Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlin Childress.

I'm a life and parenting coach. And this is episode 200.

I can't quite believe that we're celebrating 200

episodes, 200 weeks of this podcast. That

means that I've been airing and hosting this podcast for almost four

years, which is really amazing to me and

exciting and. And I wanted to take a chance to

make this episode a little bit special by telling you

about my infertility and adoption story. I

realized that I hadn't completely shared that part of me

and my story with you. I've mentioned it, that I'm an adoptive

mom. I've brought that up before, but I wanted to have a

chance to really narrate and really describe sort of

how I experience infertility and, and why we chose adoption

and how that informed me as a parent and becoming a

trauma informed parent. On episode 100,

I walked you through my ACE score, which is the Adverse

Childhood Experience Survey. I talked about the traumatic

background and traumatic childhood I experienced and shared

with you how I overcame a lot of those traumas

and how that has informed me now as a coach.

And this is also true of experiencing

infertility and choosing a different path

towards motherhood. That meant that I did not birth children.

And I think as a coach, having so many different

experiences and backgrounds and painful moments in my

life, it helps me become more empathetic, more compassionate, more

understanding, and help you as you grow.

Now, my hope for this episode is even if you did not experience

infertility, that maybe hearing me share my story

might help you have more compassion for your girlfriends that are going through

it, or a family member or something like that. Or

maybe you experienced infertility and you have felt

alone and sort of lost in all of that. Either

primary infertility, which means the first time you try to get pregnant,

or or secondary infertility the second time you try to

get pregnant. So I wanted to kind of give you

voice to the pain and a place for you to feel

supported and loved on and yeah, just an

opportunity for you also to get to know me as well and a little bit

more about my story. So

my kids are 21 and 19. So this is going back 20

plus years ago. And I was pretty young,

actually. I was like 29. And my husband and I decided

to have children. I got married really young. That's like another episode.

I could talk about how religion informed my marriage decision.

But anyway, I got married at 22 and we

spent several years Just traveling and building our

careers and buying a house and all of those things that

were really important to us at the time. And then it became

really clear to me that I really wanted to become a mom. I was a

middle school teacher. I wasn't very satisfied as a teacher

and I was ready for parenting and becoming a mom. A lot of my

friends were having kids and I just really, really, really wanted

to be a mom. Now, not everybody has that

feeling before they become a mom. Some people, it just happens to you, it surprises

you, you're not ready for it and you pivot and you become a parent

and you make the best of it. But for me, I was on the

pill and. And so we decided to go off the pill

and see what happened. So that was around 2001,

maybe 2002. I'm trying to remember, to be honest,

what year. But anyway, it was around that time and

we went off the pill and started to try, as they

say, to get pregnant. And the first few

months I wasn't really thinking anything of it. Kind of didn't

get pregnant, you know, kept having my period, no problem.

And then, you know, six months, seven months in, I was like, huh, this is

kind of, you know, not concerning, but strange. My sisters all had children

really easily and you know, kind of like you breathe near them and they got

pregnant. So I was like, I don't know what's going on with me. So I

started to do like ovulation test strips to try to time it right, did

the basal thermometer right, all those little at home

hacks that you can do to increase your chances.

And a year goes by and we don't become

pregnant. During this time I was

pretty sad, to be honest. And my

friends were becoming pregnant and in the beginning when I first started trying,

I was excited for them and I'd be like, oh my God, that's so cool

and maybe we'll have babies together. And I was just really thrilled

and nervous and happy and all of those things. And then as time kept going

on and it became more evident that maybe it wasn't going to

happen for us, I started to feel jealous and

scared and less than

a lot of different emotions that were really

triggered a lot in my childhood as well because kind of always feeling like

I was odd, didn't belong, you know, no one liked me,

whatever. I had all those like insecurities and then not

being able to get pregnant kind of really brought all those up

again. And my husband was super supportive and he just like,

it'll happen, it'll happen. And then it didn't happen. So at the

year Mark, we decided to go to the doctor

to figure out what was wrong. I don't know if you've ever done that, but

it takes a little bit of time to get those tests done

because of the cycle. They need to check at different points in the

woman's cycle, and then they also need to test the man as well.

So it took a little bit of time. And then we got our results. And

it turns out that my husband was having trouble

conceiving, and that meant that we were going to

need some sort of interventions. So we

sat together at that time and

really we were not sure what to do. The obvious

answer at that time was in vitro or

even iui, which is insemination, but that

would probably not work. So it would be IVF. And like I said,

this was 20 plus years ago. And I had friends who were going

through ivf. Not that many because most were young.

