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The "So Now What?" Podcast


I am a Fertility Survivor.  The kind you enter into treatments hoping you will never be... childless.  After several rounds of IUI and IVF, at some of the leading Fertility Centers, I was told I was no longer a candidate for fertility treatment.  It left me asking myself...

So now what?

For the years that followed, I tried to put myself back together and tell myself I would be OK, but I wasn't.  I was shattered - I felt alone and failed by the whole process and especially, my body.  I yearned for others that felt the pain I felt and someone that could help me navigate a life without a child. 

I didn't find it, so I decide to create it.  

Fast forward to today. I am still childless, but my beliefs about my life have changed.  I decided that I can create meaning and purpose in my life even though I am not a mother.  I've learned to love myself and the body I felt failed me as a woman.

If you've been on this journey, hop on and join me as we create something we were not offered.  Let's create a sisterhood for the bravest women I know.  We brush ourselves off and don't let terms like: Failed, Unexplained, Miscarriage, Not-viable or Advanced Maternal Age define us anymore.  

 

Jun 6, 2023

this will be my last week recording the podcast from this condo. If you have been following along with the podcast or at all on social media, we are moving. This is going to be my second move since selling the house that we thought we would bring our babies home to after our fertility treatments and when my fertility treatments ended and I didn't end up becoming a mom.

I clung to a lot of things in my life and I wanna talk about that this week. Cuz I think when you go through this process of imagining your life being at a certain place and being. Moving in a certain direction and it doesn't end up that way. There's a part of us, I think, as humans that don't wanna let go of the things that feel secure or the things that feel explainable or predictable or understandable in your life, which is fine.

There's no need that just because you find out that you're not gonna become a mom that all of a sudden you feel like. You have to uproot your life and change 1,000,001 things. But for me at least finding out that I couldn't become a mom, I realized that there was an opportunity for me to grow from that.

And I'm gonna talk this week about some of the growth that I've experienced in my own personal life and also share some things that some of the students that I work with have been. Able to grow and see change in their life from a place that took some courage and maybe took some dreaming and took some willingness to put things out in the universe and declare what it is that you are looking for, even if you have no clue.

If it's gonna ever come true for you or whether it's seemingly too big for you to even think it's possible for you to achieve. And if you feel yourself wanting change in your life or maybe seeking more, but not knowing where to go, I invite you to just. Sit here, listen, and maybe allow yourself to disconnect from the things in your life that are telling you you can't or you shouldn't, or it's too risky.

So let me first talk about, you know, the move thing. And if you find yourself in a house that every time you walk past a certain room or when you think about certain occasions going on, you. Think of that house as having been the place you thought you would be hosting Christmases or hosting, um, a birthday party for your kids, or maybe you bought a house that had a swing set in the backyard, or maybe there's a room that you walked past that in your mind was always gonna be the nursery for that child that you thought you were gonna bring home.

And do you find yourself not feeling good? In this place because it has too many reminders of a life that didn't turn out the way that you thought it was going to be with children. I invite you to maybe sit back and ask yourself, where would you see yourself going if this isn't the house or the apartment, or the town home or where?

Wherever it is that your living situation is that you purchased or. We're forward thinking into this future that was gonna have children in it. Where else would you go? Not where could you go? Not where could you afford to go? Not like, don't put any parameters around it, but take some time. You can even pause right now.

If you have your journal with you and you wanna do some paper thinking, pause and just allow yourself a few minutes to close your eyes. And then write down where are some places that you would love to live, but maybe it just doesn't make sense to you right now. Or you know, where, where are some places that you would love to live, but you haven't even really given yourself an opportunity to think about where they would be.

Maybe you can even start, it doesn't even have to be a destination. Maybe you can think about your surroundings, maybe think about a dwelling. Would it be. An apartment, would it be a home? What would the climate be like? How many rooms would there, would there be? What would the environment be like? Is it a city, is it rural?

Is it, you know, maybe a subdivision. So think now and just imagine what that would look like for you. What would. What, what does your your mind automatically go to when you close your eyes and you think about this place that you would love to be living one day? Okay. And when you think about that and you write it down, you don't have to prevent yourself from writing it down because it just doesn't make sense to you, and you tell yourself like, oh, there's absolutely no way this would ever happen.

