little bit too much of
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: a people please or my friend?
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: I think that's right.
• 11:41
  Speaker 4: And I don't think I would have ever called myself that,
• 11:43
  Speaker 4: but I think that's it. And so I think that
• 11:45
  Speaker 4: I was very, very lucky to have the husband that
• 11:47
  Speaker 4: I did, and that he was in the room with
• 11:49
  Speaker 4: me that moment and took my hand and we got
• 11:51
  Speaker 4: the heck out and we never came back.
• 12:01
  Speaker 5: Hi.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: I'm Ben Sas and I'm Chris Stirewalt. And this is
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: not dead yet. We're all dying, but some of us
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: have been brought face to face with that reality.
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: However long each of us have to do it though.
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: We all want to live a good life.
• 12:15
  Speaker 5: One with meaning, love and joy, and our guests are
• 12:18
  Speaker 5: here to help us do exactly that. Now available for
• 12:21
  Speaker 5: download and streaming at ricochet dot com. Ricochet Yeah, Join
• 12:26
  Speaker 5: the conversation.
• 12:38
  Speaker 3: All right, yeah, so you left that you were living
• 12:41
  Speaker 3: in DC right at the time. Okay, so you left
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: and you left that practice, and then what was your
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: next step? What did you do next?
• 12:49
  Speaker 4: Well, we decided to We talked to some older friends
• 12:53
  Speaker 4: who had adopted, and they sort of connected us with
• 12:57
  Speaker 4: some people and everyone was, you know, they and some
• 12:59
  Speaker 4: other other people were sort of saying, listen, it takes
• 13:02
  Speaker 4: a long time if you think you're open to it.
• 13:04
  Speaker 4: And we were always open to it. In fact, I
• 13:06
  Speaker 4: remember having kind of mixed emotions about it because I
• 13:08
  Speaker 4: was we were so excited about the idea of adoption
• 13:11
  Speaker 4: even when we were and it wasn't like the kind
• 13:13
  Speaker 4: of thing where people say like, oh, I'm going to
• 13:16
  Speaker 4: have some biological babies and then we really want to adopt,
• 13:19
  Speaker 4: we want to share our love whatever. It was just
• 13:20
  Speaker 4: sort of, I don't know, there were just babies out
• 13:22
  Speaker 4: there that needed parents, and I was ready to step
• 13:24
  Speaker 4: in like it just I just was suited for it,
• 13:27
  Speaker 4: you know, and so that wasn't a big deal. So
• 13:30
  Speaker 4: we just started doing that and then thought, okay, well
• 13:33
  Speaker 4: we'll you know, we'll see, we'll get going. You have
• 13:37
  Speaker 4: to learn a whole to see somebody with the practice
• 13:39
  Speaker 4: is NAPRO technology, which is like a form of reproductive
• 13:43
  Speaker 4: restorative medicine. You have to learn their method of fertility tracking,
• 13:48
  Speaker 4: taught by one of their licensed practitioners.
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: And these pause before we get into napro. So you're
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: in the adoption process, in the adoption process, so you
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: didn't you didn't give up home of having a baby,
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: but you also started that ball with the adoption. Yeah,
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: And normally that ball takes a very long time.
• 14:08
  Speaker 4: To roll right, which is why people said start it now,
• 14:12
  Speaker 4: because when you're ready, I think what people were sort
• 14:14
  Speaker 4: of thinking, like, whenever you've exhausted all your fertility options,
• 14:18
  Speaker 4: you want to be ready to go with adoption. But
• 14:20
  Speaker 4: for us, it was sort of like, we just want
• 14:23
  Speaker 4: to do whatever it takes to get the baby ball
• 14:25
  Speaker 4: rolling right, you know, whether it's pursuing the fertility stuff
• 14:29
  Speaker 4: or pursuing adoption.
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: One thing that I really liked about how you phrased
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: it in the book was that like, the adoption wasn't
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: the consolation prize, right, Like, you didn't you didn't give
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: up and then go to Plan B, Like adoption wasn't
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: Plan B for you now? And I liked I liked
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: that you made that clear that like we were we
• 14:49
  Speaker 3: were having a baby one way or the other, and
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: like it didn't preclude you still continuing on this road
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: of conceiving, but like you wanted to.
• 15:00
  Speaker 4: Yeah, so I think if we had gotten pregnant, I
• 15:04
  Speaker 4: don't think we would have pursued adoption, which is a
• 15:07
  Speaker 4: complicated thing when I'm like, it wasn't a plan B,
• 15:10
  Speaker 4: but at this seemed But I think really that's because
• 15:14
  Speaker 4: that's just a really straightforward way of having kids. You know, right,
• 15:19
  Speaker 4: it's you and your husband's you get together and you
• 15:21
  Speaker 4: have a baby, and it's just you know, it's you guys,
• 15:24
  Speaker 4: and it's not a lot of people, and it's not
• 15:26
  Speaker 4: money lawyers.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: You don't have to involve lawyers. Yeah, hopefully, right idea.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: And I think so that's really what I mean that that.
• 15:39
  Speaker 4: For us was the distinguishing thing, not sort of like
• 15:42
  Speaker 4: our own biological stuff or this way or that way.
• 15:46
  Speaker 4: It was mostly like that would be a straightforward way
• 15:48
  Speaker 4: to do it. And in fact, that's one of the
• 15:51
  Speaker 4: things I really envy about people who don't have any
• 15:53
  Speaker 4: fertility problems, is that you can just decide to, you know,
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: have sex during your fertile period and then have a baby,
• 16:00
  Speaker 4: like that's all it takes. Like that seems like so amazing,
• 16:03
  Speaker 4: Like you's like it's like door dash.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: I mean it's not. It's not.
• 16:06
  Speaker 4: I don't mean to reduce it to that, but do
• 16:07
  Speaker 4: you know what I mean, just like ye have to
• 16:10
  Speaker 4: do any like criminal background checks.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: Now you don't have to. You don't.
• 16:15
  Speaker 4: People don't have to certify that you have like an
• 16:17
  Speaker 4: escape ladder from your window, you know, like all these
• 16:20
  Speaker 4: just like little things you just I mean, we're just, yeah,
• 16:24
  Speaker 4: just do the thing.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: Just do the thing.
• 16:25
  Speaker 4: But yeah, so we were just we were just ready.
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: It wasn't And again it's one of those things where
• 16:29
  Speaker 4: I didn't think about it at the time, but looking like,
• 16:31
  Speaker 4: it just wasn't. It wasn't a big hurdle for us.
• 16:34
  Speaker 4: And maybe also it didn't feel like a hurdle because
• 16:37
  Speaker 4: we weren't giving up on conceiving. So maybe because they
• 16:41
  Speaker 4: went together, it was right easier to swallowed. We just
• 16:44
  Speaker 4: wanted to be parents so much, we wanted to be
• 16:46
  Speaker 4: parents together.
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so we did that.
• 16:49
  Speaker 4: And it didn't it didn't take a long time. It
• 16:52
  Speaker 4: turned out we hadn't actually even found an instructor in
• 16:56
  Speaker 4: the new fertility tracking method in order to do all
• 16:59
  Speaker 4: that stuff. Yet, because once we met with the agency,
• 17:04
  Speaker 4: we had to fast track our home study because six
• 17:07
  Speaker 4: weeks later our son was born.
• 17:10
  Speaker 3: Wild wow, So you went from like opening your mind
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: to adoption to having a baby two months later basically.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, wow, yeah that is fast. It was really fast. Yeah,
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: we were. I mean it's amazing though.
• 17:25
  Speaker 4: You really do realize even though it's really fun to
• 17:27
  Speaker 4: buy baby stuff, like you really don't need anything.
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: It's true we're newborn, you know.
• 17:33
  Speaker 4: Yeah, although I mean I remember thinking that every time,
• 17:35
  Speaker 4: but every time, I mean especially because I have big
• 17:37
  Speaker 4: age gaps between all of my adoptions, so it's like, oh,
• 17:40
  Speaker 4: all there's all new stuff, you know, right right, extensions
• 17:43
  Speaker 4: and like nos Freeda, like that wasn't around for my
• 17:45
  Speaker 4: first like but you know, yeah, yeah.
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: I've kind of fallen out in love with the nose Frieda.