And really, actually infertility. 95% of

couples can conceive within the first year. And then of

that 5% that don't, typically, only, only 1%

are truly infertile. So it's actually pretty rare. You know, as you

get older, the chances go, chances change and things like that.

So this was. We're all pretty young. So anyway, I didn't know that many people,

but I did know some. And I was hearing just how much it cost and

how devastating it was to think you were going to get pregnant

and do all the shots and all the tests and all the stuff, and then

it not happen. And we

decided to consider all of our options. At that time, we were

not closed to becoming adoptive parents. In fact, I

think there was a part of us that always sort of wanted to be at

some point, like kind of have our own and then adopt some sort of

thought. And so when it was laid out for us

like, okay, you can start the medical route or you can

pursue adoption, I said to my husband that I wanted to

pursue both at the same time. That was my thought at the beginning. I thought,

let's just make doctor's appointments and also look

into adoption as well. So I kind of

think I had appointments on the books to talk to in vitro

specialist and pursue that. And then we also started to look

at adoption. And I knew I didn't want to

adopt through the foster care system. I felt a little

bit overwhelmed by that idea. I also did really wanted adoption,

a baby that was mine that I adopted. And it was final. Like, I didn't

Want this kind of court, middle ground. I just was so desperate for

this child, and I didn't really want it to be an insecure

relationship. I was scared. I know now that that's not necessarily a

risk factor, but I was scared that what if the birth mother came

back and took my child away? That's what I was afraid of. So I

wanted to do out of country. It's called inter country adoption. I wanted

to adopt out of, of the country. And at that time, we

had a couple of options. We could adopt from Russia, from China,

from Guatemala. Those were the main places that people were

adopting from at that time. And when we

sat in our adoption seminar

and learned about the process and the

costs and the wait times and things like that,

the Russia choice seemed the most aligned for us in that you

would have a baby in nine months. And I was like, well, that feels about

right, because that's how long it takes to have a baby naturally. The

other was like, it could take two, three years. One was like, you

could have a baby tomorrow. That felt scary. So not really tomorrow, but

like, pretty quick. And I was like, let's just do the Russia thing. Like

that felt the most aligned. And then we started to realize pretty

quickly that we had to pick one path over the other.

Because if we were going to go the infertility

route and the medical route, that was going to cost a lot of time and

money and energy. And if we were going to do the adoption route, that was

also going to cost a lot of time, money, and energy. And so I

remember my husband and I, after the adoption seminar. We live

in Los Angeles, so we drove to Santa Monica. I often

find myself at the ocean when I have a big decision or I'm in

a lot of emotional pain, I end up on the shore. So we

sat on the beach and we talked about it, and we both kind of

felt like, why not, why not just pursue adoption

from Kevin? It was great. It aligned with his values.

He wasn't really that inclined to have a bio kid. You know, he

wasn't that important to him, to be honest, which is unusual sometimes for men.

But he just wasn't like that invested in his genetic pool. Like,

he didn't really care. And I wanted. I wanted a sure

thing. That's what I was about. I didn't want to go through

round and round and round of in vitro and losses and in

vitro and like, I just could not handle the pain anymore.

So we said, let's just. Let's just adopt. And we did.

Adoption requires a Lot of what they

call a home study. So it requires a lot of, like,

psychological testing and evaluating your fitness

as a parent and your home and whether you can provide for a child

and financial proof. And it's like this

very intimate process and intimate details about

our life. And when you get pregnant, right? If you

are just a person, you get pregnant, you just have a baby. Like, no one

asks you, are you qualified? Are you ready? Are you

gonna be a good parent? We had to answer so

many questions about our marriage, our religion, our

values, whether we were gonna spank, whether we were believed in.

Time out. And I was, like, 29 years old.

I didn't really know that much about parenting. So I'm reading

parenting books, and I'm trying to figure out all this stuff, like, before

I even have a baby. And anyway,

it was really intimate. It was like

having someone look under the hood of your life and then decide

whether you're good enough or not. And this was really

hard for me, to be honest. They call it a paper pregnancy, which,

when you are adopting and what isn't really

accounted for is just how you are evaluated and

determined whether you should be good or not. And

it was painful, that whole experience of

finding out we had infertility

pivoting to adoption, having all of those

invasive questions and all of the intimate details

of our life exposed into paper. I

felt very alone during that time. I didn't really have anyone

who was going through it at all. And I also

didn't know how to deal with the pain of watching my friends have babies

and give birth and have baby showers and have

newborns. And I have these beautiful friends. I'm

still very close to all these mamas, and they were in so

much pain for me and felt tender around me and a little bit

like eggshelly because they didn't want to share their joy with me

and because they didn't want to hurt me. And I felt so terrible to

not be so present. I remember my brother sitting us

down on Easter or something, and he's like, guess what?

