Stories of Family Formation for Season 4

This season, we are listening to women share their stories of how they formed their families, especially when health factors or medical issues impacted their decisions. Women's health matters for its own sake. At the same time, for many women, health issues not only impact their own quality of life but also their paths to forming families, and many women have wanted to share those stories here, too. For our purposes, “forming families” means the creation of any home-life that generates safety, belonging, connection, and joy, and it doesn't exclusively mean becoming a parent and raising children. I hope you will listen to each story this season with a sense of curiosity and compassion. And if you're going through something in your life right now where you're not in a place to listen to stories like these, I hope that you find compassion and support for what you're going through, and you can return to this podcast when you're ready.

Contact Femammal:

• Email femammalpodcast@gmail.com
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If you have feedback or want to be a future guest, please get in touch!

Logo design: copyright Darragh Hannan

Transcript

[00:18] Greer: 
Hi, this is Greer, your host for Femammal, the podcast that holds space for women to explore what it means to live well in our bodies and celebrates moving through this world as female mammals.

[00:37] Greer: 
You welcome to season four of Femammal. This season we will be listening to women share their stories of how they formed their families, what family means to them, and the factors that impacted their choices, especially where medical issues or health concerns were involved. I'm really excited to have these conversations and to share them with you, but frankly, I also felt torn about whether to tackle this theme at all. So before we dive into these interviews, let me spend a few minutes explaining why I felt ambivalent about making this a femammal theme, what approach I will be taking with these interviews, and why I think these stories are so important to hear. 

I admit I've always had a lot of curiosity about what family means to people and how people form their families. I grew up as the middle of five children, with two more children lost to miscarriage or stillbirth when I was very young, and one of my sisters is internationally adopted from Korea. The two of us have always introduced ourselves as "Irish twins" since we are just ten months apart in age and we did everything together as children. Even at a very young age, I was always attuned to what was said and what was not said, and wondered how much my family's dynamics translated to other families. As a child, I wondered why there was an unstated expectation that when asked, 'how many siblings do you have?' that I wouldn't count and include the two who were lost. And growing up in an interracial family in an overwhelmingly white part of the Midwest brought its own dynamics. I wondered why more families didn't look like ours. I wondered why more of my classmates' families didn't include adopted children. Oddly in college, where the student population was 85% Catholic, When my sister and I enrolled in some of the same classes, some of our classmates wouldn't even believe that we were sisters, which usually earned them an eye roll and the slogan 'adoption is an option!' from the two of us. I guess I never had the luxury of assuming that all families looked the same, or that there was one obvious way to form a family. I was always painfully aware that medical conditions like infertility and pregnancy loss were real risks to be navigated, and that some people see family as expanding beyond blood ties. 

I conceived the idea for Femammal during the summer of 2022, which in the United States was the summer that our Supreme Court ruled in the case of Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health Organization, a ruling which overturned the Court's 1973 Roe versus Wade decision and paved the way for dozens of states to prohibit abortion. The rhetoric on both sides of this issue that summer was intense, inflammatory, and divisive, and it was hard to escape. I couldn't turn on a news program, a comedy program, or even a music station without hearing about it. I was in an emotionally vulnerable place myself that summer because I had spent the past two years throwing everything I had at trying to "fix" the myriad of gynecological conditions that were preventing my husband and myself from being able to have and enjoy penetrative sex. We celebrated our second wedding anniversary just a few weeks before the Dobbs decision, and I found it pretty triggering to be inundated by all of these politicized narratives of sex and reproduction and the assumptions that they made. I also found it completely infuriating that the politicization of abortion seemed to suck all of the oxygen out of the room for any other conversations about any other women's health issues. I couldn't help but feel that if politicians, the media, educators, and religious authorities had given 10% of the resources that they spent on fighting about abortion to research and education on other women's health topics instead, such as the topics I've covered in this podcast, then maybe I wouldn't be in the situation I was in. Maybe I would have received actual sex education. Maybe someone would have intervened when I was a teenager experiencing debilitating chronic pain on a monthly basis, and maybe there would have been a solution. Maybe my gynecologists wouldn't have caused me medical trauma by forcing me through excruciating internal pelvic examinations. Maybe I myself would have had more reproductive choices, like the choice to have penetrative sex and get pregnant, if I had benefited in any of these ways. 

The assumptions that polarizing narratives on both sides of the issues were making made me feel like my own experience was completely beyond the pale of "normal" human sexuality. Those who supported retaining abortion access in all 50 states often implicitly or explicitly assumed that abortion is necessary for guaranteeing women's equality because an unwanted pregnancy could happen to any woman at any time. And here I couldn't figure out how to have penetrative sex with my husband. Those who wanted to end abortion access in the United States often implicitly or explicitly assumed modern advances in obstetric care and the high demand in the adoption market for infants meant that carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term and giving up a baby for adoption is more like a nine month interruption in a woman's life and less of an ordeal that inescapably will have permanent, possibly traumatic consequences and could be fatal. And here I dreaded every appointment with every gynecologist who caused me physical pain, dismissed my pain, and gaslighted me when I tried to advocate for myself and my well being. And nowhere in this debate was I hearing the message that women's health matters for its own sake, and not just when it's connected to reproduction. 