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: So so you're in the middle of juggling a new
• 17:55
  Speaker 3: baby who has just been literally placed in your lap,
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: and you're like, oh my god, and you are starting
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: to pursue this napro Is that is that how you
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: pronounce it? Yes?
• 18:05
  Speaker 4: But we actually once we had the baby, that became
• 18:09
  Speaker 4: sort of less of a priority, and you know, you're busy.
• 18:13
  Speaker 4: And then actually about so in there, my dad gets
• 18:17
  Speaker 4: really sick and then he dies, and so we're traveling
• 18:21
  Speaker 4: back and forth. He was in Morgantown, West Virginia, so
• 18:23
  Speaker 4: that like three and a half hours from DC back
• 18:26
  Speaker 4: and forth. Also, my husband, right before Orlando, he's our
• 18:30
  Speaker 4: eldest baby was born. My husband had accepted a job
• 18:33
  Speaker 4: at Notre Dame to be a professor, and so we're
• 18:36
  Speaker 4: gearing up to move.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: So there's a lot of stuff.
• 18:40
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, So we didn't really you know, we weren't
• 18:43
  Speaker 4: doing any tracking or whatever for a while.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: When once we.
• 18:47
  Speaker 4: Came to South men Indiana, I got settled, it was
• 18:51
  Speaker 4: always on the list things to do, things to do.
• 18:53
  Speaker 4: But you know, Toddler's busy, busy. I think in those
• 18:57
  Speaker 4: days too, we were. I used to Joe that you
• 19:02
  Speaker 4: could still see like like my fingernails, like in our
• 19:05
  Speaker 4: the Harbord floors of our DuPont condo. Because I really
• 19:08
  Speaker 4: loved living in DC and I really didn't want to leave,
• 19:11
  Speaker 4: And so we traveled back a lot, and we you know,
• 19:14
  Speaker 4: we traveled, We just traveled a lot. Those first couple
• 19:16
  Speaker 4: of years and then you know, but we was in
• 19:19
  Speaker 4: those little mommy groups with the other kids, and Orlando
• 19:22
  Speaker 4: was two and you started seeing the other two year
• 19:24
  Speaker 4: olds with little brothers and sisters, and we're just like, yeah, okay,
• 19:28
  Speaker 4: it's time. And so we got going with the napro technology.
• 19:32
  Speaker 4: I had to learn the method by phone. You have
• 19:34
  Speaker 4: to take quizzes.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Wow, it's like a thing. It's a whole thing.
• 19:39
  Speaker 4: And then once you've got three good months of charts
• 19:41
  Speaker 4: and you've done some blood work which you have drawn
• 19:44
  Speaker 4: where you live. And then nowadays, like we have a
• 19:46
  Speaker 4: whole naprotechnology practice in South Bend now and I think
• 19:49
  Speaker 4: they're all over the place now, But in these days,
• 19:51
  Speaker 4: you really did have to find the doctor and like
• 19:53
  Speaker 4: so I had to go to Nebraska once I finally
• 19:56
  Speaker 4: got the appointment. So we that he was three by
• 20:02
  Speaker 4: men and I was I thah, I just turned thirty three.
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: Do you have any regrets of you know, those three
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: years that you didn't you didn't jump on the napro
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: thing sooner? You just kind of feel like it all worked.
• 20:14
  Speaker 4: Out little, I mean a little sometimes because it's uh,
• 20:19
  Speaker 4: you know, I think obviously if there's something wrong, it's
• 20:21
  Speaker 4: gonna be easier to fix some more time to fix it, right,
• 20:24
  Speaker 4: I mean a little, but not it's not overwhelming.
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: How how successful is napro generally? Like I know that
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: he not to not to catapult your your narrative, but
• 20:37
  Speaker 3: he gave you a seventy five percent chance right of success?
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 20:40
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it looked really good and it kind of like
• 20:42
  Speaker 4: confirmed like what we had always sort of again felt
• 20:45
  Speaker 4: like whatever, Yeah, yeah, things are doing.
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: How how successful like was that? You don't you don't
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: seem to think it was snake oil what you were sold?
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: It just didn't work out right.
• 20:57
  Speaker 4: Just didn't work out. And maybe that's because we didn't
• 21:01
  Speaker 4: do it long enough. I do know that I know
• 21:04
  Speaker 4: women that are more like so I'm pretty firmly gen ic.
• 21:07
  Speaker 4: Some women that are more like millennial gen z who
• 21:10
  Speaker 4: like really stuck with that kind of live with the
• 21:12
  Speaker 4: Napro stuff for a long time, like years like four
• 21:15
  Speaker 4: or five, six even up to like seven or eight years. Wow,
• 21:18
  Speaker 4: And I know, I don't know if I could have
• 21:20
  Speaker 4: done it, but they got pregnant.
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: So okay, explain, like how how does it work? Like?
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: What is this napro thing that magically is is helping
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: these women even after that many years, Because I feel like,
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: if I'm multiplying seven by twelve, that's a lot of
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: months that a lot like what is magically changing that
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: this technology is able to get them at like six
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: seven years to suddenly change this the trajectory of what
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: they had been doing for seventy eighty cycles.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really good question.
• 21:55
  Speaker 4: And again a lot of my info is a little
• 21:57
  Speaker 4: bit outdated because it's been sixteen years, I think seventeen
• 22:02
  Speaker 4: maybe years since I've been a patient. I mean my
• 22:04
  Speaker 4: gone to collogist now is that. But I'm fifty, So
• 22:07
  Speaker 4: we don't do any charting or anything, although people who
• 22:10
  Speaker 4: people who are died in the role enthusiasts for the
• 22:13
  Speaker 4: Creighton model would probably still be tracking. But interesting, I
• 22:17
  Speaker 4: enjoy the ethos of the nephro technology physician rather than
• 22:20
  Speaker 4: in practice. So I think, well, I think it depends
• 22:24
  Speaker 4: on what your diagnosis is, if you whether you have
• 22:27
  Speaker 4: PCOS or really bad end ofmetriosis or.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: And yours was just unexplained, right like you have anything,
• 22:35
  Speaker 3: and I.
• 22:35
  Speaker 4: Think now it might have I think unexplained isn't given
• 22:39
  Speaker 4: as often now as a diagnosis. I think there's more
• 22:42
  Speaker 4: diagnostic tools. Again, I just think that they worked so
• 22:45
  Speaker 4: hard with the newer technology. I think they have, you know,
• 22:49
  Speaker 4: hormone balancing techniques that are more advanced than they were
• 22:52
  Speaker 4: when I first saw them. I think they do some
• 22:55
  Speaker 4: more more surgical things. I think like there's like some
• 22:58
  Speaker 4: scraping that could happen, like in the uterus that can
• 23:01
  Speaker 4: you make a more hospitable environment if you've got built up.
• 23:04
  Speaker 4: I think maybe things move faster.
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it makes sense. I mean if you if you
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: had to do all this, you know, learning on the
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: phone and all of those things, all that takes time.
• 23:12
  Speaker 4: It takes time. Yeah, And so I think I think too.
• 23:16
  Speaker 4: I mean I think the rates I think they I
• 23:18
  Speaker 4: mean I see different things, but I think that success
• 23:21
  Speaker 4: rates can rival, if not surpass, some of the IVF
• 23:24
  Speaker 4: success rates.
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 23:26
  Speaker 4: But again I think too. It's important to note that
• 23:29
  Speaker 4: I think a lot of women using nepotechnology are young.
• 23:34
  Speaker 3: Young, very highly educated, yes, rather.
• 23:37
  Speaker 4: Than people who are at forty two all is trying
• 23:41
  Speaker 4: to get pregnant and move right into IDF.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: Whereas even IDF isn't that successful when you're.
• 23:45
  Speaker 4: That age, right, right, So I think probably some apples
• 23:49
  Speaker 4: and oranges. Again, I'm just I'm just the lady who
• 23:52
  Speaker 4: tried to get pregnant. You know, I'm not an expert
• 23:54
  Speaker 4: and wrote.
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: A book about it.
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: It's not like you're at it.
• 23:56
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know it's I do think
• 23:59
  Speaker 4: I do think that people are having a lot more success.
