The Miscarriage Dads Podcast
E20: A Journey Through Infertility to Unexpected Parenthood (ft. Tom Kreffer)
Welcome to episode 20!
When hope seems a distant memory and the journey to parenthood is shadowed by infertility, the story of one man's unexpected path to fatherhood emanates like a beacon of resilience. Tom Kreffer, a UK author and father, joins me to relay his deeply personal experience—from penning letters to an unborn child to embracing the surprise of natural conception. His narrative, set against the stark reality of a nearly zero chance diagnosis, speaks to the heart of every listener grappling with similar adversities and the quest for family.
The profound transformation from wanderlust-filled adventures to the anchored responsibilities of parenting is a tale that resonates deeply. Tom's memoirs, which began as cathartic journals, have become a testament to the power of writing through life's tempests. Our conversation traverses the emotional landscape of secondary infertility, the societal stigmas faced, and the delicate balance of cherishing the present while yearning for more. Tom's journey, reflective and enlightening, offers an intimate glimpse into the less-discussed male perspective on infertility and its impact on identity, relationships, and dreams of legacy.
This episode is a mosaic of shared experiences, from navigating the complexities of the UK's healthcare system post-COVID to the emotional resilience required when expanding a family remains an elusive dream. Tom's interaction with other couples at baby shows underscores the silent struggle many endure, while his books provide solace to women and men alike, seeking to comprehend and share in this deeply human experience. Tune in for an exploration of the emotional support necessary for men and the vital understanding that each journey through grief and infertility is as unique as the individuals who tread these paths.
Sincerely,
Kelly
Follow on IG @themiscarriagedad
Email themiscarriagedad@gmail.com
Make sure you subscribe!
Write us a review!
Welcome to episode 20!
When hope seems a distant memory and the journey to parenthood is shadowed by infertility, the story of one man's unexpected path to fatherhood emanates like a beacon of resilience. Tom Kreffer, a UK author and father, joins me to relay his deeply personal experience—from penning letters to an unborn child to embracing the surprise of natural conception. His narrative, set against the stark reality of a nearly zero chance diagnosis, speaks to the heart of every listener grappling with similar adversities and the quest for family.
The profound transformation from wanderlust-filled adventures to the anchored responsibilities of parenting is a tale that resonates deeply. Tom's memoirs, which began as cathartic journals, have become a testament to the power of writing through life's tempests. Our conversation traverses the emotional landscape of secondary infertility, the societal stigmas faced, and the delicate balance of cherishing the present while yearning for more. Tom's journey, reflective and enlightening, offers an intimate glimpse into the less-discussed male perspective on infertility and its impact on identity, relationships, and dreams of legacy.
This episode is a mosaic of shared experiences, from navigating the complexities of the UK's healthcare system post-COVID to the emotional resilience required when expanding a family remains an elusive dream. Tom's interaction with other couples at baby shows underscores the silent struggle many endure, while his books provide solace to women and men alike, seeking to comprehend and share in this deeply human experience. Tune in for an exploration of the emotional support necessary for men and the vital understanding that each journey through grief and infertility is as unique as the individuals who tread these paths.
Sincerely,
Kelly
Follow on IG @themiscarriagedad
Email themiscarriagedad@gmail.com
Make sure you subscribe!
Write us a review!
That's the thing with infertility. It doesn't unless you've had something like something gone wrong where, if you've received a medical diagnosis, where part of the diagnosis is you will not have children. In most experiences it sort of happens incrementally. You start by trying for a baby. It doesn't happen month one, okay, fine, you go again. You go again. At some point a little bit of doubt enters your mind and you start to question why? Why is this not happening?
Speaker 3:This is the Miscarriage Dads podcast, a podcast humanizing the experience of miscarriage by normalizing dads openly talking about its impact on us as men and fathers. I am delighted to have one of my good friends from across the world join me in this conversation today for this podcast, so I'm going to ask my man, tom, to please introduce himself.
Speaker 1:Thanks, kelly, good to catch up again. So my name is Tom Creffer. I'm an author from the UK. I write memoirs about parenting.
