Episode 21
Infertility, loss, and the questions you should never ask
Infertility isn’t just a medical diagnosis — it’s a daily ache that reshapes how you see yourself, your relationships, and even good news from people you love.
In this raw, unfiltered episode, I'm opening the hell up about four years of unexplained infertility, pregnancy loss, the jealousy nobody admits out loud, and why asking “When are you having kids?” can quietly devastate someone.
If you’ve been there, you’ll feel seen. If you haven’t, you’ll understand why silence, empathy, and better questions matter.
Have a listen. It might just make you feel better about all... that *gestures wildly at everything*
Oh, and check out all the other ways in which I can support you, here. https://stan.store/elletwo
Mentioned in this episode:
Build Your Better course
Build your better course - https://stan.store/elletwo/p/build-your-better
Transcript
My husband and I struggled with infertility for four years. So we went to all
Speaker:the doctors. Nobody could find anything wrong with me. Nobody really could really find anything
Speaker:wrong with him. There was nothing medical that could explain it. If
Speaker:I want something, I will bulldoze everything in my way to get to it.
Speaker:And then, lord help everyone if it doesn't work.
Speaker:Infertility changed my whole life. Not in that we had to
Speaker:change the way we eat, even though we did not. In that we changed,
Speaker:changed the way we socialized. Even though we did, it made
Speaker:every single person in my life somebody who could hurt me accidentally.
Speaker:Hi, everybody. I'm Lauren Howard. I go by L2.
Speaker:Yes, you can call me L2. Everybody does. It's a long story. It's
Speaker:actually not that long a story, but we'll save it for another time. Welcome to
Speaker:Different Not Broken, which is our podcast on
Speaker:exactly that. That there are a lot of people in this world walking around feeling
Speaker:broken, and the reality is you're just different. And that's fin.
Speaker:So I talk about this pretty frequently. It's not a secret. It's something that took
Speaker:me probably a long time to get comfortable talking about, but my husband and I
Speaker:struggled with infertility for four years, and I should say, like,
Speaker:unexplained infertility. There wasn't a reason. It wasn't. Like, we went to
Speaker:all the doctors and they were like, oh, well, here's definitely the issue. This is
Speaker:why it's not happening. There was no reason that we could. Anybody
Speaker:could clearly pinpoint. There was always like, well, this is this, or this could
Speaker:be a little bit. But there was nothing that should have us at a point
Speaker:where we were four years in and unable to get pregnant. And so
Speaker:I can't tell you when the desire to
Speaker:have a kid clicked on. We started trying pretty early,
Speaker:but, like, very nonchalantly. Like, it wasn't like we were,
Speaker:like, actively trying to do anything aside from,
Speaker:you know, if it happens, it's great. And then after a year, it was
Speaker:like, this isn't happening. Maybe we should talk to somebody.
Speaker:And I went to my doctor, and she was like,
Speaker:I mean, we can send you for testing, but it probably isn't anything. And I
Speaker:was like, okay. And then another six months and then another year, and we're like,
Speaker:well, okay, this isn't happening. Can someone tell me why
Speaker:it goes from being part of your existence to
Speaker:your only existence, not your only goal? Because we had a lot of things going
Speaker:on, and we. We stayed pretty busy at the time. I mean,
Speaker:when we got married, I was running a business, we bought a house, we
Speaker:got married all at the same time. It was chaotic. It took us like years
Speaker:to catch up from just that sheer amount of chaos. So it wasn't like we
Speaker:were like sitting around with nothing else to do and no other activities.
Speaker:But two years in, still
Speaker:not successful. Then it starts to become
Speaker:like, well, is there a problem? So we went to all the
Speaker:doctors. Nobody could find anything wrong with me. Nobody really could really find anything
Speaker:wrong with him. Wrong is not really the word. But there was nothing
Speaker:medical that could explain it. I always asked like, does it matter that we don't
Speaker:really like each other? And they were like, no, that doesn't actually factor in at
Speaker:all. And I was like, okay. We went to really good doctors.
Speaker:The medical part of infertility, I feel like that part
Speaker:is discussed fairly frequently. And obviously I could talk
Speaker:about that for a long time too. And some of the challenges there and some
Speaker:of the things that we struggled with as far as the actual process
Speaker:of getting with the right doctors and finding the right practices
Speaker:for us and, you know, the people with the right processes and procedures and things
Speaker:that felt right to us. But the thing, I
Speaker:have two kids now, two kids that came out of this process of
Speaker:going through fertility treatments and finding the right
Speaker:clinics and doing multiply multiple different
Speaker:processes and procedures. And, and, and also,
Speaker:this is not a slight. At my husband, we just have different ways of approaching
Speaker:things. If I want something, I will bulldoze everything in my way to
Speaker:get to it. And then lord help everyone if it doesn't work.