• 24:02
  Speaker 4: I do remember back in the day that their real
• 24:06
  Speaker 4: strong point was being able to keep you pregnant. So
• 24:09
  Speaker 4: people who had had recurrent miscarriages were able to if
• 24:13
  Speaker 4: you could get pregnant, they could help you stay pregnant,
• 24:15
  Speaker 4: like I have our dear friends here their two last
• 24:19
  Speaker 4: living children, or doctor Hilter's success stories. Wow, yeah, because
• 24:23
  Speaker 4: they had repeated miscarriages.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: Hi, this is a young Culter.
• 24:34
  Speaker 3: Welcome to my Ricochet podcast.
• 24:37
  Speaker 4: And Culter every week on Ricochet, your home to center
• 24:41
  Speaker 4: right conversation.
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: Hey, that was pretty good. I guess this is probably
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: a question for a napro expert. But in Judaism there's
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: like a very very different perspective on IVF. It's like, yeah,
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: I think the most fundamental differences I would say, between
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: the two faiths, and it's to the point where like
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: there are fundraisers for IVF They're like, we have a
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: big fundraiser to help families have children. Then it's called
• 25:12
  Speaker 3: baneo Lam and they fund IVF. So very different perspective
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: Israel too, Like there's a lot of like yeah, stay
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: funded with.
• 25:20
  Speaker 4: Yeah, because I read there's in the Washington Post a
• 25:23
  Speaker 4: woman who kind of chronicled her IVF journey and she
• 25:26
  Speaker 4: and her husband, I think, actually went to Israel to
• 25:28
  Speaker 4: get it done.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: People. I have friend natural cycles and all kinds of stuff.
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it was funny. I have friends who moved
• 25:35
  Speaker 3: there for free IVF and did it for years and
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: were did not have success getting pregnant, and so they
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: moved back to America, bought a giant dog and got
• 25:47
  Speaker 3: pregnant that month.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: And they were like, oh no, now we live in
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: Washington Heights with a giant dog. We thought that we
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: were closing the door. So that that's another strata talk
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: to about. Or buy a giant dog and move to
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: an apartment in New York City.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: That I'll make sure I put that in a note
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: in my next book.
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: Make it as inconvenient as humanly possible, you can see,
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: and then maybe maybe that can work. I have I
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: have a friend who they did. They did IVF, but
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: because there was like a chromosotal mismatch between her and
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: her husband and so they were they screened the egg
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: and the sperm to make sure that they would be
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: a match before they and so I wonder, and I
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: think I'm just thinking out loud for a moment, there's
• 26:37
  Speaker 3: probably not a napro way to do that right like
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: you would just No.
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: I do think that they could.
• 26:44
  Speaker 4: You know, there was a time when it was considered
• 26:47
  Speaker 4: This isn't exactly the same thing, it's not as in depth,
• 26:50
  Speaker 4: but there was I think a time when doing like
• 26:53
  Speaker 4: a post coital exam was pretty normal in fertility treatments,
• 26:58
  Speaker 4: like sort of seeing how hospitable your environment was, like
• 27:02
  Speaker 4: what environment.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: Was after you had sex.
• 27:05
  Speaker 4: But then I think they kind of they weren't seeing
• 27:06
  Speaker 4: a lot of things like that. But I feel like
• 27:08
  Speaker 4: anecdotally I've heard that that sort of back as part
• 27:11
  Speaker 4: of the culture of like sort of the resort of
• 27:15
  Speaker 4: reproductive medicine making sure that your pH values and you know,
• 27:19
  Speaker 4: are welcoming to spur.
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: That's one thing that I really like about this whole
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: movement among more educated women, I think is that like
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: throwing IVF as the first line of attack. Infertility is
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: often a symptom of something else going on. And instead
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: of like throwing women on tons of hormones and injections
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: and surgical procedure and all these things, doesn't it make
• 27:46
  Speaker 3: sense to try to figure out what's going on just
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: outside of infertility, Like, if there's something out of the norm,
• 27:53
  Speaker 3: that person should be made aware.
• 27:55
  Speaker 4: That a healthy woman should be able to get pregnant. Yeah,
• 27:58
  Speaker 4: And I think starting from there, it's like then because
• 28:01
  Speaker 4: it's I mean, and that's why I think that even
• 28:03
  Speaker 4: though you know, it doesn't always work. I have other
• 28:06
  Speaker 4: friends who also saw it actually doctor Hilger's and didn't
• 28:10
  Speaker 4: work for them either. It is a gift to be
• 28:13
  Speaker 4: treated that way. We just want to make you healthier,
• 28:16
  Speaker 4: and you know, obviously we're kind of laser focused on
• 28:19
  Speaker 4: an end result, but that's not all of it.
• 28:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, okay, So let's let's get back into your story.
• 28:26
  Speaker 3: So you are you start after you're so Orlando is
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: three and you start, you start the napro and you're
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: doing all of the things. How long did you stay
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: on the napro and were you also pursuing another adoption
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: at the same time.
• 28:41
  Speaker 4: We were not pursuing another adoption. We were just doing
• 28:45
  Speaker 4: the napro, which I think we did for about eighteen
• 28:50
  Speaker 4: months maybe okay, it was three. And then I know,
• 28:55
  Speaker 4: I feel like I need to have like a laminated timeline.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: Because you know, I get exactly it's all.
• 29:01
  Speaker 4: It's a long ago now about I think eighteen months
• 29:03
  Speaker 4: to two years we did it, and then my husband
• 29:07
  Speaker 4: was going to teach in London first semester, so we
• 29:09
  Speaker 4: decided to take a break, which is great because I
• 29:12
  Speaker 4: think I've seen some I follow a bunch of like
• 29:15
  Speaker 4: infertility accounts. One really good one, I'll plug her right
• 29:19
  Speaker 4: here is called White Lotus Blooming. A woman named Mary Bruno,
• 29:24
  Speaker 4: and she's a napro instructor, but she's also an infertile
• 29:28
  Speaker 4: person and she's written some really great books. So Mary Bruno,
• 29:31
  Speaker 4: look her up if you're interested, because she's young and
• 29:33
  Speaker 4: she's like with it, she's on top of things. But
• 29:35
  Speaker 4: she has a really good social media feed. And I
• 29:38
  Speaker 4: think it was her just said, like you, if you
• 29:41
  Speaker 4: feel like you need a break, take a break. But
• 29:44
  Speaker 4: it's so hard to let yourself do that because, like
• 29:46
  Speaker 4: we were talking about, like the regrets for wasting those
• 29:48
  Speaker 4: three years or no. Because if you really are honest
• 29:52
  Speaker 4: and understand your biological reality, whether you're getting medical attention
• 29:56
  Speaker 4: for that or not, whether that's you know, natural stuff
• 30:00
  Speaker 4: or that's more in basis of whether that's IVF, there's
• 30:02
  Speaker 4: only there's a finite number of years and the finite
• 30:05
  Speaker 4: number of eggs that you're dealing with, and so it
• 30:08
  Speaker 4: really is hard to let yourself take a break.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: But this sort of was forced upon us.
• 30:11
  Speaker 4: And again we're in Indiana, my doctor was in Nebraska.
• 30:14
  Speaker 4: That already seemed kind of crazy when you're dealing with
• 30:17
  Speaker 4: and I haven't been I have been very lucky. I
• 30:19
  Speaker 4: haven't had any like broken bones or major surgeries ever,
• 30:23
  Speaker 4: or any chronic illnesses, and so syringes and medicine all
• 30:27
  Speaker 4: the time was like a different way.
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: To live than I had really used to.
• 30:31
  Speaker 4: Doing that from far away just seemed weird, and being
• 30:33
  Speaker 4: in charge of it seemed weird. And then take it
• 30:36
  Speaker 4: across the ocean seemed extra weird. And so it just
• 30:39
  Speaker 4: made sense like, let's just take these six months off
• 30:41
  Speaker 4: and then we'll hit the b And you know, you
• 30:43
  Speaker 4: kind of think, too, oh, maybe it's like when you
• 30:46
  Speaker 4: tell yourself you should take a break from Keto and
• 30:49
  Speaker 4: eat some carbs, and then Keto will be so much better,
• 30:52
  Speaker 4: you know, the next time, or whatever.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: I think.
• 30:53
  Speaker 4: You know, I know all the you know, the weird
• 30:55
  Speaker 4: little bargains you make in your head, thinking like Okay,
• 30:58
  Speaker 4: I'll give my ovaries and everybody break and then we'll
• 31:01
  Speaker 4: get back back to it.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: And I was only going to be.
