My husband and I struggled with infertility for four years. So we went to all

the doctors. Nobody could find anything wrong with me. Nobody really could really find anything

wrong with him. There was nothing medical that could explain it. If

I want something, I will bulldoze everything in my way to get to it.

And then, lord help everyone if it doesn't work.

Infertility changed my whole life. Not in that we had to

change the way we eat, even though we did not. In that we changed,

changed the way we socialized. Even though we did, it made

every single person in my life somebody who could hurt me accidentally.

Hi, everybody. I'm Lauren Howard. I go by L2.

Yes, you can call me L2. Everybody does. It's a long story. It's

actually not that long a story, but we'll save it for another time. Welcome to

Different Not Broken, which is our podcast on

exactly that. That there are a lot of people in this world walking around feeling

broken, and the reality is you're just different. And that's fin.

So I talk about this pretty frequently. It's not a secret. It's something that took

me probably a long time to get comfortable talking about, but my husband and I

struggled with infertility for four years, and I should say, like,

unexplained infertility. There wasn't a reason. It wasn't. Like, we went to

all the doctors and they were like, oh, well, here's definitely the issue. This is

why it's not happening. There was no reason that we could. Anybody

could clearly pinpoint. There was always like, well, this is this, or this could

be a little bit. But there was nothing that should have us at a point

where we were four years in and unable to get pregnant. And so

I can't tell you when the desire to

have a kid clicked on. We started trying pretty early,

but, like, very nonchalantly. Like, it wasn't like we were,

like, actively trying to do anything aside from,

you know, if it happens, it's great. And then after a year, it was

like, this isn't happening. Maybe we should talk to somebody.

And I went to my doctor, and she was like,

I mean, we can send you for testing, but it probably isn't anything. And I

was like, okay. And then another six months and then another year, and we're like,

well, okay, this isn't happening. Can someone tell me why

it goes from being part of your existence to

your only existence, not your only goal? Because we had a lot of things going

on, and we. We stayed pretty busy at the time. I mean,

when we got married, I was running a business, we bought a house, we

got married all at the same time. It was chaotic. It took us like years

to catch up from just that sheer amount of chaos. So it wasn't like we

were like sitting around with nothing else to do and no other activities.

But two years in, still

not successful. Then it starts to become

like, well, is there a problem? So we went to all the

doctors. Nobody could find anything wrong with me. Nobody really could really find anything

wrong with him. Wrong is not really the word. But there was nothing

medical that could explain it. I always asked like, does it matter that we don't

really like each other? And they were like, no, that doesn't actually factor in at

all. And I was like, okay. We went to really good doctors.

The medical part of infertility, I feel like that part

is discussed fairly frequently. And obviously I could talk

about that for a long time too. And some of the challenges there and some

of the things that we struggled with as far as the actual process

of getting with the right doctors and finding the right practices

for us and, you know, the people with the right processes and procedures and things

that felt right to us. But the thing, I

have two kids now, two kids that came out of this process of

going through fertility treatments and finding the right

clinics and doing multiply multiple different

processes and procedures. And, and, and also,

this is not a slight. At my husband, we just have different ways of approaching

things. If I want something, I will bulldoze everything in my way to

get to it. And then lord help everyone if it doesn't work.

The level of unhinged that I can become when something I want

doesn't happen. And I don't mean that in like a tantrum way. I just mean

like, what do you mean it didn't happen? I have control over everything

in the whole entire world. How could this not happen? The level

of unhinged is whatever next is. It's that level. We

have our two kids. We. We actually still have embryos. We talk all the time

about potentially cooking them. The problem is, is

that my uterus is useless and it undercooks them.

They come out al dente every time. And the first time you have

a kid who comes out undercooked, they're like, it's probably a fluke.

The second time they're like, don't do this again. If it happens twice, they're

like, especially if it happens twice and it's worse. The second time, they're like,

nope, that thing doesn't Work. There is no way that we can make sure

that that kid stays in long enough so we're not doing this again. So the

only way for us to really continue to have more

kids, which we would love. I would have 10 kids. And I, I say this

as somebody who has a full time nanny and a full time house husband. So,

like, I am not, I am not completely overwhelmed with my children all the time,

even though they overwhelm me frequently and that is still a very

common or very universal motherhood experience. I

would have 10 kids because I love having

kids and I love the little sassy assholes that my kids are. Even when

they're, even when they're being sassy assholes. Like,

there's the part of me that, like, corrects them. And then the part of me

that's like, yes, excellent. That's just the kind of parent I am. But

again, I say I have my kids. I have at least

two of them. We could potentially have more if we were to find

a uterus to rent. I

still feel a pang in the pit of my stomach anytime somebody announces their

pregnancy. And it's better now. It's. It's definitely

better now. It's there, but it's like, it's more like I go through

a process of remembering how much it used to suck and comparing it to that

and going, oh, man, this really isn't so bad anymore because I have my kids.