Speaker:The level of unhinged that I can become when something I want
Speaker:doesn't happen. And I don't mean that in like a tantrum way. I just mean
Speaker:like, what do you mean it didn't happen? I have control over everything
Speaker:in the whole entire world. How could this not happen? The level
Speaker:of unhinged is whatever next is. It's that level. We
Speaker:have our two kids. We. We actually still have embryos. We talk all the time
Speaker:about potentially cooking them. The problem is, is
Speaker:that my uterus is useless and it undercooks them.
Speaker:They come out al dente every time. And the first time you have
Speaker:a kid who comes out undercooked, they're like, it's probably a fluke.
Speaker:The second time they're like, don't do this again. If it happens twice, they're
Speaker:like, especially if it happens twice and it's worse. The second time, they're like,
Speaker:nope, that thing doesn't Work. There is no way that we can make sure
Speaker:that that kid stays in long enough so we're not doing this again. So the
Speaker:only way for us to really continue to have more
Speaker:kids, which we would love. I would have 10 kids. And I, I say this
Speaker:as somebody who has a full time nanny and a full time house husband. So,
Speaker:like, I am not, I am not completely overwhelmed with my children all the time,
Speaker:even though they overwhelm me frequently and that is still a very
Speaker:common or very universal motherhood experience. I
Speaker:would have 10 kids because I love having
Speaker:kids and I love the little sassy assholes that my kids are. Even when
Speaker:they're, even when they're being sassy assholes. Like,
Speaker:there's the part of me that, like, corrects them. And then the part of me
Speaker:that's like, yes, excellent. That's just the kind of parent I am. But
Speaker:again, I say I have my kids. I have at least
Speaker:two of them. We could potentially have more if we were to find
Speaker:a uterus to rent. I
Speaker:still feel a pang in the pit of my stomach anytime somebody announces their
Speaker:pregnancy. And it's better now. It's. It's definitely
Speaker:better now. It's there, but it's like, it's more like I go through
Speaker:a process of remembering how much it used to suck and comparing it to that
Speaker:and going, oh, man, this really isn't so bad anymore because I have my kids.
Speaker:But I was, I was probably four or five years
Speaker:into motherhood, not into the fertility process,
Speaker:into motherhood, before the part of me that got
Speaker:so insanely jealous that this person could sneeze and get pregnant,
Speaker:it didn't, it didn't go away before it dampened. Infertility changed my whole life.
Speaker:And not in that we had to change the way
Speaker:we eat, even though we did not in that we, you know, changed
Speaker:the way we socialized, even though we did. It made
Speaker:every single person in my life somebody who could hurt me accidentally.
Speaker:That is a bonkers way to feel, especially when you're
Speaker:surrounded by people you love. But I remember one afternoon
Speaker:I was so. I think we had another failure, another
Speaker:unexplained situation. I felt completely
Speaker:devastated by it. And I, at the time, like, the way you kept up with
Speaker:all your friends was Facebook. And so I went on Facebook and I
Speaker:hid every single person who
Speaker:I perceive to be of childbearing age who
Speaker:could announce their pregnancy at any time, because that's all my
Speaker:feed was, was all of these people who
Speaker:didn't have to do anything at all. Didn't have to do even the slightest amount
Speaker:of work and just got pregnant and were announcing. Like, there were people who were
Speaker:announcing their literal third and fourth pregnancies in the time that we were still trying
Speaker:to get pregnant. People who had only had one kid
Speaker:or had. Had no kids when we started. And
Speaker:so I stopped reaching out, I stopped
Speaker:responding. I stopped talking to people. If somebody reached out
Speaker:to me, especially a woman I knew, if somebody reached out to me
Speaker:who I hadn't talked to in a while, I knew exactly what it was about.
Speaker:And I was like, I'm just not going to respond. Would get invited to baby
Speaker:showers. I wouldn't go. Everything felt like an
Speaker:assault. And I remember I was driving back from
Speaker:one of our IVF appointments pretty shortly after I got pregnant with my
Speaker:second child. And there was a
Speaker:doctor on the radio who was a fertility doctor. He
Speaker:partnered with one of the local radio stations to talk about what they do, I
Speaker:guess. And he said, the thing that people don't understand
Speaker:about women going through infertility is that as soon as you realize you're
Speaker:going through infertility, everybody around you is pregnant. And I went, oh,
Speaker:my God. That felt like a punch in the stomach because it was so true.
