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Talkaboutable with Dr. Susan Swick
Lisa Schuman on How to Talk to Kids About Donor Conception
00:46:27
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- [00:02]
Lisa Schumann
Lemonada
- [00:07]
Dr. Susan Swick
Talk About Able is produced by lemonada Media in partnership with Montage Health and their Ohana center for Child and Family Mental Health, and it's made possible through funding from the Montage Health Foundation.
- [00:26]
Lisa Schumann
I have someone on my podcast who works on my team, and she and her wife were telling their children they have two children who they had through donor embryos, and they were telling their children about their story, and they said, okay, we've been telling your story for a long time. Do you understand it? And this woman's son says, yes, I had a mama, a mommy, and a donut. And she said, what do you mean, a donut? He said, yes, I tell my friends I had a mommy, a mama, and a donut. And so she says, you know, I learned my lesson. You can't tell your child their story if you have a Brooklyn accent because you will mess it up.
- [01:03]
Podcast Host
That's fair. Fantastic. That is fantastic.
- [01:13]
Dr. Susan Swick
I'm Dr. Susan Swick, and this is Talk About Able. Today I'm joined by Lisa Schumann, a therapist focused on assisted reproduction and founding director of the center for Family Building in New York City. She's also the co author of Building youg the Complete Guide to Donor Conception and hosts a the Building youg Family podcast. Lisa spent her career helping people find their way to parenthood, and today she's helping us to understand donor conception. In particular, we're gonna be talking about the best way for parents to speak with their children about where they came from and how to handle those moments that don't go as planned, like when a child throws a picture book about donor eggs across the room. This is a conversation about telling your origin story to your child in a way that makes them feel special and know how much they are loved, no matter how your family took shape.
- [02:18]
Podcast Host
So, Lisa Schuman, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Talk About Able. We're really excited to have you drop some knowledge, share some of your experience and your wisdom, working with families of all kinds, shapes and sizes and backgrounds. I'd love to hear a little bit about your own story. You came to this work partly through your own fertility experience. Could you share a little bit more about that and how it's shaped the way that you approach the families that you work with?
- [02:55]
Lisa Schumann
Oh, sure. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on this podcast. I love your podcast and I admire everything you do. Dr. Swick, you're really so wonderful to listen to, and I'm very grateful to be part of it. So thank for Having me.
- [03:09]
Podcast Host
Oh, now we're, now we're good to go. We don't have to say anything else.
- [03:15]
Lisa Schumann
So I started in this industry because I was going through fertility treatment myself. And at the time I was practicing as a therapist in New York City and I had a private practice and I was very happy with my practice. After graduate school, I did psychoanalytic training and I worked in substance abuse for a while, and I worked in perinatal health and women's health issues and did so many things and thought this would be my practice. And then my fertility doctor said, you know, I think you'd be really good in this industry. I think you should try to get some training and see how you like it. And so I went to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and started to get some training. And that was 30 years ago. Here I am.
- [04:06]
Podcast Host
Wow.
- [04:06]
Lisa Schumann
So I work in fertility treatment, seeing people who are on their journey in every stage. But a large part of my work is third party reproduction, which includes donor conception and surrogacy. And through that, I help people not just get through the process and screen their gestational carriers or screen their egg donors or sperm donors, but also learn how to parent their children. And I created or co created a workshop for donor conceived children that I ran for many years and stopped Covid. And it was a workshop to help children understand how to share or not share their information with other people. Because just like adults, right, children are hardwired to have certain temperaments and some people are more private. Some people are kind of, you know, soapbox kids and want to tell the world everything. And so I think children also have to honor who they are. And as they honor who they are, they can also make a decision about that story. And the. That may be very different from the way the parents see things.
- [05:14]
Podcast Host
So wonderful that you can reassure families and children or adult children that principles can guide this. There's no single right or wrong way. Let's take this moment to define donor conception. I've learned what it means, but some of our listeners may not know. So could you elaborate on that for us?
- [05:35]
Lisa Schumann
So at the moment, and I say at the moment because there is a new technology evolving as we speak. But at the moment, yeah, at the moment it is when we use someone else's gametes, their sperm or eggs, or even their embryos to help us have a child. And so we might use the egg from a younger person. If we have older eggs that aren't working, we may use the sperm from someone outside of our family. Or if There are embryos already created. They may be donated to another individual or couple.