My wife's pregnant. And because it was my brother and I felt

safe, I just started crying so hard, I had to run out of

the room. I was just kind of a mess at this time.

Meanwhile, I'm over on my desk getting

so many papers ready, because when you adopt internationally,

you have to have. It's called a dossier. It's probably

about a hundred pages of documents describing your

financials, your house, your health. I mean, clearing you

on all these different psychologically, all these different levels so that

you prove that you are worthy of adopting a

baby. And I appreciate the process because it's good, right? We

don't want to put kids in dangerous situations. And at the same

time, I'm like, I'm a good person, I promise. Anyway, it just brought up a

lot of information, insecurity and pain. And

also with the process, when we were waiting, we were told that

it would take a certain amount of time once we turned in this

giant dossier, which by the way, had to be like

notarized, certified by the state of California, certified by the

United States government, then translated all into Russian, and

then certified by the Russian government. I mean, this document just

grew like, I think it was like 300 pages by the end. And

that's your dossier. You send that over. Once you do that, you get on the

list in this other country, Parenthetically, Russia has

been closed for inter country adoption for a very long time.

I think the last one was like 2009,

so this was around 2004, and maybe it

was even 2008 that it closed. So you can't do this anymore there.

And in general, most countries, there's not a lot of inter country adoption

at this point in time anyway. Back then you would get on the list

and then you would, you know, be matched with a baby that

was also ready to be adopted. And that was the

lowest age, could be five months old. So we thought we would

get a baby around five or six months old, which felt pretty young.

And while we were waiting, once we turned in our paperwork,

the country of Russia changed the rule that said that the

children must be at least eight months old. So all these little

babies that were ready for adoption at five months, and all these

parents who were matched and ready had to wait three additional

months in order for the children to be the right age to be

adopted. That meant that we were stuck in this transition time where

we thought it was going to take a couple of months to get matched, and

it took much longer during that time. I felt so,

so sad. I just wanted to be a mom so bad. And my friends were

having babies and I just was like, why is this not

happening? How is this happening to me? Our social worker at the

time did say to me, she said, you know, darlin,

you are gonna be matched with the right kid for you.

No one ever thinks, oh, this is the wrong kid for me. I

should have got the kid three months ago or three months from now.

And it did soothe me a little bit to realize that, yeah, I'm

gonna be matched with the right kid for me. And I just have to wait

for him to be ready. And I spent a lot of time crying

and being alone and being pretty desperate for this baby.

I don't know if I can capture it just by talking about it,

but it was as if a piece of me was missing. I

just felt so much despair. And I could not wait for this

baby to come into our life. And then

In February of 05, we got matched with

our son Lincoln. It was a really amazing

experience. You get a small photo of

him and that's your baby. It's

totally bizarre. It's like at the time of the photo, he was five

months old. And we just had one picture of him and it was

super cute. And it's like, okay, this is your baby now. You need

to go to court in Russia and file

for adoption. So the way it worked back then was that we

had to fly to where the baby was, go to his

orphanage, meet him in person, and sign off

on a decree that said that we agreed to adopt this

baby. They didn't want people to get there and change their minds. They wanted you

to see the baby. You would then get a court date. So that was

extremely painful because we got to meet our baby

and then we had to leave. And you can hear the tears in my voice

because it was like meeting your child and then leaving

them at a hospital that you can't go visit anymore. It

was so painful to leave that

orphanage and also leave my child in hands,

not great hands, right? In poverty, in

neglect, in malnutrition, in,

you know, just a very bad place. And

knowing that I couldn't do anything about it and get on an

airplane and fly back to my life, it was really

hard. I cried a lot at the airport and they

said, okay, well, your court date will be in two weeks. So, you

know, it's like, okay, get home. You can do anything for two weeks kind of

thing. And we waited

and we waited and we waited and two weeks went by and we're calling

our coordinator and. And they're like, we don't know what's going on. The

judge is out of town. There's been some holidays.

We're like, okay, we're just waiting. And then

finally we get a court date. And it's eight weeks passes between the time

we meet Lincoln till we can go to court. So we do,

we fly, we go to court, we

get approved. And then there's a 10 day waiting period that

you have your baby while

you are waiting for the Court decree to be final. So

we do the paperwork, we see him, and

then we have to wait again. And so we wait a couple more weeks,

and then he's ours, which is amazing. We go

through a visa process, and we

fly home, and he's our baby, and he's

1 years old. So all that time

it took from match to home, it was four months,

and I was a new mom to a one

year old. And that loss has

always been a little bit hard, a little bit painful

for me because I do feel like I missed out on the

little baby stage and nursing

and all of those things. But, yeah,

we bonded immediately with him. We

loved him to pieces. He fit right into our family.