Speaker:But I didn't realize, again, thought this was just me. Thought that I
Speaker:was just this unhinged, crazy person who
Speaker:couldn't handle this very normal life thing that sometimes happens
Speaker:that was happening to us but wasn't happening to us because
Speaker:somebody was mean or cruel or unkind or whatever. It's just a thing. It's just
Speaker:a thing. I think I was a pretty social person
Speaker:before infertility. Like, I still like to be home in my pajamas and
Speaker:not put pants on a lot. But I wouldn't have thought twice about
Speaker:making plans to go to dinner with a friend or
Speaker:go to a party with a bunch of people. I might have thought twice about
Speaker:the party with a bunch of people because that was I. I still never really
Speaker:liked parties, but, like, really, it started feeling like every single person who was walking
Speaker:past me had the potential to be a threat. Doesn't
Speaker:sound right, because they weren't doing anything to harm me. But definitely, like. Like, you
Speaker:know, in. In video games, when somebody walks past and they have, like, the red
Speaker:thing around them, which means, like, this is a person who could attack or
Speaker:this is a person who could be dangerous. That's basically what I would
Speaker:see every time somebody walked past me or every time I was
Speaker:reintroduced to somebody who I already knew. And the only way I could think to
Speaker:get through it was to just cut myself off from it. Was that the way
Speaker:to handle it? Maybe not. Maybe I. Instead of putting all the
Speaker:eggs into the this will all get better when we get pregnant basket, which,
Speaker:by the way, it didn't. If you've been through infertility and loss,
Speaker:it's not like you get pregnant and, like, everything's just fine. Like, now you have
Speaker:to go through nine months of incubating this human. Or if you're me, seven and
Speaker:a half at most, going like, oh, God, I hope I don't screw this up.
Speaker:Oh, my God, what if this doesn't work? So it's not like you think, like,
Speaker:I'm gonna get a positive pregnancy test and I'm gonna be so happy and everything
Speaker:is gonna be great, and we are gonna be out of this period of our
Speaker:lives, and we're never gonna have to worry about it again. That is not what
Speaker:happens. You pee on a stick,
Speaker:you're not sure if it's positive. You start telling yourself that
Speaker:you're crazy because you have looked at so many of them and you've never seen
Speaker:the second line before. Or if you've had it didn't work out in your favor.
Speaker:You think you see the second line. You're like, I.
Speaker:I think there might be a line here. I
Speaker:think. I think there's a line here. No, I'm
Speaker:crazy. There's never a line here. It can't be that. And then you either take
Speaker:another one or you wait a couple hours and you take another one. And then
Speaker:all of a sudden, it's like, oh, that's definitely a line. Oh, my gosh,
Speaker:definitely a line. And you're, like, really, really happy and really excited.
Speaker:And then all of the doom and gloom and shame that came
Speaker:with the last set of things starts setting in, and you go,
Speaker:okay, well, how long is this going to last? What
Speaker:if it's not real? What if it ends tomorrow? What if it ends in two
Speaker:weeks? What if I get it in my head that this is actually going to
Speaker:happen and then it doesn't? And then on top of it. We've talked about this
Speaker:before. This idea of talking about pregnancy loss, talking about
Speaker:infertility. It's, you know, these are ugly topics. And we've been taught that we don't
Speaker:talk about ugly topics. I didn't tell a single person,
Speaker:this is me, me, person on the Internet who talks about everything
Speaker:and who overshares every part of my life. There were
Speaker:two people in the world who knew we were going through Fertility treatments. And my
Speaker:parents were not in those two people. There was one person who worked with me
Speaker:and so she came with me to a couple of appointments, obviously my husband, so
Speaker:I guess technically three and I think one other person.
Speaker:We did it by ourselves. We didn't tell anybody. We didn't share with
Speaker:anybody. I didn't know how to share with anybody. I didn't know how to
Speaker:tell anybody that this was so awful and hurt so
Speaker:badly and that
Speaker:nothing we did seemed to work. I sat in
Speaker:waiting rooms full of other women who were waiting for doctors at
Speaker:fertility clinics, certain that I was the only person who had ever gone
Speaker:through this. When there was literally examples around me
Speaker:every single time I was there. It's never like I was sitting in an empty
Speaker:waiting room. Everybody goes to a fertility clinic
Speaker:for about the same reason, some version of the same reason.
Speaker:You don't go to a fertility clinic because you're not trying to get pregnant.