I imagine that many other women with many other stories also found that summer extremely hard and wished that they could just turn off all this rhetoric: women who have experienced an abortion procedure, women struggling with infertility, women who have experienced pregnancy loss or infant loss, and any number of other stories that I haven't heard yet. My way through that summer was to give light and oxygen to stories about women's health that weren't primarily connected to reproduction or family formation. It was important to me to vociferously affirm that women's health matters for its own sake and not primarily for the sake of women's reproductive potential. Health experiences that are unique to women or overrepresented in women, or which express themselves differently in women, deserve as many resources and as much airtime as issues related to reproduction are getting. So for 33 episodes across three seasons, I've focused on everything from endometriosis to breast cancer to menstrual cycles and healthy lifestyles and lifestyle choices. Sometimes women touched on how their conditions intersected with family life and shared about fertility issues connected to their conditions, but the focus has always been on the women themselves and their health journeys and search for joy. It's been incredibly life giving for me to elevate these stories, and it's helped reinforce my own self confidence and belief that my health matters for my own sake. But all this time I've had women reaching out to me to offer to share their stories of their struggles to form families and medical conditions that impacted their choices around family life. And please let me be clear that to me, forming families means the creation of any home life that generates safety, belonging, connection, and joy. And that doesn't exclusively mean becoming a parent and raising children. For many women I interview this season, forming their families did involve a path to parenthood, but not for all, and I'll let them share their own perspectives on that. 

I want to hear all of these stories, and I feel like the time is right. If that's not where you are at, if there's something difficult going on in your own life that makes it hard to listen to stories on this theme, it's okay to take a break this season. Maybe there are episodes you missed from 2022 or 2023 that would be more meaningful to you. Or maybe there's another podcast out there that you would enjoy more. I've been making recommendations on the Femammal Facebook page. I get it. I have ugly-cried through the Mother's Day blessing at my church before because as a married woman in my late 30s without kids, it made me feel excluded from the circle of women. But if you are curious to hear about the diverse and difficult paths that women have taken to form families and build communities of belonging, then please subscribe to this podcast in your favorite app so that you don't miss an episode. 

My goal with the season is to break down taboos about what can be discussed openly, create a safe space for listening and for sharing, and to build compassion for women who suffer under unspoken burdens, who make difficult choices, and who create joy and connection in their own lives and within their communities and families. Since these stories pertain to reproductive choices that women have made, they are likely to intersect with issues that have become politicized or are debated by medical ethicists. However, this podcast is not political or ideological. It is person-centered. If you're listening and a woman shares about a choice that you wouldn't have made for yourself or your family, please try to listen to it with nonjudgmental compassion to simply understand what she went through, how she made choices for herself, and how she has fostered joy, resilience, and connection. No one is here to argue or persuade. We are all here to listen, learn, and develop deeper curiosity, understanding, and empathy. 

Finally, I want to take a moment to acknowledge where I'm coming from and what might be some shortcomings of this series. Most, or maybe all, of my interview guests this season are in Generation X or Generation Y. (Remember, that's what they called us before we were Millennials.) They have been making their decisions about forming their own families over the past 25 years. I'm certainly curious about the stories of women in generations ahead of ours, but medical technology and social expectations have changed so rapidly since our parents generation that the contemporary choices with which we are faced are in many cases truly new. Moreover, a higher proportion of guests this season were friends of mine long before I started this podcast. With there being so much social and familial pressure surrounding choices about family life, not to mention political and ideological struggles, I think in some ways it can be easier to have these conversations between friends where trust and respect are already established. There is so much taboo around topics related to family formation, pregnancy, infertility, and reproductive technology that most of us move through the world completely ignorant of the fact that people we encounter every day have navigated the challenges and made the decisions that my friends have made. We will simply never hear about it. That may be changing as celebrities become more public about their own challenges and choices, but the resources that celebrities have certainly impact the dynamics of those choices and their consequences in a way that's removed from an experience of less affluence and power. And because many or most of the women I interview come from my own social circles, many of them, but not all, share aspects of my own background: white, cisgendered, and heterosexual; currently middle class, educated, married, raised in Christian and often Catholic families. These backgrounds certainly do inform the expectations we were raised with, the resources we have access to, and the beliefs we received about family life that we had to ultimately evaluate for ourselves. It's important to me to elevate the voices of women from a great diversity of backgrounds, but I may fall short of that in important ways this season. 

Thanks for hearing me out on all of this. I'm really looking forward to listening to these women's stories with you. As always, I welcome your feedback and I'd love to hear your story. We all come from families, and we all face decisions of our own, and we know we're not alone in that. I hope that this podcast can be a good companion for you as you reflect on your own journey. 

[16:27] Greer: 
If today's episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at femammalpodcast@gmail.com. That's femammalpodcast@gmail.com. You can also follow this podcast on Facebook. Just search for Femammal Podcast and you will find a community of people who are interested in living well in our bodies. And of course, I'd love for you to rate this podcast and leave a review wherever you download your podcasts. Until next time, be well.