Jessica Weinstock
Follow Jessica as she shares women bearing it all on instagram @thebearingallproject
Five sentences about me…
1. I was super ambivalent about parenthood from the beginning.
2. I had 2 TFMR's (termination for medical reasons) prior to having our living son via an emergency c-section.
3. We wanted to give our son a sibling but subsequently had two miscarriages and so we pursued IVF with PGS testing.
4. I got pregnant via IVF and my water broke at 30 weeks, 3 days; I gave birth to our son via another emergency c-section 8.5 weeks early- a healthy, 4lb 4oz boy who had a 5.5 week NICU stay.
5. While I would have spared my husband and myself the heavy heartache that colored our journey, looking back, I have found beautiful meaning in our experiences, in our loss, and in the life that we have created together.
One thing I wish I knew going into my fertility journey...
We can do all of the "right" things, but at the end of the day, we are not in control.
One thing about me that is forever changed because of my fertility journey...
I experience life though a lens that filters everything in such a way that it all fells delicate. I see our sons in any given context and can see what can go wrong in any situation. Almost everything feels impermanent.
One funny moment or anecdote from my fertility journey...
A lot of the funny moments are so so so dark, that I'm not sure they would translate here. But here is an anecdote from my journey that feels meaningful: After a miscarriage, but before IVF, I needed a break. . Like Bill Murray’s character Bob, in the film, What about Bob, I told my [fertility] problems that I was on vacation. I took six weeks. Six weeks of freedom. A freedom and identity outside of this existence between life, creating it, and death. A literal mid-life crisis. My best friend, Stacy, coined this my #6weeks. So obviously, I went to a crystal healer, legally bought some pot at Med Men after preschool drop off and got a tattoo of four heart outlines representing my lost babes and one filled heart representing our son. An artful scar to make the invisible visible. Concretized on my body.
One product, practice, or ritual I adopted during my fertility journey, which I have/have not kept a part of my life...
Guided by my acupuncturist, I abstained from wine, coffee, cold drinks, gluten, sugar, and dairy throughout the course of my IVF process. Today, my pandemic diet almost exclusively consists of wine, coffee, dairy, sugar, and gluten.