- [06:13]
Podcast Host
Mm, okay. Got it. And I wanna ask one high level question before I jump into asking you about a very specific family. It strikes me that all parents have periods where they worry they're getting this wrong. It seems really easy for other parents to deal with X, to deal with bedtime routines, to deal with school drop off, to deal with dinner time. And that parents who have become families through fertil treatments maybe feel like other parents automatically know how to do this because of some miracle of physical gestation, whereas they do not because they entered through a side door. Is that your observation in 30 years of doing this?
- [07:02]
Lisa Schumann
You know, I have two answers to that question. So one is the group of parents, which is kind of the largest group of people who feel anxious with donor conception in general. So in my book I talk about two extreme cases. So one case was a woman who said to me, you know, if I make a cake with a Betty Crocker mix or from scratch, it doesn't matter, it's going to taste the same. It doesn't matter to me if I use donor conception, I use my eggs, it doesn't matter. I want to be a parent. And then I saw another woman who I saw for a very long time, she struggled to choose a donor. She struggled with the, the process of donor conception. She struggled through her pregnancy. She was worried about feeling like there might be an alien in her body, some foreign entity she wouldn't be able to bond with. Then she had her children. She had twins, a boy and a girl. And the girl, she named the child and then still felt uncomfortable that she couldn't feel an ownership over her role as a parent unless she renamed her child. So it took her that long to accept donor conception. And I would say that most people fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. But generally people feel uncomfortable. Most of us don't expect when we growing up that we're going to use donor conception to build our family. Most people wish that our children had our father's eyebrows and our mother's laugh and our sister's athleticism or whatever. And so it is really hard for a lot of people. And as a result, many people kind of rail against this idea of talking to their children about their origins and being able to share this information with their child. It's really difficult because it almost makes it more real.
- [08:59]
Podcast Host
Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to invite you to step into our community. And I had a wonderful conversation with Lorraine and Michael, parents of 4 year old Sadie. They had difficulty getting pregnant and they eventually decided to use a donor embryo. And Lorraine carried the embryo. So she carried Sadie and gave birth to her. And neither parent though is genetically related to their child. And they have always tried to be very open and honest with Sadie. They have all the books. They have talked to her from the very. I mean, she's only four. And they've been doing this for as long as I think Sadie's been talking. And now that she's four, she has a few more questions that has prompted them to worry. So she has questions like where am I from? What happens when we die when they bring out the books? And then they're children's books that have sort of told a story. She's actually recently taken the book and thrown it across the room. She doesn't want the book anymore. And it's left them worried that they're not getting it right. They're not telling her where she comes from in the right way. So let's just start with that part of the story.
- [10:23]
Lisa Schumann
Okay, so, you know, if we kind of go back and think about what happened in the adoption community, right, in the 1970s or so, there was a large number of children adopted in the US and many adoption agencies at the time said, you know, you probably shouldn't tell your child and if you have to tell them, tell them very little because you have to be the parents. And that's the end of the story. And so those children grew up very dissatisfied and felt like their parents lied to them. Wondered if their parents weren't telling them this, maybe there were other things their parents weren't telling them. So fast forward 1980s, because donor sperm's been around forever. But in the 1980s, donor eggs became popular and we kind of went back to the drawing board and unfortunately the fertility doctors again told parents, you really don't have to tell your children. And so we had to learn the same lesson all over again. And what the adult children said was, you know, if I had my druthers, I would love to never have a moment when I knew my parents had told me this story. I wish I just always grew up knowing it. And so that's why we recommend sharing from infancy. The second reason is for the parents discomfort, right. We talked in the beginning about how uncomfortable the parents are. And that's natural. Parents are going to trip over their words when they talk about it. They're going to feel anxious, they're going to feel nervous. And so the antidote to that is practice, right? And so if they can start even in the womb, start with, and I have a four step process I'm happy to share with you. But if they can start sharing the narrative and practicing it, they can have their tears about it, they can talk to their spouse about it, they can get the kinks out. So when they finally share it with their child and their child understands it, they've said it a thousand times and it feels really comfortable for them. And so with this couple, it sounds like they've been talking about it for a long time and that they feel comfortable with it. And so if they didn't feel comfortable talking about it and they started crying in the middle of every story, that naturally would make the child, even a young child, wonder what's going on here. Right. What I'm hearing and what I'm seeing are two different things. And so maybe that's what they're picking up. It sounds like these parents have been very thoughtful from day one, really trying to get this right. And so it seems like they're doing all the right things. And so it's really important for them, I think, to follow their kids lead. If they are in these workshops that I ran for donor consultants and before that adopted children I would see year after year after year, some of these kids, we started age five and so some of these kids would say to their parents, I don't want to have anything to do with this. I don't like it, I don't want to come to this thing. I don't understand why I need to learn this information. This is not important to me. And then, and we have them make this little book in the workshop and then one day the parent goes in their bedroom and they see them looking at the little book. So you just never know when you, and we call it the planting the seed theory. You keep planting seeds over time and eventually some of them sprout. And for some kids they sprout at 4 and some kids, they sprout later. Some kids may, in adolescence, their body may start to change and their body may not be like their parents body. And they may say, okay, now I'm really interested. Or maybe when they're first going into, let's say second grade and they develop abstract reasoning and they can start to learn things in a different way. You know, parents so often say, why do I have to talk to my child? They're not going to understand this complex situation. It doesn't make sense to them. I have to wait till they're older. But the point is really not that they understand because, as you know, they will develop different ways of understanding over time. And even though their understanding is very concrete when they're little, that's okay. They have to understand the concept.