• 31:05
  Speaker 4: Thirty five when I would have started again, so you know,
• 31:09
  Speaker 4: you know, you think it's you know again, thirty five
• 31:11
  Speaker 4: is major in fertility world, but in popular culture, thirty
• 31:14
  Speaker 4: five is pretty young.
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: It seems like in this world people are talking about
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: infertility more. But in my opinion, and my opinion alone,
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: I think women are trying later. Like they start trying
• 31:26
  Speaker 3: at thirty five, and you can say with total confidence,
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: we gave it a college try. We went for over
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: ten years. But when people start trying at thirty five,
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: I think that they have a false sense of what
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: their biological clock is because they see Janet Jackson had
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: a baby at what fifty fifty halle Berry, and like,
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: what frustrates me about it is when like halle Berry
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: has didn't she have a baby also in her late forties?
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: I think so Hillary well, she had two wins in
• 32:00
  Speaker 3: her late like forty nine. I think Hillary swank that's it.
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah she did, yeah.
• 32:07
  Speaker 3: Very very late. And what frustrates me about all of
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: these stories is that they are never honest about what
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: they did and so exactly exactly, and so women, and
• 32:20
  Speaker 3: I've had people say this to me. Women will say, well,
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: I'm not in a rush. I want to do all
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: the things because I'm only thirty seven and I have
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: thirteen more years according to the Janet Jackson clock. And
• 32:34
  Speaker 3: I'm like, Janet Jackson's clock isn't real. None of that
• 32:37
  Speaker 3: is real.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: None of it's real.
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: And so I think I think also a frustration that
• 32:43
  Speaker 3: I have with the infertility conversation is just like ignoring
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: biological reality and not acknowledging the not the impact of IVF,
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: but how much people are using IVF and the tradeoffs
• 32:59
  Speaker 3: that they're making with donor eggs, with donor sperm, all
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: of those things. And then all the women like Jennifer
• 33:05
  Speaker 3: Aniston who didn't work for it, had all the money,
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: all the things.
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I.
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: Think that there is absolutely zero conversation. And I'm saying
• 33:14
  Speaker 3: this as someone who's not against IBF. By the way. Yeah,
• 33:17
  Speaker 3: but I think there's zero conversation about the impact of
• 33:21
  Speaker 3: all of those hormones on cancer rates on help. Yeah,
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: Like where are those studies? Because to me, I mean
• 33:30
  Speaker 3: it's the same with the birth control pill. What are like,
• 33:34
  Speaker 3: what are the impacts? Because you can't you can't claim
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: that there's no impact whatsoever flooding a woman's body with
• 33:41
  Speaker 3: hormones like that. There has to be.
• 33:43
  Speaker 4: There has to be, because I mean that's not just
• 33:45
  Speaker 4: an urban myth, right that it has affected like yeah,
• 33:48
  Speaker 4: fish and stuff like hormones in the waters.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: Right, Yeah. And I think too, Like, I mean we.
• 33:53
  Speaker 4: Our last adoption, I was forty six, forty seven, and
• 34:00
  Speaker 4: I can just tell you ovaries, an egg health and
• 34:03
  Speaker 4: stuff aside. Being a mom in your late forties to
• 34:06
  Speaker 4: a toddler is really.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: Something I can't imagine.
• 34:12
  Speaker 4: No, I mean, I feel like we're like, we've got
• 34:15
  Speaker 4: to send him to preschool next year because we're too old.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: We need somebody else.
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: That makes me feel better because we're sending our I'm
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: thirty nine for another one and a half weeks. Yeah,
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: and we're sending our three year old to preschool next
• 34:34
  Speaker 3: year because me and my husband are like we're so tired.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: So tired, so much.
• 34:38
  Speaker 4: I know you played all the games and they're so
• 34:41
  Speaker 4: I mean, I hate it, but they're a little bit boring.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, And I feel very torn because I see
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: I have this wonderful feature on my iPhone that I
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: can't tell you how to resurrect, so no one. Everyone's
• 34:56
  Speaker 3: gonna have to chat you bet to figure it out.
• 34:58
  Speaker 3: But it wrote it hates old pictures on your phone.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, my teen, Well he's an teen.
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: Driamh.
• 35:04
  Speaker 4: We just turned twenty one. But my eldest did that
• 35:06
  Speaker 4: from my phone. But I also don't know how to
• 35:07
  Speaker 4: do it.
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: I love it.
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: I don't know how to do it, but like it
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: shows baby pictures of my third and my and it
• 35:14
  Speaker 3: changes every hour, and so it's making me really nostalgic
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: because I'm like, oh my god, that was like fifteen
• 35:20
  Speaker 3: minutes ago, but now that child that was in diapers
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: is now like doing the area of a trapezoid on
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: my couch right now. And so I'm looking at my
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: youngest and I'm like, you're three, and this goes so
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: fast and you're so cute, but I'm also so tired.
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: Same same.
• 35:38
  Speaker 4: I keep thinking, like what gift is that it is
• 35:40
  Speaker 4: that I get to do this one more time, you know,
• 35:43
  Speaker 4: and enjoy it. Because he's eleven years younger than my twins,
• 35:48
  Speaker 4: and so I mean, I just he's our bonus baby
• 35:52
  Speaker 4: in so many ways.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: And he's so cute and.
• 35:54
  Speaker 4: He's so sweet and just all those little things that
• 35:57
  Speaker 4: you get, like the curling up in bed with you
• 35:59
  Speaker 4: in the morning, and the sweet little games and discovering
• 36:02
  Speaker 4: things and you know, figuring out how to say like, oh,
• 36:06
  Speaker 4: he was so excited that he finally could get congratulations
• 36:09
  Speaker 4: out of his mouth without like, with people actually understanding
• 36:11
  Speaker 4: what he was saying.
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: And he was so congratulations is real, right, and he
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: clapped congratulations.
• 36:18
  Speaker 4: He's just so happy and it's like all these little,
• 36:20
  Speaker 4: sweet little things at the same time. The reality is
• 36:26
  Speaker 4: fifty This is how old I am. Now, it's really
• 36:28
  Speaker 4: old to have a toddler. I mean my friends have grandchildren.
• 36:32
  Speaker 5: Wow.
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean they're older friends, but you know.
• 36:34
  Speaker 3: Right right right, they're so contemporary doing that.
• 36:38
  Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean my eldest is twenty one. I
• 36:41
  Speaker 4: hopefully it won't be too long before he delivers on that.
• 36:44
  Speaker 4: But it's something that he's you know, it's to do
• 36:49
  Speaker 4: that to your to go through that pregnancy or whatever
• 36:51
  Speaker 4: it took to get to that pregnancy Janna Jackson. And
• 36:54
  Speaker 4: then but I guess she also has like probably eighteen nannies.
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: I'm sure she got.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah that's different.
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know, Okay, so you go to London. Yeah,
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: you say, let's take a break. You came back. Did
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: you ever did you unpause or you just kind of said,
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: this is this the end of the line.
• 37:10
  Speaker 4: We were getting ready to come home, and I just
• 37:13
  Speaker 4: happened to mention to Carter, my husband, I should.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: Probably because I think he had a couple other things
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: to do.
• 37:20
  Speaker 4: My son and I were going to go home first,
• 37:21
  Speaker 4: and I said, I'll get back and I'll contact doctor
• 37:23
  Speaker 4: Hildre's office let him know we're back, get going again.
• 37:27
  Speaker 4: Maybe I have to do like another round of based
• 37:28
  Speaker 4: blood work or whatever. And he just was kind of like,
• 37:32
  Speaker 4: you know, I don't know, maybe we don't you know.
• 37:35
  Speaker 4: And it's funny because and I forget this part. And
• 37:37
  Speaker 4: I'm glad that this is one reason why I wrote
• 37:40
  Speaker 4: this book, because even I mean, memories change, I mean
• 37:43
  Speaker 4: it's the nature of memory, but just remembering little things
• 37:47
  Speaker 4: like the six months we were there, which you know
• 37:50
  Speaker 4: is not very long. Twice people contacted us, like people
• 37:56
  Speaker 4: from home that they knew somebody who knew somebody who
• 37:59
  Speaker 4: knew somebody that kind of thing, who was experiencing like
• 38:02
  Speaker 4: an unplanned pregnancy and was thinking about placing for adoption,
• 38:05
  Speaker 4: and so, you know, word of mouth, they're like, oh,
• 38:08
  Speaker 4: we know people who might be interested in that, and
• 38:10
  Speaker 4: so twice and we said yes both times without even hesitating.
