What You Didn't Expect in Fertility, Pregnancy & Birth: Real Stories & Expert Insights

" Need is an albatross. To be needed is to wear the weight of stones across your chest . To be wanted. That is different. To be wanted by a child is the cleanest of desires. To still be wanted once the child is fed and rested; once the diapers are fresh and the snot has been siphoned from the nostril and the gas has passed through. To be recognized not just as a body, but a person, a comfort...

In today's episode Anja and I talk about one of the biggest, most oppressive misconceptions about motherhood and what you can do to free yourself from it.  We also discuss: * how not being in control can actually be a good thing;  * how being present makes you better able to respond to needs, including your own, and * how the energy you bring into the room and the world has a big impact on bo...

  In today's episode you will hear, useful advice about what you can do if the birth you planned is not the birth you experience , a  very persuasive case for why trusting your intuition is so important and insights on how much control you have in this transformation from person to parent. Nausea & Lethargy in Pregnancy Mayo Clinic on NVP Cleveland Clinic   on NVP Pregnancy Sickness Suppo...

Entering the Postpartum period is like being pushed from a cliff...it's a shocking change of circumstance, and its hard to be ready for it that first time--but with more accurate expectations?? In today's episode, you'll hear the second half of my conversation with Megan. She shares:  how she was able to identify what turned out to be PostPartum Depression in herself given that her...

" I've heard somewhere that the first baby, it's like a bomb going off in the mother's world. It just totally rearranges you. It rearranges your life. " This is a show that shares true experiences of getting pregnant, being pregnant and giving birth to help shift the common cultural narrative, away from the glossy depictions of this enormous transition you can find on all...

Today my guest experiences pain in her everyday life for years after pregnancy. And then finally, after an exploratory surgery gets a diagnosis she's been waiting for. In today's episode you'll hear how Kayshaun, a nurse turned businesswoman who is a mother of four, uses the pain and trauma from her four complicated pregnancies to help other people find their voice and consider natu...

Hi, Welcome to War Stories from the Womb: In this episode, you'll hear how my guest rejected her doctor's insistence on a hysterectomy, and saved her own life. Today you'll hear how my guest learns to trust her body and advocate for herself--a critical skill in any medical procedure, maybe even more critical in childbirth; she had four births and each was visited by something unexpe...

<p>In this episode, you'll hear how Kekua managed when her experience really shoved her expectations for her second birth off a cliff.</p> <p>Tune in to hear how Kekua manages many surprises in the birth of her second child. The number of things that go a bit sideways almost makes her story sound like a sitcom script, but the way she sticks the landing, in the end is what&ap...

This is a show that shares true experiences of getting pregnant, being pregnant and giving birth to help shift the common cultural narrative away from the rainbows and roses depictions you can find on social media, and other media more broadly, to a more realistic one (which might include rainbows and wreckage?).  It also celebrates the incredible resilience and strength it takes to create another...

This is a show that shares true experiences of getting pregnant being pregnant and giving birth to help shift the common cultural narrative away from the glossy depictions of this enormous transition you can find on social media, and other media more broadly, to a more realistic one.  It also celebrates the incredible resilience and strength it takes to create another person and deliver them into...

This is a show that shares true experiences of pregnancy to help shift the common cultural narrative away from the glossy depictions of this enormous transition you can find on social media, and other media more broadly, to a more realistic one.  It also celebrates the incredible resilience and strength it takes to create another person and deliver them into the world. I’m your host, Paulette Kame...

This is a show that shares true experiences of pregnancy to help shift the common cultural narrative away from the glossy depictions of this enormous transition to a more realistic one.  It also celebrates the incredible resilience and strength it takes to create another person and deliver them into the world. I’m your host, Paulette Kamenecka. I’m a writer and an economist and the mother of two g...

 This is a  show that shares the true experiences of pregnancy to help shift the common cultural narrative, away from the glossy depictions of this enormous transition to something more realistic. It also celebrates the incredible resilience and strength it takes to create another person and deliver them into the world. I'm your host, Paulette Kamenecka, writer and an economist and a mother o...

Many women enter pregnancy, coming from a life that feels firmly under their control. That was the case for today’s guest, whose past experience in the world led her to make detailed plans for her home birth. But the stars did not align, and what started out as a home birth ended with a hospital birth attended by a life threatening case of eclampsia.  Luckily, both she and her son survived. For he...

Teenage girls are repeatedly told that pregnancy could fall on them at any moment. Caution is the watchword. But often when those young women grow up, pregnancy is nowhere to be found. That was the experience of today’s guest. When she and her partner set out to start a family, month after month, the pregnancy tests were negative. After some fertility testing the doctors believed that they had nai...

In today's episode we hear the second half of my conversation with Courtney Maum. She shares the motivation for her second pregnancy and the challenging end of that pregnancy. We'll pick up where we left off last week: with wise words from the French gynecologist that Courtney saw for the very first pregnancy appointment for her first pregnancy. for more extended show notes, see: http://...

Today's guest shares her experience of pregnancy, birth and motherhood, none of which conformed to her expectation. She walked into pregnancy ambivalently....and to her surprise loved many of the aspects of the experience that people often find difficult; because of a lifelong struggle with insomnia, the nine month hormone bath of pregnancy gave her luxurious periods of long sought-after slee...

Today we hear the second half of my conversation with Joy about how her experience with preeclampsia played out and her efforts to understand what happened to her, why her hospital care was so chaotic, and how she and her husband returned to a more stable place. I also include more from my conversation with Dr. Oparil and Dr. Sinkey. Both doctors have done important work in the hypertension and pr...

Today's guest walked into pregnancy carefully. She is a health journalist who had researched and reported on pregnancy issues and this work influenced her ideas about the kind of birth she wanted to have. Things began swimmingly, and it wasn't until the third trimester when the first signs of what would become preeclampsia began to emerge, but nothing is diagnosed at this point. The birt...

This week we hear the rest of my conversation with Nicole. At the end of last week she'd described her first birth, which ended in a C section and left Nicole feeling that the birth had been exacted without her full participation, and she was vowing to have a different experience in future births, despite the predictions of one of her doctors, who suggested that she might be too physically sm...

Today's guest walked into pregnancy with an expectation that the process would be as smooth for her as it had been for her mother, as it was for the farm animals she'd been surrounded by for her whole life, as it was from 50,000 feet: civilization depends on this process and women's bodies were made for this project. Although the pregnancy part was relatively straightforward, the wa...

Today we pick up the second half of Melissa's story. At the end of last week's episode Melissa was on bedrest, she has to leave her job and be home with a four year old and a husband who worked full time, in a town in which she didn't have a strong support network because she'd moved there relatively recently. To remind us where she was emotionally, I'm going to share an e...

Today's guest is a clinical psychologist, whose mother passed away a few years before she had any direct experience of pregnancy. She encounters recurrent miscarriage, three in the first trimester, and then a pregnancy that progresses past the first trimester, only to be threatened with prematurity early in the third trimester and experience all of these challenging and transformative events...

Today's guest had a number of challenges with the physical aspects of pregnancy--she and her partner had trouble getting pregnant initially, and her third child was born in June of 2020, very much in the heart of covid, which invited it's own challenges; but what really surprised her was the loss of the person she used to be.  She found motherhood to be both beautiful and completely over...

Today we hear the second half of Eileen's story about her experience with pregnancy. Last week we heard about some of the challenges associated with her miscarriages. But when we left Eileen, she was about to deliver her first baby, having christened the hospital elevator when her water broke on the way up to a birthing room. we'll pick up her story when she's on the way to the hosp...