Speaker 1:I began the day I found out I was going to be a dad.
Speaker 1:I wrote a journal entry and I addressed it to my unborn child.
Speaker 1:It was a bit of a road to find him and to get him in place, because we didn't think we could have children. The process of writing down a few thoughts and feelings on a bit of paper felt pretty good, so I ended up doing that every day for the duration of pregnancy, and I was about three months in when I realized I was accidentally writing my first book, and that came out, dear Dory, in 2020. And since then, every day I've reflected on parenthood. I've wrote in my journal and I've addressed each entry to my then unknown son, but now Arlo, he's almost four and that's led to four books so far out in the world, with more in the works, and we were told we wouldn't have children. Charlene is my partner, so when he did show up, it was a bit of a shock. Hence why I decided to verbalize some of my thoughts and feelings onto paper to try and untangle the sort of emotional mess in my head that I couldn't really understand, and he was born in 2019.
Speaker 3:So let's go back to the early days of you and your wife trying to start your family. Obviously, it sounds like this is something that both of you were sure you wanted to do when you got together, or maybe after you got together, that you both wanted to become parents. So who was Tom prior to everything that Tom ended up going through, before or as he was trying to become a father? Who was that Tom in comparison to the Tom after that first loss experience, if you will?
Speaker 1:Tom enjoyed going on holiday all the time. When I met Charlene, I had come out of a horrible breakup from a previous relationship. She just came around at the perfect time. She was great, she was friendly, she was everything I look for in a partner and she just loved hanging out and she loved going on holiday as well. So when we first met we got really into traveling. We'd go away all the time. One year, I think, we went away every single month for the year and we just loved hanging out and in the early days we talked about family. We established that we would want the kids at some point in the future. We never set a date and then I took a career break from work and we hit the road and we went traveling all around the world.
Speaker 1:We started in Africa and then moved over to Asia and we planned to do a year, but at the time I was in my mid-30s and we were getting tired. It is tiring sleeping in cars, camping, backpacking around lots of fun, a ton of fun, so many memorable experiences. But we were getting tired and we were in Hong Kong in the worst hostel you could imagine. It had like snot-green-hued walls and the conversation began again. When do we think we'd like to have children? 20 minutes later, charlene threw her contraceptive pill in the bin and that was the beginning of it. That was the beginning of the journey. That was 2017, I think. November, october, november, 2017 and we were still traveling. So we, there was no pressure, there was no, there was no apps, there was no right. We've got to have sex at midnight under a full moon, with blessings from you know which whichever saint, god, deity. There's none of that. So we carried on traveling around and then we got back home the following year and we kept trying and it wasn't happening and we didn't know why.
Speaker 1:That's the thing with infertility it doesn't unless you've had something like something gone wrong, where, if you've received a medical diagnosis, where the part of the diagnosis is you will not have children. In most experiences, it it sort of happens incrementally. You start by trying for a baby. It doesn't happen. Month one, okay, fine. You go again. You go again two months, three months, four months. At some point a little bit of doubt enters your mind and you start to question why is this not happening? And then you begin to go through the process of well, what do we do now? Is it too early to call the doctor, book an appointment, is it not? Are we blowing things out of proportion? What do we do? So those sort of small incremental steps happen very gradually.
Speaker 1:And we got to a year. We got to a year and nothing was happening. So we called the doctor, we did tests, fertility tests, fine, all okay. And then Charlene went in for a treatment, a procedure, and that's when we got the diagnosis that the chances of us conceiving naturally were next to zero. Charlene was told she would need to have at least one, possibly both, fallopian tubes removed and that we would need to go on the waiting list for IVF. That was a blow. That was a big blow. That was the first time where we were hit with news that we just had to absorb on the spot. That wasn't pleasant.
Speaker 3:What did that do to you, Tom?
Speaker 1:I needed a few days to process fine, big, big piece of news, and then I would always respond to these challenges by looking at whatever variables are within my control and within fertility. I realized there was not a lot that I could control. So I started wrapping my head around the possibility that children just may not be part of our future. Or, if they are, the journey to get there looks very different than we originally visualized, and we had no roadmap. We hadn't sat down and explored what those other roads to parenthood would look like or could look like. So we had a very brief sort of period where we were like okay, maybe our lives aren't going to pan out quite as we planned. Okay, maybe our lives aren't going to pan out quite as we planned.