• 38:14
  Speaker 4: Neither of them panned out. And it's funny because they
• 38:17
  Speaker 4: would have been born around like within a month.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: Of each other.
• 38:20
  Speaker 4: And then of course we get home and then seven
• 38:23
  Speaker 4: eight months later we adopt twins who I know, h
• 38:27
  Speaker 4: forty eight hours about notice?
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's.
• 38:31
  Speaker 3: Uh, it just was that, how do you get forty
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: eight hours notice? Explain this to me.
• 38:38
  Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, we had turned so we just for the
• 38:41
  Speaker 4: listeners out there, we did all private newborn adoptions, which
• 38:46
  Speaker 4: is basically, you know, you a pregnant person, typically a
• 38:50
  Speaker 4: pregnant woman, goes to the agency and looks at a
• 38:54
  Speaker 4: number of profiles, sure like sort of picture books, and
• 38:59
  Speaker 4: you write about your family and your marriage and you
• 39:02
  Speaker 4: know your plans for the future, and they choose and
• 39:05
  Speaker 4: then you know, they interview to views and as they
• 39:07
  Speaker 4: meet you in persons and this top on the phone.
• 39:09
  Speaker 4: Sometimes they don't want to it's really all in their
• 39:11
  Speaker 4: court what they want to do. But then they choose
• 39:12
  Speaker 4: the family. So we had done all of them. As
• 39:16
  Speaker 4: soon as we got back to South Bend, we started
• 39:19
  Speaker 4: with the home study again and we did all the
• 39:21
  Speaker 4: background checks and this and that, contacted the agency, set
• 39:25
  Speaker 4: up our profile, and once everything was done and ready,
• 39:29
  Speaker 4: they called us and said, okay, we just got back
• 39:31
  Speaker 4: your last report.
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: This and this is good. This is good. We'll let
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: you know sort of.
• 39:36
  Speaker 4: They give you like a report every month about like,
• 39:38
  Speaker 4: you know, who's looked at your profile? What's you know,
• 39:40
  Speaker 4: what's going on right? Oh, by the way, there's a
• 39:43
  Speaker 4: woman who's expecting twins. At the end of the month.
• 39:46
  Speaker 4: We think she might like your family. Do you mind
• 39:49
  Speaker 4: if we show her your profile? And we're like, great,
• 39:52
  Speaker 4: that sounds great, thinking like, oh, if we're even in
• 39:55
  Speaker 4: the mix this early on, hopefully you know, we'll get
• 39:58
  Speaker 4: matched and have a baby this year. Next day they
• 40:02
  Speaker 4: called back, she wants to talk to you on the phone. Okay,
• 40:06
  Speaker 4: you talked to her on the phone. She's like, I
• 40:08
  Speaker 4: want it. I want it to be you guys, but
• 40:09
  Speaker 4: I'd really like to meet in person. Luckily she wasn't.
• 40:13
  Speaker 4: She was only a few hours away, so we were able
• 40:15
  Speaker 4: to meet her. We were going to take her and
• 40:17
  Speaker 4: her mother out to lunch. We were going to meet
• 40:19
  Speaker 4: them after, you know, one of the last checks before
• 40:23
  Speaker 4: the babies were going to be born. And we got
• 40:26
  Speaker 4: there and her blood pressure was up. They had admitted her,
• 40:29
  Speaker 4: and before I knew it, they were like, we're going
• 40:31
  Speaker 4: to take the babies out tonight. And she just turned
• 40:33
  Speaker 4: to me and said, do you want to come in
• 40:36
  Speaker 4: the room with me in the you know, delivery surgical room.
• 40:39
  Speaker 4: They were born by vice section, and there there we were.
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: Wow, that's incredibly generous of her to have a stranger
• 40:47
  Speaker 3: in that very vulnerable Yeah.
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it was.
• 40:51
  Speaker 4: It's really it's a really pretty intense experience, that whole thing.
• 40:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, do you have any intact with any of
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: the birth mothers or was that sort of part of
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: because I know that it really can vary.
• 41:04
  Speaker 4: It can really vary, and so it's kind of the
• 41:07
  Speaker 4: way like ABD can mean anything like POSTCRAD, you know,
• 41:11
  Speaker 4: different levels of having completed dissertation, open adoptions, the same way, right,
• 41:16
  Speaker 4: Some people just share pictures. Some people like go on
• 41:18
  Speaker 4: vacations together.
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: Wow. Yeah, I mean, oh yeah, that to me would
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: be a little that's that's like divorced couples that go
• 41:27
  Speaker 3: on vacation together. I'm like, oh yeah, I do that.
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 41:31
  Speaker 4: So it's you know, it's a lot. I think it's
• 41:33
  Speaker 4: just it depends on the preferences of you know, yeah
• 41:36
  Speaker 4: sing to the birth families.
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: So we've had a variety of different things.
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: That's so interesting. How did you? I mean, I feel
• 41:44
  Speaker 3: like your book is so much of a like roadmap
• 41:48
  Speaker 3: of sorts of people, like this was this is the
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: map that I chose, and this is what it looks like.
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: And if you want to follow a map, you know,
• 41:54
  Speaker 3: this is an example. And that's something that I really
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: enjoy reading. I like reading biographies because it's so interesting
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: just see the different paths that people take. How would
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: you recommend people, because I'm sure you still counsel people
• 42:08
  Speaker 3: all the time who are going down this road. How
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: if you are Catholic and you are really faithful, what
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: does this path look like in twenty twenty six? Like,
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: what would you tell someone if they were like I
• 42:19
  Speaker 3: want to pursue adoption at the same time as like,
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: I mean, obviously I think it sounds like you would
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: recommend napos still, right.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so.
• 42:27
  Speaker 4: I think in general, I mean, I think I've seen
• 42:30
  Speaker 4: a big I mean, I feel like babysitters come through
• 42:33
  Speaker 4: the house that are doing it like in college or
• 42:35
  Speaker 4: already tracking their cycles.
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: And they're just doing it just to be aware of
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: by awareness.
• 42:41
  Speaker 4: Yeah, like they have PMS, they can, you know, you can.
• 42:44
  Speaker 4: I think people get treated with hormones for that, like
• 42:47
  Speaker 4: little progesterone supplementation.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: I mean, think the.
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: Loss instead of throwing you on the birth control pill.
• 42:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly exactly where pcos that kind of thing. So
• 42:57
  Speaker 4: I think that that's a real trend. And I think
• 42:59
  Speaker 4: we've seen all with these sort of young people and
• 43:01
  Speaker 4: the apps and everything. People are doing this natural thing,
• 43:04
  Speaker 4: Catholic or not. So that's a pretty normal thing. People
• 43:07
  Speaker 4: are throwing away the pill. I mean, I feel like
• 43:08
  Speaker 4: I see another headline about.
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: That every day.
• 43:10
  Speaker 4: Yes, yes, so I think if you're already doing that, great,
• 43:13
  Speaker 4: If you're not, I think it's important to start that
• 43:15
  Speaker 4: or any sort of there's different flavors of the you know,
• 43:18
  Speaker 4: I think you can use the different tracking models. There's
• 43:21
  Speaker 4: like regular NFP, there's billings, there's I don't even know,
• 43:26
  Speaker 4: there's a lot. Yeah, and I think you know that.
• 43:30
  Speaker 4: And then you see a doctor who I mean, I
• 43:34
  Speaker 4: think it's good if you're Catholic. It's really great to
• 43:36
  Speaker 4: see a Catholic doctor because that's easy. It really makes
• 43:39
  Speaker 4: your health care a lot easier. And a lot of
• 43:41
  Speaker 4: them really do specialize in this reproductive, restorative, reproductive medicine.
• 43:46
  Speaker 4: But we're talking about adoption, Army, Oh, you're talking about
• 43:48
  Speaker 4: posts at the same time.
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: Both like, what would you say if I if I
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: came to you as like a young Catholic woman who's
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: twenty three years old, Yeah, you know, you answered the
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: part A, but then would be like, so, it sounds
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: like your ball started rolling very quickly on adoption, especially
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: the first time, because you were so gosh darn appealing,
• 44:09
  Speaker 3: because you were this young couple who like, yeah.