Speaker:You don't go to a fertility clinic because you could just get pregnant at home,
Speaker:easy. There are different reasons, but they are all with
Speaker:the same end goal. They're all headed toward the same thing. And I was still
Speaker:convinced it was just me. Nobody would understand. I was mortally
Speaker:terrified of somebody finding out. I remember one time I had to go
Speaker:to a follow up appointment and for some reason
Speaker:I had my dad, like he's a child. I was babysitting. I had my dad
Speaker:that day. And I said, all right, well, I have an appointment in the morning
Speaker:and then I'll come back and then we'll. I don't remember where my mom was.
Speaker:But then we'll go figure out things and just
Speaker:thinking like, my dad would never. My dad would never question further,
Speaker:right? I don't know what I was thinking. And finally he looks at me and
Speaker:he's like, you want to tell me what the appointment's for? Or you're just going
Speaker:to keep saying you have a weird appointment. And I was like, I don't remember
Speaker:how I weaseled out of it, but I did weasel out of it. But even
Speaker:my dad, my best friend in the world, didn't know because I had no idea
Speaker:how to tell anybody. First off, we had always, we had always held this line.
Speaker:It was very protective. It was very much designed so that we
Speaker:didn't have to invite anybody into this process. But people would ask us
Speaker:all the time, like, when are you guys gonna have kids? And we would always
Speaker:basically say like, we didn't want kids. We were happy with dogs. And you can
Speaker:put dogs in boxes and leave the house. But people get mad when you do
Speaker:that with children. And we used to say that all the time. And it was
Speaker:pretty effective at silencing people. People didn't ask again after that. That
Speaker:was, like, our standard response. It's how we got people to back off of it.
Speaker:First off, don't ask people when they're going to have kids. It's not your business.
Speaker:That's a personal question. And you have no idea what those people are going
Speaker:through. None. It is a
Speaker:perfectly reasonable decision to decide that you don't want kids. Child free
Speaker:is a great way to pee. I love my children. I would have 10 more.
Speaker:But you can love money and sleep as much as you can any small human.
Speaker:And I stand by that. I would never trade my kids for anything
Speaker:in the world. They are my favorite humans. But, like, I'm already
Speaker:here if you're not. That is a valid decision to make.
Speaker:But don't ask. You literally are ripping off a band aid on
Speaker:somebody who's going through infertility when you insert yourself in that. And they don't
Speaker:have to tell you if they don't want to. Maybe they will. But then how
Speaker:are you going to feel if you say, when are you going to have kids?
Speaker:And they say, oh, we've been trying for six years and we've had 18 miscarriages.
Speaker:Just let it hang there in the air because you're asking an question you shouldn't
Speaker:be asking. It's not your business. Somebody's fertility
Speaker:and family planning is not your business. Don't ask them. Every
Speaker:time somebody asked that question, I would, with a straight face, without missing a beat,
Speaker:gave the same answer, and then leave and go cry.
Speaker:Because all of these people think that we should have kids, but for some reason,
Speaker:my uterus does not. It changed me on a
Speaker:molecular level. It changed how I interact with other people. It changed how
Speaker:I respond to good news. It changed how I trust almost
Speaker:anything. It changed how
Speaker:I felt about life transitions. It
Speaker:changed how I felt about this idea of being able to plan your life and
Speaker:make decisions for yourself. Like, I had no control over that I wasn't
Speaker:gonna plan. It changed my sense of fairness.
Speaker:I used to get. I still get really angry when things seem just,
Speaker:like, completely unfair. Even though, as my dad would say, life's not
Speaker:fair and stop waiting for fair. But it did suck
Speaker:when everybody around me is just, like, popping out perfectly
Speaker:healthy kids. And then not only was I years into the process before we finally
Speaker:got pregnant, but then when I, you know, then my Water would just like break
Speaker:randomly seven and a half months in and be like, we're doing this today. And
Speaker:then we do weeks in the NICU and have all of the terror that
Speaker:comes with that. Meanwhile, like friendo over there is having kid number
Speaker:six, completely unmedicated home water births.
Speaker:I so I remember when Michelle Obama wrote her first
Speaker:book. My husband gave me a copy of it and he was like, before you
Speaker:read anything else, you need to read this chapter. And I was like, why? And
Speaker:he was like, just because. So I did and I went and read the chapter
Speaker:and it, I guess it turned out that Michelle Obama had to do IVF
Speaker:for both of their kids. Again, seeing it on paper really
Speaker:did. And we had our kids at this point, but seeing it on paper
Speaker:really did. It made me feel like somebody understood me in a much
Speaker:bigger way, even if she had never met me. It also showed that that
Speaker:part of your life you can get past and you will. I'm never gonna be
Speaker:a person who didn't go through that. It changed everything about me
Speaker:internally. It changed my brain wrinkles in
Speaker:ways that I probably don't even realize. I will never ask people
Speaker:what they're planning to do about having children. I don't ask. I support
Speaker:people on whatever their decisions are. It is not my business.