Speaker 1:But that episode concluded very quickly because before we received the surgery dates in the post, sharlene fell pregnant naturally. And yeah, as I said, when we started recording, that was the last thing I expected to happen. I was so shocked, so overwhelmed, so grateful to the universe for giving me something that medical experts had told me would not happen. And then we began our pregnancy journey, and that's when I became an author and the book came out and the start of our sort of happy parenting life and everyone told me what I was in for with a baby and the lack of sleep and how hard it was.
Speaker 3:And everyone was wrong.
Speaker 1:We just got so lucky with Arlo. He was sleeping through the night. By seven weeks he was born healthy, he was happy, he's a content. He still is. He's just a wonderful little boy, so special, and it was for that reason that we were only six months into the journey with with him when we started talking about going again. And that's that's really where the next sort of stage, the plot development of the story, happens, because that's a conversation where you say, well, hang on a minute, we were told it wouldn't happen. It did happen. Is arlo a medical misdiagnosis or is he really that one in a million miracle child the doctors have, you know, leading us to believe and we have to try and answer that? Of course you can't answer that question. We had no idea, but that's that's the conversation we had when decided whether to go for round two so, before, before we jump into, before we jump into round two I want to spend a little bit more time on the.
Speaker 3:That first impact, that first diagnosis of Charlene is going to have to perhaps get both of her fallopian tubes removed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you guys are out traveling.
Speaker 3:You are, you're seeing the world, and I think traveling and seeing the world especially in the way that that you describe it it you're learning so much, not just about the world but about who you are, and you're doing it with your wife, so you're learning about who she is, and there are all sorts of discoveries happening right, like your value systems are being shaped and influenced, and all of that good stuff, which is, to anyone who has not traveled, outside of going to an all inclusive hotel in the tropics somewhere, which is awesome also to see the world and putting yourself, immersing yourself in other cultures, to see other lifestyles, and there's so much value in that.
Speaker 3:So you're doing that, the conversations are happening. In that context. I'm imagining that there is a sense of your identity, as to who you imagined yourself to be as a father when it happened that also was being birthed around that time, or maybe even before that and then to get that news that there are all of these possibilities, that this may never happen. What parts of you died when you heard that. How did that change your outlook on yourself, on life, as you were in the midst of doing all of this traveling and discovery, I think something I spent a lot of time thinking about is why we have children in the first place.
Speaker 1:What drives us to have children? We could talk about this for days. Is it a subconscious biological, biological process designed to keep our species afloat, keep them surviving, pass on to the next generation? Is it so that we have someone to look after us when we're older, when we're in our twilight years? Is it because we're social creatures and we have love to give? And is it just just born out of that? I think about that all the time.
Speaker 1:Now when, regardless of the reasons, I think we can agree that when you sit down and agree to start a family, there are driving factors inside of you. They're incredibly powerful. Incredibly strong, even if you can't articulate what they are. I've thought about it for a long time, but I still have no idea exactly what. What it is that drives us to have children. Because, as a father, the gig is bonkers. It's so tough. You, you give away so much of your freedom to raise small humans. It doesn't really make sense. Um, so it was. You know it's. It's one of those things that you can think about and discuss and debate for years, but the point was, it was such a huge, powerful driver within me, and then for someone to tell me that that would be denied to me through reasons that were beyond my control, yeah, that's a gut punch, that's an absolute gut punch, because it is a fundamental part of being human being, alive for any species, is that we are able to pass on our genetic code, procreate, have children, raise a family. And for that to be denied to me or to anyone, then, yeah, you do, you think, think well, you start going down the rabbit hole, you start questioning the meaning of life, why we're here, all those things that you can't answer. And then you try and rationalize it, because you're human and that's what we do, we try, and always how I respond to this stuff. And when you can't rationalize it, what do you do? What do you do? You are just sort of I don't know. You're sat in a room, there's no doorways in it and there's nothing you can do about it, and so learning to accept that it was tough. I don't. It's difficult to articulate how you traverse the sort of lands of uncertainty with fertility that's. That's a difficult one because, as I said, you're you want to, you're willing to do whatever it takes to get to what you want, and in my case, a child. Now, that's a very different goal than I want a promotion at work. As I said, we're talking about biological factors that are driving us that are immensely powerful. We might not be able to explain them, but we know they're there. That's why we're signing up to parenthood, even though on paper it doesn't look like a good idea.