• 44:12
  Speaker 4: And check it, like statistically speaking, you are younger, you
• 44:16
  Speaker 4: are you're going to be more appealing to birth mothers.
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: And they told us that and that's often.
• 44:20
  Speaker 3: Because I think you wrote that even yeah, and.
• 44:24
  Speaker 4: Because often young people people have babies, young often have
• 44:27
  Speaker 4: children who then also have babies young, and so I
• 44:30
  Speaker 4: think if you are in your forties, you might look
• 44:33
  Speaker 4: like a grandmother. Yeah, you a pregnant person, a pregnant woman.
• 44:38
  Speaker 4: That's a private But again, like that's I think it's
• 44:40
  Speaker 4: mostly anecdotal. I haven't, you know, But and I do
• 44:43
  Speaker 4: think again, like I think we're just physically prime to
• 44:45
  Speaker 4: be mothers then, and so I think putting it off.
• 44:49
  Speaker 4: But again, if private adoption is expensive and so, you know,
• 44:53
  Speaker 4: I need to wait until you know you've built up
• 44:55
  Speaker 4: that nest egg. I mean that was really definitely at
• 44:58
  Speaker 4: play for us the few times when we adopted that
• 45:00
  Speaker 4: you kind of have to like spend all your money
• 45:02
  Speaker 4: and then you wait again for the coffers to fill
• 45:03
  Speaker 4: up and a lot of practical stuff again, all that
• 45:06
  Speaker 4: stuff you could avoid if you could just like you know, yeah, yeah,
• 45:10
  Speaker 4: thanks me.
• 45:11
  Speaker 3: And although I will say it's also expensive, yeah so life,
• 45:15
  Speaker 3: hey for the birth and all those things.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, not as expensive.
• 45:19
  Speaker 3: I'm not discounting.
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: No, no, no, and I'm not either.
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: Hi.
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: I'm Ben SaaS and I'm Chris Stirewalt. And this is
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: not dead yet. We're all dying, but some of us
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: have been brought face to face with that reality.
• 45:39
  Speaker 3: However long each of us have to do it though.
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: We all want to live a good life.
• 45:44
  Speaker 5: One with meaning, love and joy, and our guests are
• 45:47
  Speaker 5: here to help us do exactly that. Now available for
• 45:50
  Speaker 5: download and streaming at ricochet dot com. Ricochet Yeah, join
• 45:55
  Speaker 5: the conversation.
• 46:06
  Speaker 3: You went private? So what what like? What does that
• 46:09
  Speaker 3: look like?
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: That looks like? So you sign up? You find a
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: sign up where so?
• 46:14
  Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, So there's an agency that we use and
• 46:18
  Speaker 4: they are lawyers and their.
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: An adoption agency.
• 46:21
  Speaker 4: They're built up of social workers, lawyers, sechi, family business
• 46:25
  Speaker 4: and but their license in lots of different states. You
• 46:29
  Speaker 4: work with them, they birth mothers. They advertise and birth
• 46:34
  Speaker 4: mothers find them and then you are a client.
• 46:38
  Speaker 3: Of theirs and they're matchmakers.
• 46:40
  Speaker 4: Basically they're matchmakers, yes, but then also they provide all
• 46:44
  Speaker 4: the legal stuff.
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: So you could go to one agency and they would
• 46:47
  Speaker 3: do all of that for you.
• 46:48
  Speaker 4: Yes, not not every so there are different setups. Some
• 46:51
  Speaker 4: people use like an adoption attorney and find their own
• 46:54
  Speaker 4: birth mothers. People advertise like in the Penny Saver recently,
• 46:59
  Speaker 4: I mean that was twenty years ago.
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: I don't know. It's true anymore.
• 47:02
  Speaker 4: But yeah, like I mean, I think in that movie,
• 47:04
  Speaker 4: do you know, isn't that how that worked?
• 47:06
  Speaker 3: Yes? Yes, but that was also very old and you
• 47:08
  Speaker 3: know is now a boy, So that's how that's how.
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: They Yeah, that's how old it is.
• 47:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you can have any more babies.
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: It's all over for you know.
• 47:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so I don't actually think you know, as a boy.
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: Just for the record, yeah right, yes, came around listeners.
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: Uh. Yeah, So there's certain ways I prefer our model.
• 47:28
  Speaker 4: I think having it all done in one place is
• 47:30
  Speaker 4: really helpful and good. Yeah, they're really honest with you,
• 47:34
  Speaker 4: and they're also I find that they are very even
• 47:38
  Speaker 4: though the adoptive parents are the client, they're very concerned
• 47:42
  Speaker 4: about the well being and the welfare of the young
• 47:44
  Speaker 4: women who come to them or the young couples they provide.
• 47:48
  Speaker 4: They set up them up with outside counseling or you know,
• 47:51
  Speaker 4: and they make They're very good about not being coercive,
• 47:56
  Speaker 4: which I know is a concern for.
• 47:59
  Speaker 3: So use did you use the same agency for all
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: four or all three adoptions?
• 48:03
  Speaker 4: I guess no, just the second, the second, and the third. Okay,
• 48:07
  Speaker 4: the first we were still living in DC, so we
• 48:10
  Speaker 4: used someone in Delaware. Well, I don't know why that's
• 48:15
  Speaker 4: a sow, but anyway, it was somebody, somebody on the
• 48:17
  Speaker 4: East coast.
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: Okay, I know it was.
• 48:18
  Speaker 4: Just because it was recommended to us. Yeah, and they were.
• 48:23
  Speaker 4: They were not as thorough as our new people are.
• 48:27
  Speaker 4: Our new people we recommend them to anyone.
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: So when you say thorough like, what so, I feel
• 48:33
  Speaker 3: like after I've used a contractor to renovate a room,
• 48:38
  Speaker 3: I'm like, these are all the things I wish that
• 48:40
  Speaker 3: I had known then. So what would you say to
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: someone who's doing this? And when you say thorough like,
• 48:47
  Speaker 3: what balls did they drop? That? You know, a future
• 48:50
  Speaker 3: couple can know that when they're when they're choosing an agency,
• 48:53
  Speaker 3: that these balls won't be dropped.
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 48:59
  Speaker 4: Again, it was our first time and it was twenty
• 49:01
  Speaker 4: one years ago. But I just think I think little
• 49:03
  Speaker 4: things like making sure that there's a a clear path
• 49:09
  Speaker 4: that meets everyone's needs on both the adoptive and the
• 49:13
  Speaker 4: family of origins, like like I think meeting all that
• 49:17
  Speaker 4: like me like not standing in the way of that,
• 49:20
  Speaker 4: not sort of making decisions for them, just sort of
• 49:23
  Speaker 4: being like a facilitator. Sounds too clinical, but you know what,
• 49:26
  Speaker 4: I mean like helping pave the way for that relationship.
• 49:29
  Speaker 4: And again and again it's varies. It just depends what
• 49:32
  Speaker 4: everybody wants. Just making sure that everybody knows exactly what's
• 49:35
  Speaker 4: expected and what can be expected. I mean, that's our
• 49:40
  Speaker 4: agencies that they're called Kirsh and Kersh in Indianapolis. They
• 49:43
  Speaker 4: they have like informational videos, informational meetings. You know, they
• 49:47
  Speaker 4: are just they're just very thorough and again they've been
• 49:50
  Speaker 4: in the business for a long time. I think they're
• 49:51
  Speaker 4: maybe on their third generation.
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 49:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's really a family affair. And some of the
• 49:57
  Speaker 4: people that work there. I know one woman that worked
• 50:00
  Speaker 4: with who was a social worker had been a birth
• 50:02
  Speaker 4: mother and I was also an adoptive mom.
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 50:05
  Speaker 4: And so I mean they're just bringing so much the table.
• 50:07
  Speaker 4: They have really nice dogs sort of the.
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: Sprinkles on top.
