[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to Start to Finish Motherhood, a.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Podcast for those thinking or already single mothers by choice.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Just looking for practical advice for navigating life's relationships. When you decide to have children on.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Your own, it doesn't mean that you're completely alone.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: I'm Aisha Jenkins and I'm partnering with you every step of your journey.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Life with two children has been quite the adventure.
So having a second child has been one of my best life decisions ever. I love parenting each child, and they are very different people, they have very different needs, and they make me a better person and a more empathetic person.
I tell them, my oldest started my family, my oldest made me a mom, and my youngest completed our family.
And it's amazing how you speak life into the children, right? And so they parrot that back to me. And they are so proud of their independent, unique roles in the family. And I just, I love it. I look back on the times where it was just me and Noel, and I loved sharing my pregnancy with her. To this day, she tells her sister how she would kick her from within my belly.
And, you know, so she has vivid memories of the time when mommy was pregnant and the time when mommy went in for delivery. So it is. It's funny now that Camille is at an age that Camille is at the age that Noel was when this episode was recorded. And they had the same developmental needs for that age. So at six years old, they were pushing up against boundaries.
[00:02:06] Speaker C: Six years old.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: At six years old, they are pushing up against boundaries. Both Noel and Camille are pushing up against those boundaries. At 6, they're still cuddly, so I still get to snuggle Camille all the time. Noelle is not as cuddly and not cuddly all the time, but I do cherish the moment she snuggles in my bed or she lets me hug her and kiss her cheeks. So fast forward, I suspect Noel being the oldest, she. She's moving into kind of like those tween ages. And she's a little bit shy, she's.
[00:02:45] Speaker C: A little bit more reserved.
[00:02:48] Speaker B: I have to speak more life into her, more strength into her and more confidence into her. So a lot more validating what she already knows about herself and just loving on her. And so I letting her know that while I am giving her independence, I'm still here.
I still love her unconditionally. We bump heads, and so I know that there are times where she's just like, mommy, you're so overbearing. And there are times where I'm just like, ooh child, what are you doing?
So, yeah, I still give more hugs than I yell because having to be a mom, I have to balance in that softness that they need to feel secure and, and being a disciplinarian. And so sometimes it can feel counterintuitive to me. And so, you know, when I have to yell and say, I need you to do this right now, they both look shaken and jar jarred. Right. And so that, that makes me sad, you know, and I immediately want to put my arms around them, but I can't undermine myself in that moment because I need them to really understand that when I said something in that moment, I need them to actually do the thing that I asked them to do. So that's where we are. We have our moments, we have our explosions. I think we're learning and internalizing the mindfulness practice of deep breathing. When we need time away, we take time away.
We're all three really good at articulating our feelings and our needs. Camille will sometimes say, you know, mommy, I'm not excited about going to school on Monday.
Or Noel will say, mommy, stop doing that because you don't like it when I do that. And I think like somebody said in one of the episodes, parenting the child in front of you is that you have to kind of let them push back against you as that flexible boundary so that they understand that they can push back. You're going to love them anyway. You're going to talk them through.
Where we are now in terms of conception stories with a 6 year old and an 11 year old, we are having more concrete conversations about each child's conception story.
I'm still very mindful of having private conversations with each child individually because they do have some variations in their donors.
I want to make sure that they each understand that their unique conception stories and then they can come together and discuss, as I know siblings will, which, you know, warms my heart, that they will be able to talk through.
So it's just evolving. But like we say in the SMC community, tell them early, tell them often. I am now 11 and a half years in and I have told my children early. I have told them often and it is just a regular part of our lives now. They do have their moments where they do wish that there was another adult in the house. My youngest will ask about a daddy. The children are just realizing that mommy had been married before and what that means. And so it is very interesting for them to see me as a human person and then to ask me those questions because that now opens the door for me to talk about relationships and to talk about friendships and to talk about how people should treat you. And then based on this episode, the advice that I'd offer Essences is still the same. If your end goal is to be a parent, explore all options until you're satisfied or you come to peace with any potential results. And that will vary from person to person and nobody can tell you, you know what is right for you. You will know and you will have a sense of peace.
Let's see. Save money for that Hail Mary Try. If you're trying to conceive, save money to get you halfway toward an adoption. If adoption is an option for you, save money for a whiny day because you don't know how this journey is going to work out for you.
Life happens and you may need both. You may need a Hail Mary and you may need that rainy day fund.
So I'm just speaking from experience. Ask me how I know because I needed it all.