He definitely had separation anxiety. He definitely had

attachment disruption. So we were working on bonding and trust

and all of that. But in general, Lincoln slipped right into our life.

And we started to go to mommy groups and play groups and

meeting a bunch of my friends and that I now have still

to this day. And it just was such a beautiful time

of my life because I finally was a mom. I

was finally at that place in my life that I wanted

to be. Even though I got there, I always say I arrived through the

back door of motherhood. In some ways, I got there,

and it was incredible and wonderful. And

within a year, we decided to do it again.

So. So the second time, it was like, let's

adopt again. Let's adopt from Russia,

and let's adopt a brother for Lincoln. So

we did. We did the process. This time it was a little bit easier because

we had done a home study before. We knew what to expect. We knew how

to answer the questions. We already had a kid, so that

helped a lot because we were a little bit more qualified or

whatever. We had more information, filled out our paperwork, we

dropped it off. We were expecting it to take eight weeks, like it did with

Lincoln, to get matched. And no, we get matched almost

immediately, like, within three days, which was insane.

And then we flew to Russia, like, almost

immediately, not with Lincoln. We met Sawyer,

and then we turned around, we flew home. We waited the 10 days, we went

to court. We didn't even see him on that trip because his baby

orphanage was far away from the courthouse. A couple hours. He

was in a very rural part of outside Moscow. And so we went to

court, turned around really fast, came home, and then 10

days later went back and adopted

Sawyer. And he came home with us. And now then we had two

kids. They're 22 months apart, and they were adopted

two years apart. And Sawyer, we brought him home at 12 months as

well. And with Sawyer, he also was

slipped right into life. The sad part for him,

which we didn't realize, is that he was one of those kids who had a

lovey and, you know, sucked his thumb and rubbed like a little

blankie. And they don't care. The orphanage doesn't see

things as belonging to one child. So they didn't give me his

lovey. And so there was a lot of crying and a lot

of drama on the flight home with him. It was really

chaotic. I always think of it like Lincoln's birth was

easy. Like his pregnancy was hard, but his birth was easy. And

Sawyer's pregnancy was easy, but his birth was

hard. And I'm saying that like the paperwork part for Lincoln in the

process was so hard, but then getting him was so easy. Once

we, like, once we slipped in with him and Sawyer, that transition was

harder. And then of course, I had another son. So, you know, he's three.

I have a three year old and a one year old, like kind of within

a couple of months of deciding to have another

baby. Now we have two kids, three and one. And

it was great. It was great. Really intense. As you all

know, when you have two little kids, just cuckoo pants. Lincoln was cuckoo pants. He

had so much energy. Now we know it's adhd. It was

pretty easy going for the first year or so. And

then I've shared this many times. It was round when Lincoln turned 4

that his behavior really escalated quite a bit. He became

aggressive with his brother. He became, you

know, difficult at preschool. Really major

meltdowns, just a lot of dysregulation,

impulse control, anger, just,

you know, all the classic ADHD

behaviors that when you see him in a 4 year old boy, you're like, well,

that's normal. But you also know it's a little outside of normal.

And it's because of his behavior that

I started to get support. And what I did was

I started to go to parenting classes that were offered

through the organization that did our home study.

And I started to do parenting classes, take parenting

classes through that organization. And

that's where I met Jeanette Yoff, who

became my darlin, who became

the person who saved my family, who changed the

trajectory of my parenting forever. And she's actually a guest

next, not next week, but the week after on the podcast, because

next week is Thanksgiving, but the week after that I have Jeanette coming on

and you get to meet her and learn from her and

just our rapport is really beautiful. But it was

meeting her and starting to learn about trauma,

informed parenting, starting to understand feelings, drive

behavior, learning to not take behavior so personally.

