filling the silence in the motherhood discussion
A few weeks ago, I spoke at Fertility Planit on the topic of Living Childfree with No Regrets. I was honored to share the stage with Tracey Cleantis and Lynn Newman Zavaro, both of whom shared their infertility stories in a very frank and open conversation.
If you’d like to join the conversation, make yourself a cup of tea and cozy up to the video below. I hope you enjoy it.
If you’re not able to see the embedded video above, you can also download it to watch here.
Last weekend, I was at the Fertility Planit Show, speaking on a panel about Letting Go. I wrote about my trepidation in a post last month and so many of you were incredibly supportive that I thought I ought to report in on my experience.
As anticipated, it was very strange for me to be at the show. I walked around the exhibition hall glancing sideways at the booths for everything from adoption agencies to cryogenic storage facilities to banks offering IVF loans. I spotted a few organizations whose paths I’d crossed on my own journey, including one of my former doctors, who apparently had no recognition of me (probably because he’d spent little time looking at my face, if you know what I mean.) I’ll admit that my pulse quickened and my chest tightened as I walked around. I didn’t feel any pull to get back into the fertility game or any tempting new possibilities, but I could feel some of those old, anxious, emotions creeping back in.
The panel itself was great. About 50-100 people sat in the room and I’m told another 22,000 watched online! Attendees asked lots of questions and I was glad I had answers to many of them.
The hardest part for me was looking out at people in the audience who I knew were coming to the end of their infertility ropes. I could feel they were in so much pain and it was incredibly courageous of them to come and listen to this panel on a topic I know they didn’t really want to face. Part of me wanted to climb down off the stage and just hug them and the other part wanted to kick the world in the kneecaps and scream that these perfectly nice people didn’t deserve this. But I didn’t do either of those things. I sat on the stage, told my story, and answered as many questions as I could.
The upshot of the whole experience is that I’m very glad I accepted the invitation to speak. It was ultimately very rewarding to speak from a place of peace and healing.
As an added bonus, I got to meet two incredible women, Melanie Notkin and Tracy Cleantis, who I’ve known for some time through the blogosphere. I also made connections with some wonderfully compassionate therapists, who specialize in this area. More about this aspect coming soon.
The show is coming back to LA next year and you can bet I’m adding plenty of suggestions to my speaker survey of more ways to bring this crucial topic out into the open.
If you’d like to see the panel discussion, it’s available to download on the Fertility Planit site or you can view below.
Thank you all again for being so supportive and encouraging on this new step in my journey.
La Belette Rouge doesn’t write often about infertility anymore (she’s busy moving on with her life without children), but when she does, she nails it.
Last week, she batted around the idea of a companion show to Bravo’s “Pregnant in Heels.” Her idea of “Infertile in Heels” made me laugh out loud.
Although, I’m not sure there’s much of an audience for the glamorous side of infertility (mainly because there really is no glamorous side, that I can see) there’s certainly room for some media time that doesn’t revolve around pregnancy and parenting.
I wish that infertility and childlessness had a place in mainstream conversation. I wish that information and guidance was more readily available, so that those of us who find ourselves traveling that road would know exactly where to turn for help, whether that be knowing and understanding all the options open to us, or getting help putting the chic into our childfree lives.
Tracey is one of the panelists who’ll be speaking with me at the Fertility Planit Show next month, and I’m looking forward to finally meeting her in person. I’m expecting a lively conversation.
~ "a raw, transparent account of the gut-wrenching journey of infertility."
~ "a welcome sanity check for women left to wonder how society became so fixated on motherhood."