I would share my donor egg story the same way as I did with this episode because I think that it is important for someone to see life after and to understand that not everybody's journey is a straight path and that there are options that are open to you. Not every option is going to be right for you, but knowing what the universe of options are, I think gave me the made me feel empowered in making the best choice for me if I decided to end my journey, if I decide to go a different route. And thank goodness I knew people in the community who had gone each of those different routes. So I was really able to lean into that sisterhood. And to this day, those people are my people and I love them. So I have no regrets for sharing my donor egg story. My daughter, I refer to the gift of the donor egg as a golden egg that was gifted to me from another woman. And I think that honors the donor as well as honoring the honesty of our story. As we get older, we'll get more concrete, but no regrets.
Let's see.
Also, another piece of advice is that once you decide on your path, find a supportive, diverse and safe community to walk this journey with you. Because sometimes you can get so it can become so dark and so overwhelming that you're going to need people to pull you back. You're going to need people to be hopeful for you. You're going to need people to carry the emotional load for you so that you can have a clear head as you go into these different procedures. There was a few women in our group who were trying to conceive for.
[00:09:22] Speaker C: Their first time, running out of money.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: And were like, I don't know if this is going to work. I have one embryo and I can tell you whether it's one try, the third try. Each person who has put into the universe that they wanted to become a parent, they pick their path, they have become parents. And there have also been people who have decided, this is as far as I'm going to go. And I've chosen now another path in life. And I still am friends with all of those people. Let's see. And as you can tell, if you have community, you have opportunities to make some really good friends along the way. I have some people who will be lifelong friends who are children, will grow up together or will vacation together. And I feel truly honored and blessed to have that community, but also to witness other people's journeys. It makes me feel happy. Okay, so now let's get into the details of this oldie but goodie.
[00:10:24] Speaker C: Well, first, I didn't start out wanting to.
I thought I would be pretty much one and done once I had my first child. But when my daughter was about four months old, I knew that I wanted a second child. I had just fallen so much in love and she was such a cuddly little easygoing baby. And so at that point I bought more vials of my donor sperm and then I planned on weaning in anticipation of starting for my second after my daughter's first birthday. So I knew that I would start weaning at six months because it gives the body enough time to recover and hormones rebalance in preparation for another pregnancy. And so my desire for, for a second child only grew as my daughter grew and I became her chief playmate. And in my head I knew that, yeah, I can't do this forever. And so I knew I was not just built to be a soul playmate for a child. Like, when I envisioned motherhood, I envisioned reading the storybooks, playing with the dolls when the baby was bigger. But I still didn't feel that our family was complete. And so I knew that I was ready to dive right back in.
I'm really big on planning and having real honest heart to heart conversations with myself. And so when I was considering having a second baby, I actually had to sit down and see if I could afford two in daycare.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Right.
[00:11:50] Speaker C: Because that's a big chunk of the reality. Once the baby is here, you're going to have to be able to cover all of your other expenses on top of daycare. And daycare is pretty expensive in my part of the country.
And so I had that heart to heart.
I looked at my budget, I looked to see what I could move around.
I had intentionally, when I moved to the area, I had intentionally stayed flexible in my living situation. So my first apartment was roughly like 25, 2600amonth. And then I made a second move when I started trying initially for the second baby, and that had dropped my monthly rent to about 1800. And then once I got deep into the process of trying, I had to make another move that dropped my rent to 1600. So for me, it was a balancing act to free up funds in order to be able to continue trying and also to make the realities of daycare for two a possibility. So for me, finances was really a deciding factor because I was traveling to try for my second to a different city state for a fertility clinic. I had to rely on my entire village to make sure that my big girl got picked up for daycare, that I had backup arrangements in case I could not make it back in time. So anyone who, who knows my story, you know what I'm about to get into, and I am going to get up until a certain point and then pause the conversation because we will straddle into my daughter's story. So when I tried for my first and I delivered at 38 and I had no problem, it was easy peasy. But for my second pregnancy, I also assumed that it was going to be easy peasy. I was 39 at the time. I was healthy. I had good egg reserves. Anytime a fertility doctor saw those numbers, they were like, oh, yeah, great, this should be a walk in the park. I tried my first iui, it did not take. I tried my second iui, it did not take. And then it began to spiral out once I started adding additional intervention. What I didn't know at the time was that I was experiencing secondary infertility, which could happen for a variety of reasons, but I was in the cascade waterfall of a secondary infertility. And so I say all that because I want to put out a psa, because you will hear a lot of stars and a lot of people make the misassumption that, yeah, you can get pregnant into your 40s, mid-40s, even 50s. And while those unicorns do exist, and I chuckle because there are are quite a few unicorns in our black SMC community. But it is fairly rare for a woman to get pregnant after 42, 43, using her own eggs without a lot of hardship. And I had reached the point where I had experienced Hardship, using my own eggs and at the time, my own embryos. And so I made this decision to stop the pain, end the hurt, and I moved to donor egg. And it was easy for me to move to donor for my second pregnancy because I had already known women who had done it and I had seen that this is doable, this is a part of life. It doesn't really impact anything from the point of I got this little tiny pin prick piece of DNA combined with another pin prick piece of DNA and popped it into the uterus. And so for me, that was the answer for being able to continue on with my family building.