Learning about the word emotional dysregulation in

2006, 2007, like no one was talking about

it back then. Well, I guess this was like 2008. But yeah, like learning

about these phrases and like how the brain works,

discovering Dan Siegel reading parenting from the inside out,

learning about the amygdala, the nervous system, stress response,

cortisol, I mean all of that was just new

to me and also new in parent education. And so my

brain just exploded in so many

amazing ways because I could see a pathway for my family

to heal. And the reason

why everything was just outside of norm

with my kids is a. Because Lincoln had ADHD and

Sawyer had sensory processing disorders. They had disorders,

but also because they experienced a year of neglect being in

Russian orphanages. And all that time

when I was preparing to become an adoptive mom,

nowhere in my education was I taught the

words trauma or trauma informed or

attachment, insecure, attachment. There was

no education about what I might experience

by adopting a kid from a Russian

orphanage. All of my training and everything I have

learned has been because I wanted to parent these kids well and

do right by them. And everything I learn I share with you, with

you, with the people I work with, because I believe that

if we can practice compassionate parenting, we can

learn self regulation tools for ourselves and teach

those skills to our kids that our kids,

any kid, can benefit from that. So if it works with

kids with neurodivergence, if the processes that I teach

work with kids who have experienced trauma,

and if these practices work with kids who have

more extreme behavior, then wow, are they gonna, you

all are gonna benefit from them as well. Yeah. That

is how I became a mom, and then that's how I became a calm mama,

is because I became a mom of kids who

really had experienced trauma as children. And

that had nothing to do with me, you know, it's just the way it

was. And they were for a variety of reasons,

different reasons, they became available for adoption.

Their birth mothers relinquished their parental rights for

different reasons for each of them. And because of that

loss that that birth mother had, I became an adoptive

parent. And I'm always very tender about my

kids loss. We're open with them, we talk about adoption

very openly. They, they each have a different

relationship to adoption and to their story. And I've

learned a lot about trauma and how to process grief and

loss and feel feelings.

And for the most part the boys are really adjusted to Their

story. I think as they grow, they'll discover more and

more parts of them that maybe feel wounded or abandoned by

their loss of their birth mother and their birth country

and their birth mother, birth father. You know, we've seen some of it, like, in

terms of curiosity around their biology, you know, their genetics.

They both did 23andMe, before it was a

defunct company. Just to learn about themselves and learn about

their genetic history and their genetic connection. And

then for me, being an adoptive mom, having kids who don't

look like me and don't look like each other, you know, it's always

kind of been interesting. I remember one of my very good friends. It

was, the boys were little, like, in kindergarten, and she and I had just

met, but we weren't really friends yet. And she looks

at me and she says, wow, it's so weird. Your kids look nothing alike, and

they look nothing like you. And I was like, yeah, that's because they were

adopted. And then she's like, oh, I'm so sorry. I was like, there's nothing to

apologize for. I don't have any shame about this. I have

grief. I have sadness over my own loss

of the ability to have biological children, But I don't have any

shame about being an adoptive parent. I don't have any

shame for my children. I'm just grateful personally,

that, you know, their loss was my gain.

And I hold both of those things quite tenderly and make

space for their loss. But, you know, they're pretty well

adjusted. You know, it doesn't come up that much, but it does sometimes, and we

talk about it, and, yeah, they're really comfortable

with their stories. I was gonna add one last

thing is that, you know, I couldn't get

pregnant for, like, 10 years. Stopped trying

with the pill in 2002, and then in

2012, became pregnant out

of nowhere. It was super crazy. I had no idea I was

pregnant because I had never been before. I

did not know what was happening to me. And I just thought, like,

I was, like, tired. I don't know. I lost that baby at

11 weeks without knowing that I was pregnant.

And so I passed the embryo,

which was really painful and sad and terrifying because I

did not know what came out of my body. Maybe that's tmi. But

anyway, that was a shock. And then I had two

more miscarriages, one in 2013 and one in 2015.

So those losses are painful. I do think about those three

little ones that I've lost and the missed

opportunity to maybe become a bio mom. But at the same time.

I'm grateful for our family, for our life,

the fact that I'm 50 years old and I'm empty nest

and able to build my life and have this

decade for me. It's really cool. So I'm grateful that

for how things played out. I'm actually really grateful that I have these

children, the ones I specifically have. And

I know that would only have happened through this infertility and adoption

story. And I just feel grateful. I feel grateful for you for listening,

for caring about me, for allowing me to tell my

story and share some

tender things with you. And if you

experienced infertility or you are going through

infertility right now and you just want some support, you

can feel free to reach out. I'm here. I also just want to leave you

with this encouraging note that whatever

happens in your life, whatever pain you go

through, even in when it feels unbearable, like it's going

to sweep you under and drown you, and

it won't. You are really strong and you can handle

it and you can pivot and you can always find a

new normal and a new place of peace. And that is

forever available to you and to me and to anyone you

know. So giving you a message of hope

as we head into the holiday season and just lots and

lots of love. Thanks for listening.