Speaker 1:You see other parents having a hellish time. It looks awful. In fact, people are walking around like zombies because they're so tired. And yet you just dismiss all of that. You say no, no, sign me up. But harren you, you have no idea what it's like to raise a child. You know, I'm no, I know, but I'm in a really good place. I'm no, I'm ready, sign me up. Oh, okay, it's just. It's such a bizarre journey. I write books on the subject, I've thought about it for years and I still. It is you. You know you've got yeah to get yourself. So that that's.
Speaker 1:But to try and answer your question, the strange thing that happened to me initially I was in the middle of that room with no doors, thinking how do I get out of it? What do I do when suddenly a letterbox opens up in one of the doors and we get basically the news that Charlene's pregnant. So I sort of got taken out of that room. It was like you're going to go through this experience. Actually, no, you're not. You're going to go into this other room, and this other room is beautiful. This other room has a pregnancy test that says positive. This other room has a roadmap of nine months of pregnancy and then a newborn baby, and your life is going to be wonderful. And it was and it is. It was, it was amazing. So I sort of got wrenched out of that sort of emotional turmoil, if you will, before I could really get through to the other side that time.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, that is that's. That's very interesting, that that you tee it up that way. So let's get into part two, because I am certain that once we get into part two, we're going to end up coming back to what you just said about sort of being ripped out of that room into a room that presented much better possibilities and in fact, it presented you with the most beautiful gift the universe could have ever given you, which is your son. So, now that you know, there is this sense of, like you said, is this a medical misdiagnosis, diagnosis, or is our baby boy truly a one in a million type of situation? And now we're talking about six months in starting over again and trying to do this over again, do we ignore the medical expert advice or do we take a chance to see if we are, if we're going to catch lightning in a bottle twice?
Speaker 1:Well, the first thing to say about when you try for a baby or try to build on your family that you already have. The difference was the first time around we had no dependence, so we could focus all of our energy on the thing we wanted, which was a baby. The second time around, you don't have that. You already have a responsibility. You already have a child that is dependent on you. So, even though we really wanted to go again and the reason we wanted to go again was because we'd had such a positive experience the first time around, more than any of my friends that were having challenges we never experienced any of that. We were so smitten with him. We were like well, we've got more love to give, let's go again. But we can't. This was something I said pretty much from day one. We can't put all of our energies onto what we don't have, when what we have today is already more than we imagined we would get. As far as we're concerned, we've already won the lottery. So already that's an emotional adjustment from the first time round. So we're having to sort of shear ourselves into two halves. We've got, I say, two halves. Part of us was three quarters. That was the bit that was Arlo leaving today. And then there was another part that really did want another child, and it was I'd make a point of saying this in my books as often as I can, because I write my books to Arlo the reason we were so desperate to queue up again was because of our experience with him. He's the reason we wanted to have another child. So that was the first thing. That was the first sort of emotional decision. Yes, let's try again, but we cannot allow our focus to overtake what is our number one priority and responsibility, which is what we have now today Arlo, us together, our family. We're in a good space, fine. So next question with that in mind, what do we do? So? We sort of mirrored the stage from the first time, in that we started having sex and we weren't really. There was no app trappers or nothing like that. We weren't sort of. It wasn't a regimented process. We just had a few early nights and said we'd see what happens. And it didn't happen. And we got to a year and then we said to ourselves well, this feels like very familiar territory, but at the same time it's very different, because if we can't have any more children, that's fine. We've already won the lottery.