Speaker:When my brother and my now sister in law got married, I literally
Speaker:said to them, maybe like right when they get married, got married, I was like,
Speaker:by the way, I don't know if you guys want kids or whatever, but I'm
Speaker:not ever going to ask and I'm not going to get involved. And if you
Speaker:need things, if you have questions about
Speaker:fertility or whatever, let me know because I'm an endless
Speaker:resource on, on the who, what, where and how to find doctors and whatever.
Speaker:But I'm never going to offer it and I'm never going to insert myself because
Speaker:not having kids is a completely reasonable thing. But also like, I'm just
Speaker:going to make the assumption that it's not my business until you tell me. And
Speaker:they're the only people I've ever told that. But I also thought like, well,
Speaker:this is technically my family, so they should know. I mean, it is definitely my
Speaker:family, so they should know that if they need resources, I have the resources. But
Speaker:other than that, stop asking people about their fertility. Stop asking them
Speaker:about having children. Having children is not a foregone
Speaker:conclusion of being in a relationship. There are people in this world
Speaker:who just like their partners enough to be with them, which seems
Speaker:wild to me, but all right,
Speaker:and that's enough. And that should be enough. So if you've gone through infertility, whether
Speaker:you have your babies at this point or not, if you've gone through pregnancy loss,
Speaker:it's not shameful. I wish I knew that more at the time. It's
Speaker:not anything that you've done. It's very
Speaker:rarely anything that has anything to do with your actions. That was
Speaker:really hard for me to understand because I figured that if
Speaker:it was happening, it had to be me. And
Speaker:I see you and I'm sorry. And if it's something you do want to talk
Speaker:about, if it's something you do need a sounding board for, I am always available
Speaker:and around and I have all the bandwidth in the world to
Speaker:curse at your uterus with you or your partner's uterus. I don't know
Speaker:who's supposed to be uterizing the baby. But also it's
Speaker:okay to just not and know that it is
Speaker:a traumatic experience for so many reasons. It's
Speaker:traumatic when you go through loss, it's traumatic when you go through failures. It's traumatic
Speaker:when you find out that this probably isn't going to happen naturally anyway. That's
Speaker:terrifying. We had a pretty traumatic loss. It
Speaker:resulted in my youngest, but she was a
Speaker:twin. And despite the fact that we still had a healthy pregnancy,
Speaker:the period of getting between, for all intents and purposes,
Speaker:her showing up on a positive pregnancy test to us
Speaker:being able to find, let's just say she was an asshole even then. But us
Speaker:being able to find her on an ultrasound and confirm that
Speaker:all of the other things that had happened must have
Speaker:been recurrent loss while, while she
Speaker:survived, basically. I mean, it still had me in bed for weeks
Speaker:on end despite the fact that we had confirmed that what was happening, like
Speaker:the things that stuck were good. There's no right
Speaker:response. There's no wrong response. I think the
Speaker:only wrong response that I maybe had throughout the process was not recognizing
Speaker:that I needed help other than to just get pregnant. I needed somebody to talk
Speaker:to, I needed somebody to intervene. I needed somebody to tell me that I didn't
Speaker:have to do all the emotional labor for the whole process because I'm the neurotic,
Speaker:high strung one of the two of us. And he was just okay, kind of
Speaker:going with the flow and seeing what happened and trying again. And I was.
Speaker:I don't know if people know this about me, but I have control issues. And
Speaker:that was the thing. I have a couple of, just a couple of very
Speaker:small control issues, very small, almost imperceptible
Speaker:they might as well not exist. Unless you're a person who knows
Speaker:me, in which case they exist
Speaker:everywhere. So, anyway, if you're going through that, I see you. I'm sorry.
Speaker:It sucks. If you need a safe space to scream into the void,
Speaker:this is that safe space. There are no wrong feelings about
Speaker:it. And also, everybody in your life who can just sneeze
Speaker:and get pregnant can go fuck themselves.
Speaker:For this week's small talk again, Remember, this is something we do every week.
Speaker:Thanks for being here, guys. Have a good day. Love you, Mina.
Speaker:I'm so going back to being on Do Not Disturb. This has been a
Speaker:nightmare. I've. I've had a taste of peace and quiet
Speaker:and silence. And I am. I'm not going back.
Speaker:Holy. This is awful.