• 50:12
  Speaker 4: They're just they're just really good and they and they
• 50:15
  Speaker 4: will tell you when you know they think that somebody
• 50:18
  Speaker 4: is probably gonna parent, you know, and that's great. And
• 50:24
  Speaker 4: that's That's one of the really weird things about adoption, though,
• 50:26
  Speaker 4: is that you really do a jumble of emotions. Like
• 50:30
  Speaker 4: I always found myself like wanting to mother the birth
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: mother too. You know, it's it's a lot, it's living,
• 50:38
  Speaker 4: reliving all those things. It's very it's very strange because
• 50:42
  Speaker 4: it's a it's very female, a lot of woman stuff
• 50:48
  Speaker 4: going on. And again like you're strangers, but you're doing
• 50:51
  Speaker 4: this insanely intimate thing.
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: So yeah, I I've heard that from a friend who
• 51:00
  Speaker 3: so adopted that she felt like she really wanted to
• 51:02
  Speaker 3: mother the birth mother and and she felt like she
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: she needed someone to stop her. Basically, like she needed
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: someone who like she yeah, who would set the boundary
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: and that would make her respect it. Yeah, and that
• 51:19
  Speaker 3: was something that she said, like I really wish I
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: had someone that said you can't. You can't invite her
• 51:25
  Speaker 3: into your home. That's not a thing, sorry, because there
• 51:30
  Speaker 3: is that impulse because this is a woman in crisis.
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: Like she's gotten to this point for a reason. Yeah,
• 51:36
  Speaker 3: And they often lack guidance and mentorship and parenting and
• 51:42
  Speaker 3: it's how they've gotten to this step. And so I
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: think it's important to hear you say that, like the
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: agency that you use, like is watching out for their
• 51:51
  Speaker 3: well being, because that that's a really important thing. I've
• 51:55
  Speaker 3: also heard from a lot of friends that they have
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: had birth mothers come back to them to you know,
• 52:02
  Speaker 3: if they've had a subsequent pregnancy that was you know,
• 52:05
  Speaker 3: unplanned that they would come back to them. Was there
• 52:08
  Speaker 3: was there anything ever like that on on the table
• 52:10
  Speaker 3: for you guys or it was sort of like the
• 52:12
  Speaker 3: door closing.
• 52:13
  Speaker 4: Yeah, there were some sort of whispers that that you
• 52:17
  Speaker 4: know at one point, but nothing ever came to it,
• 52:21
  Speaker 4: came of it. But yeah, we would have definitely been
• 52:23
  Speaker 4: open to it, in fact, because well we call them
• 52:28
  Speaker 4: maybe babies. Like when you get these sort of like
• 52:30
  Speaker 4: hints of like the maybe out there again, like this
• 52:33
  Speaker 4: sort of like word of mouth babies and things. It's
• 52:36
  Speaker 4: i mean, you really think once you sort of spread
• 52:38
  Speaker 4: the word out there that you are, you have this
• 52:41
  Speaker 4: vocation to adoption like people talk. I mean, it's it's
• 52:46
  Speaker 4: we'd have like twenty kids if like everything had panned
• 52:48
  Speaker 4: out like whoa, I mean not from like you know,
• 52:51
  Speaker 4: we never.
• 52:51
  Speaker 3: Not understand, but there was whispers of.
• 52:53
  Speaker 4: Yeah, whispers, I mean maybe not twenty, but maybe like fifteen.
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: It would be a lot.
• 52:57
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 52:58
  Speaker 4: I mean we were lucky we never had you know,
• 53:01
  Speaker 4: like a failed adoption where like you get all the
• 53:02
  Speaker 4: way to the end and then it's over because that
• 53:05
  Speaker 4: I can't imagine that kind of heartbreak, especially if you've
• 53:08
  Speaker 4: dealt with infertility.
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be a lot.
• 53:12
  Speaker 4: But back to that twenty three year old, I think
• 53:14
  Speaker 4: that I think from the get go, it's if you
• 53:17
  Speaker 4: if you're twenty three year old and you kind of
• 53:19
  Speaker 4: think you suspect that you're having some fertility issues or something.
• 53:23
  Speaker 4: I think it's all it's really important to distinguish between
• 53:27
  Speaker 4: like the medical diagnosis of infertility and like that vocation
• 53:31
  Speaker 4: to adoption, which again I don't think I really saw
• 53:34
  Speaker 4: it as a vocation until we were sort of like
• 53:36
  Speaker 4: definitely in it where I had this, oh, this is
• 53:39
  Speaker 4: this is what we do, you know, our thing. But
• 53:43
  Speaker 4: so I think that that's important because I think that
• 53:45
  Speaker 4: people feel pressure to sort of they're married, the next
• 53:50
  Speaker 4: step is kids and to make everybody else feel comfortable.
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: I got to get some by hook or by crook.
• 53:57
  Speaker 4: You know, because then people know what to do with me,
• 53:58
  Speaker 4: you know people, I think the couple without kids, like
• 54:01
  Speaker 4: at church or something, sometimes people don't know where to
• 54:03
  Speaker 4: put them.
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: So that was actually a question. I'm glad that you
• 54:07
  Speaker 3: said that, because that was a question that so I
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: wrote questions in the back of the book that I
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: read and then I left it downstairs, so you know,
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: as you do. But that was actually a question that
• 54:16
  Speaker 3: I wanted to ask you because I'm a very fertile
• 54:20
  Speaker 3: person and I have lost friendships with friends who who
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: faced infertility. It was just too painful to be friends.
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: And part of that was maybe I just didn't handle
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: it well. Maybe there was different ways I could have
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: because I was I was talking to someone. Oh no,
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: I was at my best one of my best friend's
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: birthday parties over the weekend, and a woman stood up
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: and we were all sort of talking about how much
• 54:43
  Speaker 3: we loved the birthday girl. There was like sixty people there,
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: so it went on for a long time, and one
• 54:48
  Speaker 3: woman stood up and said, and my friend also is
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: an uber fertile person. And a woman stood up and said,
• 54:54
  Speaker 3: you know, I've had a lot of infertility issues. And
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: one thing that this friend did for me was call
• 55:00
  Speaker 3: me separately and just let me know. And that's something
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: that I always struggled with, like should I do that,
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: because I don't want to put that person on the
• 55:07
  Speaker 3: spot and that so I this is like my very
• 55:11
  Speaker 3: round about therapy kind of way of asking, like, how
• 55:16
  Speaker 3: how is it? How do you think it's best handled
• 55:18
  Speaker 3: from the perspective of someone who doesn't have infertility interfacing
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: with someone who does who they love.
• 55:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, there's definitely not one best way, because
• 55:28
  Speaker 4: I can remember actually a time not too long ago.
• 55:34
  Speaker 4: I don't know, maybe like ten, I don't know time.
• 55:37
  Speaker 4: Is it something these days? But it was it was
• 55:41
  Speaker 4: unexpected because it wasn't someone who I was particularly, I mean,
• 55:44
  Speaker 4: I was friends, I saw them often. We weren't like
• 55:47
  Speaker 4: intimate friends, you know, but they did call me to
• 55:50
  Speaker 4: tell me that they were pregnant, and I first I
• 55:52
  Speaker 4: kind of thought.
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: Well, that's I don't know whether which I felt first.
• 55:57
  Speaker 4: Actually, first I kind of felt like, does she think
• 55:59
  Speaker 4: I'm that sensitive about things that I need to be
• 56:01
  Speaker 4: talked to?
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: Or like, am I weird?
• 56:03
  Speaker 4: Or is it is it like or is that really considerate?
• 56:08
  Speaker 4: Like I kind of went back and forth, But again,
• 56:09
  Speaker 4: that was I probably had three kids by then, which again,
• 56:13
  Speaker 4: adoption doesn't.
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: Cure infertility, but it does definitely disrapt.
• 56:16
  Speaker 4: You from it, and you are full on mom right right,
• 56:19
  Speaker 4: so you don't feel like you're missing out.
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: I do. I mean sort of.
• 56:24
  Speaker 4: Right at that age when I was experiencing it, a
• 56:26
  Speaker 4: lot of my friends were also getting pregnant, a lot
• 56:29
  Speaker 4: of them accidentally. You know, we're just like, well, well,
• 56:33
  Speaker 4: you know, we'll play Russian roulette and see what happens,
• 56:35
  Speaker 4: right boom, because that's normal. And I think at that time,
• 56:40
  Speaker 4: I think again, so at that point, I think I
• 56:42
  Speaker 4: always thought like, oh, it's just not me yet, right,
• 56:46
  Speaker 4: you know. It definitely it hurt and it sucked, and
• 56:48
  Speaker 4: I'm sad and jealous. I don't know if there's any
• 56:51
  Speaker 4: I mean, I think honestly, honesty is good. I think
• 56:55
  Speaker 4: depending on the person, I think that separate phone call
• 56:58
  Speaker 4: can be good. But I think you have to weigh
• 57:03
  Speaker 4: like making it, making it a big deal, right right,
• 57:07
  Speaker 4: And you know again, like I think if it's like
• 57:09
  Speaker 4: the person who you think would be embarrassed by having
• 57:12
  Speaker 4: you know, I know, like, oh, like.