But I was, I was probably four or five years

into motherhood, not into the fertility process,

into motherhood, before the part of me that got

so insanely jealous that this person could sneeze and get pregnant,

it didn't, it didn't go away before it dampened. Infertility changed my whole life.

And not in that we had to change the way

we eat, even though we did not in that we, you know, changed

the way we socialized, even though we did. It made

every single person in my life somebody who could hurt me accidentally.

That is a bonkers way to feel, especially when you're

surrounded by people you love. But I remember one afternoon

I was so. I think we had another failure, another

unexplained situation. I felt completely

devastated by it. And I, at the time, like, the way you kept up with

all your friends was Facebook. And so I went on Facebook and I

hid every single person who

I perceive to be of childbearing age who

could announce their pregnancy at any time, because that's all my

feed was, was all of these people who

didn't have to do anything at all. Didn't have to do even the slightest amount

of work and just got pregnant and were announcing. Like, there were people who were

announcing their literal third and fourth pregnancies in the time that we were still trying

to get pregnant. People who had only had one kid

or had. Had no kids when we started. And

so I stopped reaching out, I stopped

responding. I stopped talking to people. If somebody reached out

to me, especially a woman I knew, if somebody reached out to me

who I hadn't talked to in a while, I knew exactly what it was about.

And I was like, I'm just not going to respond. Would get invited to baby

showers. I wouldn't go. Everything felt like an

assault. And I remember I was driving back from

one of our IVF appointments pretty shortly after I got pregnant with my

second child. And there was a

doctor on the radio who was a fertility doctor. He

partnered with one of the local radio stations to talk about what they do, I

guess. And he said, the thing that people don't understand

about women going through infertility is that as soon as you realize you're

going through infertility, everybody around you is pregnant. And I went, oh,

my God. That felt like a punch in the stomach because it was so true.

But I didn't realize, again, thought this was just me. Thought that I

was just this unhinged, crazy person who

couldn't handle this very normal life thing that sometimes happens

that was happening to us but wasn't happening to us because

somebody was mean or cruel or unkind or whatever. It's just a thing. It's just

a thing. I think I was a pretty social person

before infertility. Like, I still like to be home in my pajamas and

not put pants on a lot. But I wouldn't have thought twice about

making plans to go to dinner with a friend or

go to a party with a bunch of people. I might have thought twice about

the party with a bunch of people because that was I. I still never really

liked parties, but, like, really, it started feeling like every single person who was walking

past me had the potential to be a threat. Doesn't

sound right, because they weren't doing anything to harm me. But definitely, like. Like, you

know, in. In video games, when somebody walks past and they have, like, the red

thing around them, which means, like, this is a person who could attack or

this is a person who could be dangerous. That's basically what I would

see every time somebody walked past me or every time I was

reintroduced to somebody who I already knew. And the only way I could think to

get through it was to just cut myself off from it. Was that the way

to handle it? Maybe not. Maybe I. Instead of putting all the

eggs into the this will all get better when we get pregnant basket, which,

by the way, it didn't. If you've been through infertility and loss,

it's not like you get pregnant and, like, everything's just fine. Like, now you have

to go through nine months of incubating this human. Or if you're me, seven and

a half at most, going like, oh, God, I hope I don't screw this up.

Oh, my God, what if this doesn't work? So it's not like you think, like,

I'm gonna get a positive pregnancy test and I'm gonna be so happy and everything

is gonna be great, and we are gonna be out of this period of our

lives, and we're never gonna have to worry about it again. That is not what

happens. You pee on a stick,

you're not sure if it's positive. You start telling yourself that

you're crazy because you have looked at so many of them and you've never seen

the second line before. Or if you've had it didn't work out in your favor.

You think you see the second line. You're like, I.

I think there might be a line here. I

think. I think there's a line here. No, I'm

crazy. There's never a line here. It can't be that. And then you either take

another one or you wait a couple hours and you take another one. And then

all of a sudden, it's like, oh, that's definitely a line. Oh, my gosh,

definitely a line. And you're, like, really, really happy and really excited.