Just write it down. There's no commitment to it. Nobody has to see it. Nobody has to. Tell you that that's impossible for you to do. You're just simply allowing yourself to notice some of these things. Okay. And so after you give yourself a little bit of opportunity to just get into the zone of what your environment would be like, and tell me what are some of the things that would allow you.

To welcome that into your environment. Would it be a new job? Would it be making more money? Would it be telling someone in your family that you're moving away? Would it be talking to your partner about potentially relocating, you know, maybe it's a conversation that you're fearful of having. And we talked about this, one of my students, I have been working on this, she's potentially gonna be relo, relocating and talking about like, what does that conversation look like?

What are all the things that just come to your mind that you would need to accomplish in order to make it to that place? And what does the timeline look like? Maybe you don't wanna move next month. Maybe you don't wanna move next year, maybe in a few years. You have an idea in your mind, so start thinking about the timeline of it.

That doesn't mean that you're having to commit to that right now, but maybe you can tell yourself, all right, I just know in two years I'm gonna think about this. In two months I'm gonna think about this, and until then, I'm just gonna let my mind continue to marinate about being at that point in my life.

And when you put it on paper, it just allows you to have sort of this. Target and then that target doesn't seem, seems so unattainable. And so allowing yourself to also look at what you have, you know, that was something for me. You've heard me talk about selling my, my dream house. The house that I thought I was gonna bring my babies home to was special to me.

Not only because that's where I thought I was gonna become a mom, but I also loved that house. The decoration in the house, the finishes in the house, the furniture in the house, I love, that was like literally my dream house. Like something when I was a young girl or even fresh outta college and into the working world, like I never in a thousand years would've imagined I could have lived in something so beautiful.

But I did. And that made it so much harder for me to say goodbye to it. So maybe you're finding yourself. Being somewhere that you tell yourself it will never get better than this. And what if it doesn't have to get better than that? What if you could do the same thing somewhere else if you've done that once before?

Maybe if you're desiring to be somewhere else, geographically or environment to physically be different. If you love where you are right now or love aspects of your life, Where they are right now. Maybe it's your neighbors, maybe it's the proximity to family. I mean, there's a host of things that might be telling you that if you leave this physical environment, that it's never gonna be better anywhere else.

What if that's false? Cuz we sold our house and we're renting, like I never would've thought in my forties I would be a renter. And I was like uncomfortable with that because renting in my mind, MyCoach, unmanaged mind renting was sort of like not a grownup thing to do. I don't have to rent forever, but what if my renting is allowing me to have this freedom so that in my next venture I can have a different type of environment to be in?

Or a different type of physical setting to be in. So if you tell yourself that there's a right way and a wrong way to live your life, you create a lot of judgment for yourself. And when you judge yourself, you don't let yourself dream. You don't allow yourself to be open and free to things because you have been conditioned or your mind has been conditioned.

To believe that there is a right way and a wrong way of doing things, and so we oftentimes close ourselves off of experiencing different types of things or meeting new people or looking at new environments or looking into new hobbies because that's just not the, the right thing to do, or not the. The way that you were raised to live or the, the type of environment that you were conditioned to believe is the right environment for you.

And if you can just allow yourself to believe that if, if your physical surroundings are the only thing that are gonna make you happy, then you are always going to be attached to things outside of you. And that's something that I found. With me and my old house. It was a beautiful home. It was an impressive home.

It was a home that people who came to visit told me like it was the most beautiful thing they ever had been in. And I came to realize that a lot of my acceptance of myself and a lot of my worth that I associated with who I was and what I accomplished in my life was associated with. Tangible things. It was associated with material things.

It was associated with a sofa or a piece of art or these things that are great to have. I mean, I like them. I enjoy them. I enjoy art. I love having great, beautiful furniture. I love having my own style and a modern look in my house like, but I had to allow myself to let go of those things. In order to see that without a beautiful home or without an impressive this or a sought after that, I was so much freer because that allowed me to see like I can recreate those things and maybe I don't even want to recreate them.