I think it helps to know someone who has done this and lived to tell the story. And past having that embryo transferred, I never thought about it again. But I knew that if we were going to do this podcast series and use this as a platform to tell true and honest stories, that I would be remiss if I didn't tell that part of my story.
So in my house, I would say we just started getting into jealousy and it's a comment here or it's a comment there. So it's not an on ongoing, recurrent thing that we deal with. But my oldest daughter has said a few times, like, why does the baby get so much attention? So it is usually jealousy cast onto the baby. And I have to just keep explaining to her that I can't reason with the baby. Like she, she doesn't understand, whereas my six year old does. But what I started doing to balance the equation is pointing out the big and the fun things that my big girl can do that the baby can't. And so since we're in this whole pandemic schooling situation and I have my big girl home with me on Fridays, what I do is we do donut Fridays, right? And so she gets to randomly pick donuts from the donut shop and she gets to have her donut, she gets to have her special time with mom. I do more snuggles at night and just hugging and snuggling on her and carrying her sometimes so that she feels the baby. And yeah, so that's how I handled that. But by and large, we don't have a whole lot of the major jealousy issues that some people might experience keeping in perspective where they are developmentally, it's traumatic every morning.
Every morning it is trying to get the kids up. So one of the things we do, we do our bathing at night. And so mornings are just like really scaled back. Wash your face, brush your teeth, get dressed. That takes us probably an hour and a half like before normal. When I was single, my entire morning was like, roll out of bed, get dressed quickly.
But now I have a full day's worth of emotions and energy expended before I even start my workday. So we pretty much I get the baby up and ready, we snuggle, she eats, she drinks, diaper change, brush teeth and all that. But to get out of the house on time, it is an orchestrated dance routine trying to get out the house, tears. So the only reason I get out of the house on time. There are two things that motivate me to get out of the house and get the troops on the go. One is that I don't want to have to feed my baby a real meal. I will give her pieces of cheese, a piece of toast, just to settle her tummy for the car ride. But a full on breakfast routine, I don't want to do that Monday through Friday. And then also I have to send her to school with a clean diaper. And I know approximately when she poops and if we stay home too long, she's going to poop that new diaper. So I'm like, I don't want to change that. So I make sure that we get out the house before her time to poop so that daycare can change the diaper.
So this pandemic is both a blessing and a curse, right? I will say that because of the timing of the pandemic and where the baby is developmentally, I haven't yet had to fight the restaurants and take in the unruly 18 month old to a restaurant. And I'm hoping that we miss that hellish travel phase where I know if we were not in a pandemic, I would have wanted to take a vacation and then I would have had to deal with what happens when your 18 month old wants to run up and down the airplane. So hopefully I get to avoid all of that and she gets to the point of reason before we take our first plane vacation.
One to two was definitely the harder transition for me and I think because of the age at the time that I was trying and pregnant, my big girl was 4 and 5. So you get used to sleeping, you get used to them being able to feed themselves, go to the bathroom. So when I went from one to two, what almost immediately expanded exponentially was the amount of stuff that comes with a new baby and the amount of stuff that was then in the house and then laundry. Like right now I'm sitting here looking at a beeline of probably two loads of laundry that are washed but need to be folded and at some point you just run out of space because they just require so much stuff and so much clothes and who needs pajamas and all the little socks? I'm just. Yeah, that was the pain points of my transition. So definitely from one to two was harder. Okay. I really wanted to say something that would add value. So I would say pray for a short journey, but save for a long one.
And then in those savings, put aside an extra stash of money for Hail Mary pass, just in case you get to the end of the line and you're just like, I'm just gonna throw everything in the kitchen sink at this. This is my last try. It's my last gasp of breath. And so save for that particular rainy and stormy day. For me, it was considering donor eggs and so I had to make sure that donor egg was still in reach for me. I didn't have to have all of the money, but I needed it to be in reach. I needed to be like 75% there.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: Thanks for listening To Start to Finish Motherhood with Aisha if you want to keep the conversation going, follow Start to Finish Motherhood on Instagram, email
[email protected] if you love this episode, please share it with anyone who's thinking of becoming a single mother by choice. Anyone who's already parenting as a single mother by choice and just looking, looking for advice on navigating it all, or a friend or family member who's looking to support someone else's single mother by choice journey. Until next time. Bye now.