- [14:43]
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
Yeah.
- [14:44]
Podcast Host
Can you say a little bit more about what that looks like and maybe what it might sound like or look like for a family like Sadie's family?
- [14:52]
Lisa Schumann
Yes. I have someone on my podcast who works on my team, and she and her wife were telling their children they have two children who they had through donor embryos, and they were telling their children about their story and they said, okay, we've been telling your story for a long time. Do you understand it? And this woman's son says, yes, I had a mama, a mommy, and a. And she said, what do you mean, a donut? He said, yes, I tell my friends I had a mommy, a mama, and a donut. And so she says, you know, I learned my lesson. You can't tell your child their story if you have a Brooklyn accent because you will mess it up.
- [15:31]
Podcast Host
That's fantastic. That is fantastic.
- [15:35]
Dr. Susan Swick
We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, Lisa's going to share how parents could develop an honest and age appropriate story about how their family took shape for their child and how they can decide who else family, friends, even neighbors, gets to hear it.
- [15:57]
Julia Louis-Dreyfus
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- [17:46]
Podcast Host
How do you help parents develop a story that is meaningful and accurate enough for kids? And also organizing, comforting, authentic for parents?
- [17:58]
Lisa Schumann
Okay, so I know we are mostly on audio. I will show you some visuals, but I will describe them so that we can see it. So I feel like this is as you're saying, Dr. Swick. I think this is so important. Parents are so anxious. And so I developed this four step process to try to help parents have an anchor. So the first step is thinking about difference. So we want our children to develop a tolerance for difference, understand difference out in the world, be tolerant of that and difference within their own home because of course their family may look very different than the neighbor's family. And then sameness, because kids at some point want to be the same as their friends, have the same Xbox or sneakers or what have you. And then the third step would be to start to think about how the story developed, what are the mechanics and pieces along the way. And last is a child's own story. Because children always love to hear about themselves. They love to see their own pictures and understand their own story. So, so I'll show you some examples. I'm showing the family book. I have a whole list on my website of books by Todd Parr. And so the book just basically talks about, you know, sometimes you have two moms, sometimes you have one dad, sometimes you live in a house, sometimes you live in an apartment. There's no right way to have a family. And as you can see, the illustrations are very colorful and very concrete. And it just gives you this sense that this is the way to kind of think about the world. There are lots of differences.
- [19:38]
Dr. Susan Swick
Yes.
- [19:39]
Podcast Host
I love that book.
- [19:40]
Lisa Schumann
Oh, do you? Yes, I do too. I love his books.
- [19:43]
Podcast Host
His books are wonderful. And he has those cards, those flashcards of different emotions. They're the best cards. There's that wide variety of feelings. There's no bad feelings, there's just a lot of them. And his illustrations are simple and bright and colorful and very accessible.
- [20:01]
Lisa Schumann
Yes, yes, I agree. I agree. And just like with the example you gave of the four year old, something like that would be great for a little kid.
- [20:10]
Dr. Susan Swick
Yes.
- [20:11]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [20:11]
Lisa Schumann
So this book is called what Makes a Baby? And the illustration in the front is a sperm, an egg and a uterus. So although we all may come into the world in a different way. All your friends, you may see two dads or one mom or a trans family, and all of the parts might be different. Maybe you don't grow in your mommy's tummy. If you're in a trans family, there's not going to be the sperm in the man. But it doesn't matter if you use a donor eggs, if you use a donor sperm, if you use a gestational carrier. All of these parts are necessary for everyone. So although they may come from different places, in each family, everybody is the same in this way. Everyone is the same. And so for a child who feels they have to focus on what's the same, that's very reassuring for them. And as we talk about just the story and the mechanism. So there's a book called the Pea that Was Me. It's really a book that talks about very, very concrete terms like you put the egg and sperm together, you can make an embryo with the egg and the sperm, and that embryo can create a baby. And then I think it's also nice to talk about your specific family type. So this is a book called why I Don't have a Daddy. So there are lots of books like that that talk about two mom families, single parent families. This is a very sweet book about butterflies that have magical wings. And again, this is a little bit older, but some lady butterflies have extra spots on their wings and they give those spots to other little butterflies to have baby butterflies.