Maybe there's things in your life that you're holding onto because they feel secure to you. And when we go through fertility treatments and we've dreamed of this life that turned out so differently, it may feel really good for you right now to just hold onto these things that are constants in your life or things that are known things in your life, and there will be a time when you can let go of those things.

And bring yourself to this next level. And it doesn't have to be a better stage of life or a worse stage of life or a lateral stage of life. It could just be something different that you've experienced and letting go of the thing that you think is giving you the security in your life can be so freeing.

And even this condo that we moved into, it's. In my opinion, probably one of the most beautiful condominiums in all of Chicago. The most beautiful view of the city I have ever seen. And when our lease came up, I could have easily been like so sad to leave this, but we're going to a smaller place with a different view in a different type of setting and I find myself being excited about that.

And not feeling like I'm giving anything up, but that because I am childless, not by choice, I'm able to grow from that instead of be held by that and be feeling suffocated by that title that I associated with. Like I thought because I was childless after infertility, that my life would never grow past that, that I would just have to hold onto these things.

That gave me this worth in my life. But now I can see like all this change. So now we're going to our next apartment. We're still renting. I signed a two year lease. So for two years anything could happen. Who knows, like maybe we'll find a house somewhere else and we'll buy a house again. Maybe we're gonna move out of Illinois.

Maybe we're gonna relocate somewhere across the world. Who knows what happens, but. It's just such an interesting concept that so many of my students come to work with me feeling as though they can't allow things to change, because dealing with the change of becoming a woman without children is just too much to bear.

So the other things just have to stay, stay contained in their life. And then they've come to realize like, if anything, it's holding them back. And that is the power of coaching and that is the power of being part of Thrive. And working with a life coach is learning how much more is available to you that you haven't even considered.

And for so long before coaching, I remember feeling just so trapped and so stuck and thinking like, is this the best? That it's gonna get in my life and feeling like, like I tapped out, like here I was in, you know, my late thirties and my early forties, and thinking like this was the best my life was gonna get, and it felt so suffocating.

So I really want you to start allowing yourself to dream about if things were to change, how would they change? And maybe it's not your house, maybe it's a job, maybe. It's an organization that you're a part of. Maybe it's a volunteer opportunity. Maybe it's finding new friends or joining a community or working with a coach.

I mean, there's a host of things that could change in your life, but you have to first believe that you are open to this change and that the change doesn't have to be scary to you. It could be exciting to you. And even if it's so different and the security blanket of life that doesn't really feel good to you, but feels secure could be the thing that is holding you back.

So I've just been really thinking about that and obviously watching so many of my students grow and the beautiful things that they have accomplished through their journeys and through our time working together and coaching. And I just wanna offer that to you this week. I also want to ask if you could help me reach a goal of mine.

So I am about to hit 20,000 downloads of the So Now What Podcast, and I'm asking if you can help me by writing and rating the podcast. If you've listened to an episode and it spoke to you in some certain way, could you please write a review of. What the podcast is for you. Maybe there's something that it's sparked in you.

Maybe you just enjoyed listening. Maybe you enjoy knowing that there's other people out there who you hear your story through and you've never heard anyone else experience a thing that you've experienced through your infertility journey. And the reason I ask you to rate and review it is because the more.

Ratings and reviews the algo, the algorithm Gods will then farm it out and have it show up on people's search terms and when they're searching on Google. So if you could just do that for me, I will send you a t-shirt from the other's day brunch. All you have to do is send me a screenshot of your review and I will reach back out to you, get you your address, get your address from you, and I will send you an other's day T-shirt from our other's day brunch in Chicago this year. If you didn't hear about the other's day brunch, go on Instagram or you can go to stitch coaching.com. I'm sorry. If you haven't heard about the others' day brunch, you can go on lanamankowski.com and rewatch a fabulous national news story that covered the others' day brunch in the mission of the others' day that I founded in 2022.

It was a glorious event. If you wanna be part of our others' day brunch next year, you can reach me at lanamankowski.com. Hope you have a good week. I love you. And remember, it is never too late to discover your meaning. I'll talk to you next week.