Why your Fertility demands good boundaries

Happy Friday! Um, I hope that you have had a fantastic week. Uh, if you looked at the topic and the clock, I'm a little bit early today, which kind of never happens. I'm maybe one of those people that might be late frequently. If you have a friend like that, that's me. Um, but I'm here early, and if you looked at the topic, you see that we're kind of drilling down on one of the things that I talked about from Wednesday. We're talking about why your fertility health especially needs for you to have good boundaries going into the holidays. So if you don't know me, I'm Erica Hoke. I'm an infertility mentor and I'm an empowerment coach. And I want to help you guys, I want to help guide you through the next couple of months with good boundaries and why your physical health and especially your fertility health really demands it. So we all know that someone is going to tell you over the holidays any number of the well-meaning, let's say it as nicely as we can, the well-meaning but unhelpful things like relax or any number of things that drive anybody going through infertility absolutely crazy. So the reason why we want to think about this ahead of time, we want to script this out in our mind. Reduce our stress. Stress definitely does play a factor, have a factor in your fertility health in terms of increasing your cortisol levels, decreasing your gut health, reducing your immune system. So we do want to try to mentally prepare and have conversations with our partner and our spouse ahead of time to reduce stress. So that goes into my point 2 this morning, which not only will it reduce stress for you, but it's gonna help you avoid fights with your partner. If you guys can sit and talk about what the expectation is going into a party, going into a work function, going into a family gathering, decide on who will answer or who will intervene in intrusive questions and how you're going to handle that. And also, at what point do you have an eject button and what does that look like? Because you need to operate as a team, right? So we don't— what we don't want to happen, and I know that this has happened to someone out there, so I'm talking to you. What we don't want to happen again is we don't want there to be a disagreement with Aunt Sally or with your mother-in-law, or Grandpa Joe, you know, won't let up about the baby-making jokes or what have you. And you're crying in the bathroom, your spouse is unaware, and kind of living there like they're just mingling at the party or the family gathering. And you are— you have— you're broken in the bathroom because people won't leave you alone. So you want to come up with a game plan as— a couple, what this will also help you do with your spouse, partnering with them in this way, is it will help you with your connection. It's going to bring up talking points and sore points that your spouse might not have ever thought to have a conversation with you about, or just avoided having conversations with you about too. And it helps carry the burden between the two of you. Um, And honestly, like some of you might be facing male factor infertility too, and that's a whole separate sensitive subject and how, how you handle that and how you handle the questions and that sort of thing. So I really encourage you to have a really in-depth conversation with your spouse, with your partner about what you want those gatherings to look like preemptively before you go. So that you don't end up crying in the bathroom. Okay, so the third thing is, is I want you to learn good boundaries and to stand up for yourself because it is preparing you for the life that you want. It is preparing you to stand up for yourself in your medical choices, in the delivery room, which is a whole separate topic of conversation. It's going to help you stand up for yourself in your choices for your child, whether you choose to breastfeed, bottle feed, vaccinate, not vaccinate, co-sleep, not co-sleep. All this, all this boundary talking and boundary issues are things that come up again and again as parents and as a mother, and you have to learn to stand up for yourself. So this is a great place for you to start as a couple in preparation for the parents that you're going to be. And that is, that is the whole point. So motherhood comes with a lot of, um, what is the right word? Comes with a lot of choices. It comes with a lot of baggage. Um, it comes with a lot of— when your baby is born, you're born as a mother. And so you have to learn how to speak out for not only yourself but your child. And there's no better time to start than now. Moms make a lot of choices for their families, and this is good preparation. So I think I said that 3 times. Sorry about that. Well, I hope that you had a great, uh, had a great week. Have a great weekend, and I will see you here Monday, Wednesday, Friday, noonish, um, Eastern Standard Time. If you happen to be watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that like and subscribe. And if you're watching on Facebook and you want to get content notification, uh, get notified when I go live, go ahead and head over to YouTube and do that too, because, you know, Facebook is not great about any of that. So health and blessings to you guys. Bye-bye.