And then all of the doom and gloom and shame that came

with the last set of things starts setting in, and you go,

okay, well, how long is this going to last? What

if it's not real? What if it ends tomorrow? What if it ends in two

weeks? What if I get it in my head that this is actually going to

happen and then it doesn't? And then on top of it. We've talked about this

before. This idea of talking about pregnancy loss, talking about

infertility. It's, you know, these are ugly topics. And we've been taught that we don't

talk about ugly topics. I didn't tell a single person,

this is me, me, person on the Internet who talks about everything

and who overshares every part of my life. There were

two people in the world who knew we were going through Fertility treatments. And my

parents were not in those two people. There was one person who worked with me

and so she came with me to a couple of appointments, obviously my husband, so

I guess technically three and I think one other person.

We did it by ourselves. We didn't tell anybody. We didn't share with

anybody. I didn't know how to share with anybody. I didn't know how to

tell anybody that this was so awful and hurt so

badly and that

nothing we did seemed to work. I sat in

waiting rooms full of other women who were waiting for doctors at

fertility clinics, certain that I was the only person who had ever gone

through this. When there was literally examples around me

every single time I was there. It's never like I was sitting in an empty

waiting room. Everybody goes to a fertility clinic

for about the same reason, some version of the same reason.

You don't go to a fertility clinic because you're not trying to get pregnant.

You don't go to a fertility clinic because you could just get pregnant at home,

easy. There are different reasons, but they are all with

the same end goal. They're all headed toward the same thing. And I was still

convinced it was just me. Nobody would understand. I was mortally

terrified of somebody finding out. I remember one time I had to go

to a follow up appointment and for some reason

I had my dad, like he's a child. I was babysitting. I had my dad

that day. And I said, all right, well, I have an appointment in the morning

and then I'll come back and then we'll. I don't remember where my mom was.

But then we'll go figure out things and just

thinking like, my dad would never. My dad would never question further,

right? I don't know what I was thinking. And finally he looks at me and

he's like, you want to tell me what the appointment's for? Or you're just going

to keep saying you have a weird appointment. And I was like, I don't remember

how I weaseled out of it, but I did weasel out of it. But even

my dad, my best friend in the world, didn't know because I had no idea

how to tell anybody. First off, we had always, we had always held this line.

It was very protective. It was very much designed so that we

didn't have to invite anybody into this process. But people would ask us

all the time, like, when are you guys gonna have kids? And we would always

basically say like, we didn't want kids. We were happy with dogs. And you can

put dogs in boxes and leave the house. But people get mad when you do

that with children. And we used to say that all the time. And it was

pretty effective at silencing people. People didn't ask again after that. That

was, like, our standard response. It's how we got people to back off of it.

First off, don't ask people when they're going to have kids. It's not your business.

That's a personal question. And you have no idea what those people are going

through. None. It is a

perfectly reasonable decision to decide that you don't want kids. Child free

is a great way to pee. I love my children. I would have 10 more.

But you can love money and sleep as much as you can any small human.

And I stand by that. I would never trade my kids for anything

in the world. They are my favorite humans. But, like, I'm already

here if you're not. That is a valid decision to make.

But don't ask. You literally are ripping off a band aid on

somebody who's going through infertility when you insert yourself in that. And they don't

have to tell you if they don't want to. Maybe they will. But then how

are you going to feel if you say, when are you going to have kids?

And they say, oh, we've been trying for six years and we've had 18 miscarriages.

Just let it hang there in the air because you're asking an question you shouldn't

be asking. It's not your business. Somebody's fertility

and family planning is not your business. Don't ask them. Every

time somebody asked that question, I would, with a straight face, without missing a beat,

gave the same answer, and then leave and go cry.

Because all of these people think that we should have kids, but for some reason,

my uterus does not. It changed me on a

molecular level. It changed how I interact with other people. It changed how

I respond to good news. It changed how I trust almost

anything. It changed how

I felt about life transitions. It

changed how I felt about this idea of being able to plan your life and

make decisions for yourself. Like, I had no control over that I wasn't

gonna plan. It changed my sense of fairness.

