My Story with Infertility, Postpartum Depression and Anxiety

In the first episode of this season, I gave you a little bit of my history and my story and journey through infertility, through having my miracle babies, but I wanted to introduce myself a little bit more so that you can get to know me as a friend.

I was born and raised in California, and from my earliest memories, I loved taking care of babies. You can say that I didn't have a whole lot of big career ambitions as a child. I grew up saying, wanna be a mom when I grow up. What do you wanna be when you grow up? A mom.

So my husband, Tyler, and I met when we were just young kids ourselves early in college in Idaho, and we got married right away. And I was happy to have the opportunity to finish my undergrad degree. And I hoped that around the time we were graduating college, we'd be ready to start our family. That was still kind of the main objective, the main goal of my life was to be a mom.

So by the time I graduated college with a degree in marriage and family studies, with no children coming quickly on the horizon, I thought, well, well now what do I do? I knew that my passion still lied with families and helping to build strong families. So I decided I would become a a counselor. My goal was to become a marriage and family counselor. That's what I thought I really wanted to work with.

Well, things never quite go according to plan, and I actually found my passion in working with substance abuse disorders and addiction, and spent the majority of my career working in residential treatment centers, helping people who had struggled with addiction. And I found so much satisfaction in this opportunity to work with these people, some of whom were the most humble, spiritual, courageous people I had ever met who had gone through so many struggles and trials and had found a coping mechanism that unfortunately became a bigger problem than a solution. And I learned so much from my clients and from my fellow clinicians about serenity and about seeking a higher power to help heal our hearts, whether it's addiction, depression, anxiety, trauma, all of the above. It was really beautiful to see. And during my work in the substance abuse field, I became really passionate about mindfulness and the mind body connection, and how the ability to be present and mindful actually heals so many issues.

That's what allows us to get out of the rumination of the past or the stress about the future, and to just sit still and be with our body, managing the emotions and triggers we may be feeling and being able to feel them and accept them. As I progressed on this journey of mindfulness, I became really passionate about mindful self compassion and the incorporation of the self compassion piece as we are healing from whatever it is we're healing from. This is where I learned that all people need to be willing to forgive themselves, to be kind to themselves, to speak to themselves with loving care and kindness, rather than the harsh self criticism that we often talk to ourselves with. Eventually, as my own personal life took me deeper and deeper into the journey of infertility, and I realized how traumatic that experience was. I wanted to make meaning out of this suffering.

I feel really strongly about Viktor Frankl's philosophy that when we can make meaning in our suffering, it ceases to be so painful. So I wanted to help others. So I started getting involved with a nonprofit organization that offered free counseling to couples that were going through infertility. And then I realized that this was my calling. This was why I was going through this, so that I could be a support to other women and couples who were experiencing this.

That eventually led me to open my own practice that was focused solely on infertility counseling and reproductive mental health, including perinatal mood disorders. I was able to work in private practice for a couple years before I was finally able to conceive my own children and ended up getting out of the workforce. So after three rounds of IVF and several embryo implantations, I was finally able to get pregnant on Thanksgiving Day of twenty eighteen. And my twins, a boy and a girl, were born the next June. They were born really early and had to spend a month in the NICU, which was so hard.

I have such sympathy for any NICU parents because it, that is a traumatic experience in and of itself. But fortunately there was amazing medical attention that allowed them to grow and thrive and come home after about a month in the NICU. But this was a really hard time for me. Suddenly going from having a career, having a home with just my husband and I where we could do whatever we wanna do whenever we wanna do it, and then suddenly to have these two babies at home was so challenging. As I've said before, of course I was so grateful for the opportunity and I was in heaven with my babies.

But I will tell you, twins are hard. I highly, highly recommend if anyone has the opportunity to have twins that you take it because it is the best thing in the world, but it is very challenging. So I started to really have some scary thoughts and a hard time managing my emotions after the twins were born. To have that kind of pressure to take care of two crying babies and to not have any help was very overwhelming. And I definitely experienced some postpartum depression during the early phases of having my twins.

It didn't help either that around the time, you know, my twins were born in June of twenty nineteen, around the time I was finally like, you know what? I think I'm ready to venture out of the house. It's warming up. It's March of twenty twenty. The weather's getting nice. I'm ready to start getting out with my kids. And then we all know what happened in March of twenty twenty, and it was a whole different kind of experience than I would have expected. And then suddenly it was parenting amidst a pandemic for the next couple years as we navigated, how do I socialize my kids? How do we get out of the house when I need to get out of the house? How do we, go to these kid events when we all have to wear masks? And, that was was interesting. That was an interesting time, wasn't it?

But as I was able to get practice doing more things with my twins, I was able to gain confidence as a mom and feel more and more capable of getting out and doing things. And I think that's one of the beautiful things about motherhood is you can see your confidence grow. I feel like with every child we've had, it's like, oh, do you remember when two babies was the hardest thing in the entire world? And then after the third baby was born, it's like, oh, man. Having two babies is nothing. Can you imagine having four? Having four would be so impossible. And then the fourth one is born and you're like, oh, taking care of three babies is nothing, but taking care of all four is just the hardest thing in the world. I don't know if anyone else feels that way.

So less than two years after our twins were born, we had a baby girl, and we were so excited that she came to us naturally. I was able to conceive her naturally, and was able to bring her straight home from the hospital, which was such a blessing after the month we had spent in the NICU with the twins. So at that point we had my twins, a boy and a girl, and then my baby daughter. And after my daughter was born, I'm remembering the chaos of having three babies under two years old.

And I honestly don't even know how we survived that time. It was somewhat of a blur. But I didn't experience the scary thoughts and the depressed moods like I did after my twins. After this one was when I really experienced anxiety, postpartum anxiety. I remember just being absolutely paralyzed.

I could not make a decision to save my life. It felt like there were so many factors to consider to even just leave the house that I I could not even make it happen. I don't know if you guys have experienced this feeling of like, but if we try to leave the house, do I whose nap? Do I overlap? And what snacks am I gonna bring?

And what if someone how many things do I have to pack? I don't even know if I can make it. But if I drive and then someone's crying, it was just so overwhelming that I remember telling my husband that he cannot ask me a single question. I cannot answer a question to save my life right now. If you ask me what is for dinner, I could possibly have a meltdown right now because it's just too overwhelming to even consider.vIf you ask me, do you want to go out to dinner? Should we go get some groceries? Or do you want to eat at home? I too much. Too much.

And so I remember telling him like, “Honey, you have to tell me what to do at all times because I cannot decide what to do. It's too hard to even make a decision.” So just tell me, “Kelsey, sit down and eat the sandwich. And I will just try to do what you tell me to do because I can't even make a decision for myself at this moment.” So that was my first experience with anxiety.

I always kinda said that I don't lean towards anxiety. I tend to lean towards depression, if anything, in my general life experience. But after my third baby was born, I got a taste of anxiety and I started to really, have sympathy for people who experience anxiety, more often than this. Luckily, when my third daughter was about six months old, my husband was able to change jobs to a job that allowed him to work from home and have a little bit more flexibility in his schedule. And I tell him that is the only reason why I was able to be sane raising those three little ones and why we had a fourth.

I told him if you hadn't been able to work from home, I guarantee we would not have had a fourth baby. But my fourth baby was born just about a year ago, and he was such a beautiful blessing in our life. We hoped for a boy to even out our numbers, which we now have. My twins are boy girl, then I have my baby daughter, and now my baby boy. And he has been the light and joy of our family.