Speaker 1:There's a sense of at first it was guilt, because you're told you can't have kids. And then if someone had come to me and said I tell you what you can't have kids, but I'll give you one, but then you can't have anything else I'd have snapped that deal up all day long with any genie out the bar. I would have said yep, absolutely, and I'd been happy, I'd been content for the rest of my life. So there's a sense of guilt, for, well, you felt like that then. Now you got your child, you've got your happy family, everything's going well, and now you want more. So there's a sense of guilt of that. And then you start looking at what else is going in the world and other people struggling to conceive and things like that. And I had to do some sort of bit of emotional resilience training to understand that you don't need to feel the guilt. Emotional resilience training to understand that you don't need to feel the guilt again.
Speaker 1:We're talking about these hidden, unexplainable biological drivers that are within us, that are driving us to procreate and have build a family and have children, so that again, that's fine, all right, let's go through that work, let's do do, let's get through the next bit and let's say right, we do want another child. It's not the end of the world if we don't, um, but we're gonna progress this, we're gonna pursue it. What's the next step? Okay, call the doctors again, very familiar territory. Let's go and get fertility tests. Everything's okay right now. We're now. We're literally right back where we the first time around. The doctors are talking about having procedures, some of them very invasive. They're saying we need to explore ivf. They're telling us we'll need to pay for ivf now because we have a son. It's the way it works in the uk and we're saying, okay again, this is fine, we have got Arlo, no problem, let's just go through some more tests Now.
Speaker 1:Since Arlo was born, we had COVID. So the state of the NHS here in the UK, which is famously buckling under infrastructure instability, was a lot worse after COVID. Yeah, yeah, you know global problem we all were aware of, of the situation. So, and this, this is something that was different the first time around. I'm going to say two things here. One was the journey to get to like just to get the, the normal tests that you would typically go through, to get the right referrals to the fertility department, to have those conversations to explore options. It was taking a lot longer. And not only that. Shailene and I were in our mid-30s when we started trying for baby Friarlo. We're a bit older now and we're approaching 40. So time was not on our side, or at least in our minds we perceive that time was not on our side, so that added a bit of friction to the whole thing.
Speaker 1:The other thing that we noticed that we noticed is finally gets us onto the main topic of your show is miscarriages. We believed, although could never say for certain, that we may have had a few start of pregnancy miscarriages. I'll spare you the gory details, but you know biological observations by charlene. Something's not right, things aren't't going on here. So then again you go through all these questions why, what's happening? Is this different from last time? Is this new? Is it because we're getting older? Are there new problems? Was there anything left over as a result of going through labour the first time round? Okay, let's get some answers to these questions. Oh wait, we can, we can't. Covid's happened. It's six months for this appointment. It's another three months. Oh wait, it's another birthday for you, it's another birthday for me.
Speaker 1:Um, originally we discussed a two-year age gap, but of course that quickly elapsed and then it was a three-year age gap and you, you get into this. It's a horrible space when you don't understand the reason for something happening and you're unable to get the answers that you want because you can't go on Wikipedia, you can't go on Google. You need medical expertise, medical expertise, and in the uk, if you can't get these from the nhs, then you're having to pay for them, and then that's where money's involved and costs can rack up. And then you've got the your existing responsibilities in your back of your mind. Should I be paying? I mean, we spent money, we spent a lot of money, but you say, should we be doing that? Should we be saving that money for the next house or for Arlo's college fund? So it's tricky, right, it's tricky.
Speaker 1:We've been sort of right in the middle of this web of so many competing priorities and thoughts and what's the right thing to do. But we made some decisions. We sat down and we said, right, what do we really want? We wanted to proceed with the goal towards another child, because we were driven to do that, because, as we said, there's something inside both of us that was continually propelling us forwards in achievement of that goal. So then I then I did hit the books. Then I was like, right, what can we do? What can we do how? How can we change ourselves? How can we get in shape?