I used to get. I still get really angry when things seem just,

like, completely unfair. Even though, as my dad would say, life's not

fair and stop waiting for fair. But it did suck

when everybody around me is just, like, popping out perfectly

healthy kids. And then not only was I years into the process before we finally

got pregnant, but then when I, you know, then my Water would just like break

randomly seven and a half months in and be like, we're doing this today. And

then we do weeks in the NICU and have all of the terror that

comes with that. Meanwhile, like friendo over there is having kid number

six, completely unmedicated home water births.

I so I remember when Michelle Obama wrote her first

book. My husband gave me a copy of it and he was like, before you

read anything else, you need to read this chapter. And I was like, why? And

he was like, just because. So I did and I went and read the chapter

and it, I guess it turned out that Michelle Obama had to do IVF

for both of their kids. Again, seeing it on paper really

did. And we had our kids at this point, but seeing it on paper

really did. It made me feel like somebody understood me in a much

bigger way, even if she had never met me. It also showed that that

part of your life you can get past and you will. I'm never gonna be

a person who didn't go through that. It changed everything about me

internally. It changed my brain wrinkles in

ways that I probably don't even realize. I will never ask people

what they're planning to do about having children. I don't ask. I support

people on whatever their decisions are. It is not my business.

When my brother and my now sister in law got married, I literally

said to them, maybe like right when they get married, got married, I was like,

by the way, I don't know if you guys want kids or whatever, but I'm

not ever going to ask and I'm not going to get involved. And if you

need things, if you have questions about

fertility or whatever, let me know because I'm an endless

resource on, on the who, what, where and how to find doctors and whatever.

But I'm never going to offer it and I'm never going to insert myself because

not having kids is a completely reasonable thing. But also like, I'm just

going to make the assumption that it's not my business until you tell me. And

they're the only people I've ever told that. But I also thought like, well,

this is technically my family, so they should know. I mean, it is definitely my

family, so they should know that if they need resources, I have the resources. But

other than that, stop asking people about their fertility. Stop asking them

about having children. Having children is not a foregone

conclusion of being in a relationship. There are people in this world

who just like their partners enough to be with them, which seems

wild to me, but all right,

and that's enough. And that should be enough. So if you've gone through infertility, whether

you have your babies at this point or not, if you've gone through pregnancy loss,

it's not shameful. I wish I knew that more at the time. It's

not anything that you've done. It's very

rarely anything that has anything to do with your actions. That was

really hard for me to understand because I figured that if

it was happening, it had to be me. And

I see you and I'm sorry. And if it's something you do want to talk

about, if it's something you do need a sounding board for, I am always available

and around and I have all the bandwidth in the world to

curse at your uterus with you or your partner's uterus. I don't know

who's supposed to be uterizing the baby. But also it's

okay to just not and know that it is

a traumatic experience for so many reasons. It's

traumatic when you go through loss, it's traumatic when you go through failures. It's traumatic

when you find out that this probably isn't going to happen naturally anyway. That's

terrifying. We had a pretty traumatic loss. It

resulted in my youngest, but she was a

twin. And despite the fact that we still had a healthy pregnancy,

the period of getting between, for all intents and purposes,

her showing up on a positive pregnancy test to us

being able to find, let's just say she was an asshole even then. But us

being able to find her on an ultrasound and confirm that

all of the other things that had happened must have

been recurrent loss while, while she

survived, basically. I mean, it still had me in bed for weeks

on end despite the fact that we had confirmed that what was happening, like

the things that stuck were good. There's no right

response. There's no wrong response. I think the

only wrong response that I maybe had throughout the process was not recognizing

that I needed help other than to just get pregnant. I needed somebody to talk

to, I needed somebody to intervene. I needed somebody to tell me that I didn't

have to do all the emotional labor for the whole process because I'm the neurotic,

high strung one of the two of us. And he was just okay, kind of

going with the flow and seeing what happened and trying again. And I was.

I don't know if people know this about me, but I have control issues. And

that was the thing. I have a couple of, just a couple of very

small control issues, very small, almost imperceptible

they might as well not exist. Unless you're a person who knows

me, in which case they exist

everywhere. So, anyway, if you're going through that, I see you. I'm sorry.

It sucks. If you need a safe space to scream into the void,

this is that safe space. There are no wrong feelings about

it. And also, everybody in your life who can just sneeze

and get pregnant can go fuck themselves.

For this week's small talk again, Remember, this is something we do every week.

Thanks for being here, guys. Have a good day. Love you, Mina.

I'm so going back to being on Do Not Disturb. This has been a

nightmare. I've. I've had a taste of peace and quiet

and silence. And I am. I'm not going back.

Holy. This is awful.