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: I know this might be hard for you, right right,
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: having a baby, you know.
• 57:19
  Speaker 4: Like that would like make my skin crawl, like no
• 57:20
  Speaker 4: matter what you were saying, like that kind of thing.
• 57:23
  Speaker 4: But that's just because I have things. I mean, everyone
• 57:27
  Speaker 4: has things. So I think just know your friend know
• 57:29
  Speaker 4: whether that that conversation is appropriate or not, whether it's
• 57:33
  Speaker 4: you know, I think I think too, especially when we
• 57:37
  Speaker 4: got into a rhythm of a community that really like
• 57:40
  Speaker 4: values families and kids and stuff, like somebody was always pregnant,
• 57:45
  Speaker 4: you know, so you got kind of used to it. Yeah,
• 57:48
  Speaker 4: although I have to say, I I don't think it
• 57:52
  Speaker 4: was in that great program we.
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: Have on our phones that we don't know about.
• 57:55
  Speaker 4: But it was something I saw an old picture and
• 57:57
  Speaker 4: it was me giving the bird to a pregnancy test
• 58:00
  Speaker 4: commercial with a positive result.
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: And it wasn't like that long ago. So I mean,
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: you know, those feelings are definitely still there. Well, yeah,
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna be And part of that is muscle memory. Yeah,
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: you know, you're just kind of like, you know, but.
• 58:16
  Speaker 3: It's the worst. It's the worst when because I feel
• 58:19
  Speaker 3: like lately all the good people are dying, like James
• 58:22
  Speaker 3: Vanderbeek and Ben Sas Are you kidding me with this?
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: Come on?
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: I know?
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: And I feel that way also about pregnancy. I'm like, really, really,
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: she got pregnant and she's like on year ten of struggling,
• 58:35
  Speaker 3: what is this crap? Or like the friend who finally
• 58:38
  Speaker 3: finally had her miracle pregnancy after fifteen years of trying,
• 58:44
  Speaker 3: and I'm like that girl, that woman should be on
• 58:46
  Speaker 3: like kid seven by now. Yeah, and the the like
• 58:51
  Speaker 3: people who are not so great are just like about
• 58:54
  Speaker 3: to being bad a boom baut to being bad a
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: boom ma.
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: You know.
• 58:57
  Speaker 3: The ad injustice of the world can be hard to swallow.
• 59:00
  Speaker 4: It is it is, but you know, I mean yeah,
• 59:03
  Speaker 4: and there is something special about the infertility for women.
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: You know. It really it's like a core.
• 59:12
  Speaker 3: It's biblical, there's biblical.
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: It's just big.
• 59:17
  Speaker 4: And I think that, you know, to say, like, well,
• 59:19
  Speaker 4: everybody's got their things.
• 59:21
  Speaker 1: This is really a big thing, you know.
• 59:23
  Speaker 4: But one thing I used to I mean I used
• 59:25
  Speaker 4: to do when I was being sort of trying to
• 59:28
  Speaker 4: be holy anyway.
• 59:30
  Speaker 3: Did you stop that you're just like a just kidding.
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: I hope not.
• 59:34
  Speaker 4: But my children take have really taken the lead in
• 59:37
  Speaker 4: sanctifying me, like all the time, the like offering up
• 59:43
  Speaker 4: like that those dark sorrowful feelings for women who were
• 59:49
  Speaker 4: still like looking for their husbands. Yeah, because I that's
• 59:54
  Speaker 4: what I always came back to was I got this,
• 59:58
  Speaker 4: I got this really great guy who was mine and
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 4: this is this is everything to me. And keeping like
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 4: that like it was I just couldn't imagine, like I.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 3: They call it toxic positivity, but it's not toxic.
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 4: It's not toxic because I wouldn't I obviously, I wouldn't
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 4: be able to have gone through something as awful as
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 4: in fertility without that relationship. But and at at the
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 4: same time, I wouldn't trade it, like I wouldn't trade
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 4: like fertility for like a husband I didn't love as much.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 4: I Mean, that's sounds like crazy that you have to
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 4: say that out loud, but I just so lucky that
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 4: I got him, and that the rest of it's just
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 4: you know, gravy.
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I found that. So my parents died when
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 3: I was very young. I was sixteen and nineteen when
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 3: my parents died, and I got through that. I got
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: through my late teens and very early twenties by just
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: toxic positivitying myself every single day like I'm so thankful
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 3: for whatever it is, like you you have to find
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 3: and like your soulmate is a very big thing to
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 3: be thankful for. And so I found that that was
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 3: a really good, very effective coping strategy for me in
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 3: the thick of deep, deep, deep sadness of like you
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 3: have to focus on what you got.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah, that's interesting because when we were talking about it
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 4: and I was thinking about like all the different kinds
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 4: of bad. One of my other things was thinking about
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 4: like the loss of parents, and I mean, and now
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 4: here you.
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 3: Are with your yeah sixteen and nineteen. Yeah, and like
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 3: my dad commode suicide like it was. It was a
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: rough go.
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: And hard anyway.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I just I would I My
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 3: strategy was I would wake up every day and I'd
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 3: lay in bed and I'd stare at the sailant, think
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: what's the one thing you're looking for to today, and
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 3: just like hyper focus on that thing, and then like
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 3: the days go and the days get easier, and then
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 3: you you know, things go up. Things inevitably mind at
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 3: that age, So my mom was incredible. And my mom,
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: I mean, she had a lot of coping strategies because
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 3: she knew she was very, very sick my entire life,
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: and so she kind of modeled I think, really healthy
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: coping strategies. And she's also a social worker, which probably helped.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 3: And I think that there's like different kinds of social workers.
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 3: There's some that like and just mental health professionals in general.
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 3: I think there's some that go into it like physician
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 3: heal thyself and they're just total not jobs. They should
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 3: not be in the mental health field. And I think
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 3: that's a vast majority if I'm just being honest.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're extra too, oh yeah yeah.
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 3: But then there's there's some who did it for that reason.
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: But then actually, and this was my mom, they go
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 3: into it because it's physician healed thyself, but then they
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 3: figure out how to actually heal themselves, right, and then
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 3: they extrapolate it for other people. We saw We saw
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 3: a therapist for one of my children, Like we never
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: talked to the child actually, but this person had expertise
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: in the area that we were talking to them about
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 3: from their personal experience. And when she first shared, like
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 3: I have this issue, I was like, oh, I don't
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 3: like this. But then she explained like how her brain
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 3: works and how she processes things, and it opened my
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 3: eyes to my child because I was like, oh, this
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: is actually very helpful that you have the same thing,
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 3: because now I can gain the insights from you. And
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: you are a very successful person who has been able
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: to figure out your coping strategies and be grown up
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: enough to teach them to others. Yeah, but that was
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 3: my mom. My mom was like very good at she physician,
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 3: healed herself and did a pretty good job.
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Incredible.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah, she was an incredible lady. Thank you so much
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 3: for taking the time to chat with me today. Your
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 3: book was again a page sarner and really weirdly enjoyable.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: No, it should be. It's supposed to be.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 3: I enjoyed your book about infertility.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: I know that people are like, oh, it's so exciting.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 4: I heard you wrote a book, what's it about.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: But it's funny, right, it's funny, and.
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 3: You have to be able to laugh. That's the other thing.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 3: You have to be able to laugh.
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: Thanks for having me on. It was really good.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, this was great, and you were my great first
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 3: my first guest, and maybe I screwed up on the
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 3: recording and this was just a practice recording.
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: Hey, we're going to be even better next time.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 3: There you go, there you go. All right, So until
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 3: next time, everyone subscribe. And also, we have a substack.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 3: I should have said that when we were talking about
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 3: substack in the beginning the mom Wars dot subsack dot com.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 3: We have a substack. Until next time, saddle.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 4: Up, Ricochet.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 5: He join the conversation