Speaker 1:And we ended up hiring a functional medicine practitioner, which is I'm going to butcher the term because I'm not a medical expert but basically they, they will look at your overall health in a holistic fashion. And when we had our first consultation they said one of the problems with traditional national health services around the world is that they function a bit like any big company. You have your separate, siloed departments marketing, customer services, whatever and they're not very good at talking to each other. So when you have a case of infertility or, in our case, secondary infertility, else you can do the standard abcd tests for infertility. You know sperm eggs, things like that, but there are, I think I think in the uk it's, I think it's one in I could be butchering that, but I think that's right. One in four I could be butchering that, but I think that's right. One in four reasons for infertility cannot be explained and I think infertility at the moment is hitting about one in eight people, so one in eight people suffering from infertility or secondary infertility and out of those, one in four cannot be explained. That is a lot of people that cannot make babies, that have no idea why they can't make babies. That is a problem. That is a huge, huge global problem. That should be a national headline and we are not talking about that.
Speaker 1:And my work or my writing of my books enabled me, or part of the author gig meant I was going to a lot of baby shows, having a stall talking to dads about parenthood, trying to sell them some books, tell them about my work, give them some advice, help them and things like that. So I was talking to lots and lots of couples and I always start my pitch Whenever. Whenever anyone meets me, comes to me at a fair, I will always say that my partner and I were told we couldn't have kids and the amount of people that are just nodding straight and I can see it in their eyes they can relate to the story and sometimes I'll stop my pitch and I'll just say you've got experience in this field and they go yep, and I spoke to at this point. I've spoken to thousands of couples. Thousands of couples reported infertility problems and it was alarming.
Speaker 3:I don't know if in the UK you were or you are aware of this, but we're coming as live right now as we are in real time having this conversation. This whole week was infertility awareness week, so it is a. It is something like you just said so powerfully. It affects so many people globally. What is your sense of how other people's attitudes to that may be?
Speaker 3:And the reason why I'm asking is this as men, you know, we like to. We like to joke about everything and anything. You know what I'm saying. Like we, that's just what we do. So if you're my friend, right, and I come to you and I have absolutely no sensitivity to that because that has not been my experience, and so you say to me hey, kel, you know I'm confiding in you here and you reveal that you're having this thing, or maybe, if you're not so direct but indirectly, you're saying you're kind of hinting at your inability because of infertility issues, I almost have this gut sense, tom, that the reaction, my reaction, might just be like I don't know making making fun of you, making light of your situation, making comments that that imply that spoken to. Has that ever come up as part of their experience?
Speaker 1:when, when hinting at or talking about and revealing that they've had infertility issues, not once ever Nope, never Not with the as I said at this point thousands of couples. I think maybe that's because the people I'm speaking, like I'm going to these events and there are people that are about to become parents and they have they can relate to. Well, yes, so I'm speaking to others. Yeah, so most of my people, yeah, and then my friends and like so, my close support network that surrounds me outside of public life. Again, they are my closest friends for a reason they're all top top people. So, no, haven't experienced anything like that, however, when, because of my public life and because I'm pretty open about this, I have had people approach me who have been battling infertility, particularly men who just have no one to talk to or they don't know who to turn to or they don't feel like they can, and that I've had before. And something I should say as well about infertility, and I think this is I know it's certainly experienced in my house with myself and Charlene, but there's this ironic thing so you try to support and be strong for your partner. That means, maybe, trying to put on a brave face, so that means that your experience in all of this can be kind of isolated, because if you don't have an outlet like it's is everyone who's experienced in infertility, an author who writes parenthood books, who's going to baby events and talking to all these couples who relate? No, not at all right. So most people, they don't have their infertility support network to turn to, and the number one person you think they could turn to is their spouse, but they don't want to do that because they know their spouse is going through this as well and they don't want to unload onto them, to make it worse, which is such a cruel irony, because there is nothing more intimate than making a baby with someone, 100%. And yet infertility exactly right, and going through infertility can be such an isolating experience, even when you're sat hand in hand with your partner in the doctor's office at the IVF clinic, at home sitting on the sofa watching Netflix. It just adds another difficult component to the whole story. It's very tough. So I've dealt with men who have reached out to me and said, look, I'm going through some stuff and it really sucked. It fucking sucks, and I don't really know what to say or how to talk to people because, um, because I'm not good at this stuff and normally we say like, uh, tell you a quick fact about my books Most of my readers are women because they're curious about getting inside their partner's heads.
Speaker 1:They buy my pregnancy book because they're about to become a mom and their their husbands and their partners are about to kind of dad and they have no idea what he's experiencing. So they'll pick up my books and they'll say, oh, is that, and that's what it's like. And then they'll shove the book in there in their partner's face as they read this, is this right? And they'll sort of say, yeah, that's, that's, that's, yeah, that's kind of about it and that's it. And then they'll come up to do what they do um, so it's. And then and that's when it does work with pregnancy. So you can imagine, with infertility and I'm sure with some of the other guests you've spoken to, you've got this you know this huge sense of isolation in both men and women, because men particularly, maybe they're either dealing with it a different way, they choose to internalize it, or maybe they would like to externalize it, but they do not have the tools to do so.
Speaker 3:Well, that's what I mean. What you said is spot on. There is the you have to be strong for. You feel like, like, as a man, I feel like I have to be strong for my wife, whatever that means to many people. I think, generally speaking, amongst men, we all tend to have a similar sense of what that means, right? So if I have to be the emotional anchor, if I have to be the level-headed one, if I have to be the rational thinker and then just holding space for my wife or my significant other to have room to emote and express and do all of that stuff, but I have to, I have to make it seem as if our world is not falling apart, that I am holding us together, that I am holding us together and in doing that it comes at a personal cost to your point. And the personal cost is I can't tell her about it, because the moment I open my mouth to say hey, and actually acknowledge our world is falling apart, then the worry is what is that going to do to her? And I've heard so many men say to me before. You know, I just don't want to add that extra pressure on her Now.
Speaker 3:I have my own opinions about the value of being vulnerable with each other, even in these devastating moments with each other. Even in these devastating moments, I have my thoughts and opinions about how unhelpful I think it can be for me as a man to always present myself as I'm the one who's holding everything up. And I think that there's incredible value in just like breaking down with my wife and both of us kind of looking at each other like how are we going to make it out? I think there's incredible value in that. But that's just where I'm at in my thinking. But that layer of being the strong, supportive one really is like a cap. It's almost like a ceiling that then prevents a lot of men from getting the help that they need, from talking about something that is so incredibly complex.
Speaker 3:I, just when I, when me and my wife were experiencing our miscarriages, I was having all sorts of existential crises because the the fabric of my masculinity and manhood and how I perceive myself in those roles and as a, as a man, as a person, like in the most existential, like all of that, I felt like it was being de-threaded. You know, like I was becoming undone and I couldn't talk to my wife about it for those reasons that we just talked about, and also because she had asked me to not say anything to anyone about when we were pregnant, when she was pregnant, so that now that we're going through these miscarriages, like I couldn't talk to anybody about it. So all of my avenues of of support and escape on top of the personal, the societal, just how I view the right thing to do is like all of that just seems to really keep all of this pressure in. And that's been my experience as a man, and I'm wondering if there's a different or if it's something similar and I'm sure it is. I think the difference between my experience and, for instance, someone who is facing infertility is that, if I understand correctly. So this gets me into the second thing that I wanted to say.
Speaker 3:Earlier you mentioned infertility and then secondary infertility. The way that I understand infertility is that you simply put, for whatever reasons, as a man I can't, even if I'm the one dealing with infertility I can't even get her pregnant to begin with, or she cannot get pregnant to begin with, whereas the miscarriage is. We were pregnant and then we lost the pregnancy. So I'm wondering if the pressure becomes even more intense in the infertility side, because and you know, not saying that one is more than the other, or I'm not making any type of comparative judgments here, just talking about the nature of things, because I can imagine that if I'm not even able to do that, what does that?
Speaker 3:How do I then interpret that about who I am as a man and my manhood and my masculinity? Because I think that there is something very deeply ingrained in us as men where you know, sexual prowess, if you will, is is something like, there's something there that's like to to. It's some form of expression, and I think that people take it obviously to the extreme and have done horrendous things about it, but as a, as an instinctual, biological component of who we are, I think it's a neutral thing. So am I making sense, tom? Do you understand what I'm trying to say? Like is there some extra level of like? What the heck? I'm not even able to do that as a man yeah that.
Speaker 1:So I can't relate to that directly, but I've heard some version of that, people confiding into me too many times to count. I didn't see it as an individual problem. I saw it as a relationship our problem to deal with, even though we still never, we never, we never found out the reason for why we had issues. But I there was never a test that confirmed there's a problem with you, that, no, no one pointed the finger and said your sperm's the issue here, not saying that I wasn't contributing to our lack of progress, but I, I was never given sort of a definitive diagnosis as to you're, you're the issue here. So, but I? So another way of saying well, could I, could I have, um, could I have gone off and found another woman to have a baby with? So that was not an option to me. I saw it as this is our problem. Now, if you were to speak to Charlene, I'm sure she or I know she did she went through this whole other thing where she went through a version of what you've just said for her. She was like I'm in this committed relationship and I'm not able to give him and me what we need. I can't speak to that, but I can't speak to that. But I can imagine that is just hell. That's just awful place to be in, but I never saw it that way from my experience.
Speaker 1:And you talk about infertility and then miscarriages. That's something I thought about loads, because I meet these parents and they tell me about miscarriages. You meet these parents and they tell me about miscarriages and at some point a miscarriage becomes a stillbirth and I've heard stories like that and thank god I cannot relate to that and I hope I never will. But you, you'd start somewhere and you could. The suffering there. There's no end to it for some people and at some point pain is pain, right, it might be a little bit of pain or it might be a lot of pain, and I've met people that have had five, six miscarriages. I met one woman who was trying for a baby for 20 years. I met one couple who came to a show to talk to me and I said, oh, when you know, congratulations, when's the baby due? I went, no, no, no, we're not pregnant. Uh, we were and we lost the baby. We've just come to this show so that because we're going to be optimistic and we're we know this is going to happen one day. I mean, I had to hold it together. That was a tough story. Those were a tough couple to meet. Yeah, so we're dealing about just this.
Speaker 1:It's very difficult to articulate because you can't. You can't just say, right, a miscarriage at the start of pregnancy, which you don't even know is a miscarriage or not, right, we're gonna, we're gonna put that at the start of the grid and then we're gonna go right away, and we're going to put that at the start of the grid, and then we're going to go right away and we're going to be like, right still, birth at eight months. That's the range of the experience. And if you're up there, then you're in a world of pain, more than that of a person. Easy to take that mindset that, oh well, you know, at least, at least we didn't get to see the pregnancy test or at least we didn't get the first scan before we lost it. I think that's that's really dangerous territory to get into. So I have no problem with people trying to look on, be optimistic. I do it all the time it's it's it's healthy to say well, you know, rationalize this thing is, it could be worse, let's focus. All the time it's healthy to say, well you know, rationalize this thing as it could be worse. Let's focus on the positives. However, having said that, just because the person next to you has had a quote, unquote harder, tougher time with it or even more loss and a harder road to it, does not invalidate your right to feel shit about the situation. I think that's so important to call out.
Speaker 1:I've spoken to people that have said mums and dads oh, we lost the baby, but it was right at the start, it was only a ball of cells, it's fine, we're fine and they were fine and good for them, them brilliant. We want less suffering. If they can come out of that experience unscathed or you know, minimal damage, psychological damage, brilliant. That's what we want. And I've met other people who have been absolutely devastated to have lost a baby at the start of pregnancy or just to go another month of trying to make a baby in infertility journeys and then not get the test results they want. And they have also been in a world of pain because they've been at this for, however long and some might have been at it for, as I say, I've met people that have been at it for years and years and years and years, but thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds into the journey, into the pursuit of that goal.
Speaker 1:And I've met others that have just started and they're in a bad space as well, and you know what. But that's okay, that that is okay for them to be at it. They have every right to feel the way they feel as soon as we start getting into dialogue where, yeah, but you only had one miscarriage, I had 10. That is. We don't want to go there. We want to avoid that. Thank you you.