- [21:52]
Podcast Host
Oh, that's wonderful. I mean, one of the magical things about books is it can. They can be wonderful. They have illustrations which are critical for especially the youngest kids. They also can be organizing for parents so that the parent is calmly sitting side by side with their child and sharing a story, talking about a story, able to unpack and answer questions in a way that doesn't feel like a scripted experience that they have to get just right. But I'm wondering if, are there any common pitfalls that you see maybe talking with those youngest kids, those preschool kids who have questions where parents can maybe get off road? I think you never get anything too wrong because you get a chance to do it again and again. With preschoolers, the next day is a whole new. Feels like a whole new century to a child. And some of those questions you thought you had really nailed and handled well, they come back with the same question or a very slight variant on it. So maybe that's one pitfall that parents expect, that once they've answered it, it should be over. And with preschoolers, it comes up every day.
- [23:01]
Lisa Schumann
I want to answer your question, but first I want to highlight what you're saying because I think that's so true and I think it's so important for the listeners to take to heart because this dropping the seed theory is exactly that. Right. That every day we can keep modifying and molding our story in a way that feels comfortable for us and it isn't a one and done situation and we do have another day with our K. So I really appreciate you saying that. I think it's so important. So important. Yeah. So I would say the biggest pitfall or the biggest difficulty that parents have with this is not just telling their child, but how is my child going to manage telling other people? And how do I manage telling other people? And they assume that just because it's important to tell their child, they also have to tell their neighbor and they have to tell their, you know, best friend. And what I tell people is that even if they don't anticipate this yet, what's going to happen is their world is going to grow. So they're going to start out building their family with this warm, supportive community. Their best friends, their family, people who they trust and who are supportive of them. But as their world grows and they start going to preschool or Mommy and Me or girl Scouts or sports teams, they're going to need other parents who are gonna have questions. And sometimes people are very kind and just curious and say the wrong thing. And sometimes people are not as kind. And for a parent who's already feeling very hurt around this issue of needing to use donor conception to build their family, it can really be painful. Or if you're in a situation where one person needed donor conception and the other didn't, maybe a single parent or a same sex coup, or even a heterosexual couple with infertility, it can be so painful for the non genetic parent to hear comments from other people. And so I think it's really important that here they are trying to do it all. They're trying to talk to their kids in a way that's gonna be helpful. They're trying to manage their internal pain around it. They're trying to deal with other people. And so what I share with them is there's a very big difference between privacy and secrecy. Secrecy has shame behind it. And, and privacy everybody's entitled to. Just because your partner or your best friend is a soapbox person doesn't mean that you have to be. You can say to someone, you know, there's no dad in the picture or you know what? We use donor conception and we're not going to share who the child's genetically related to right now because we feel that's the child's information to share or not to share. And when a child grows up, they can make that decision or you can share it if it's something that you're comfortable with. But I think parents have to give themselves a break and understand that they don't just because it's important to tell their children, it's not necessary to tell the world. They don't have to post the donor's identity on Facebook and all of that. It's not necessary. And with the children, parents often feel very nervous. My kid's going to go to school, talk about this, and other kids are gonna think they're weird. And as I just shared in the story with the Don, in that story, this child was telling his friends that they used a donut to have him. And his friends were like, all right, let's get on this. Let's go play on the swings. Like, whatever. You know, they don't even think about it.
- [26:40]
Podcast Host
Yeah, right. Yeah. No, that's kids, they're like, that's all the information I need. I'm really interested in soccer.
- [26:47]
Lisa Schumann
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [26:51]
Podcast Host
Well, that's. I love the distinction between privacy and secrecy. I think that's so important. So for parents, parents may be unlike Lorraine and Michael, but who've maybe held back on talking about the details of the origin story. So they effectively have a secret and are trying to figure out a way to bring this to their child. Now their older child, maybe school age or even teenage. Do you have any guidance about how parents can best approach. I know that's a big topic. Are there principles that guide you? How have you helped parents through that? That. Yes.
- [27:33]
Lisa Schumann
I'm so glad you raised that because it's so true. It's so hard to feel like you have the secret and then you're so embarrassed you have to keep it. I agree with you completely. And that's why we say it's never too early, but it's never too late because we really need to appreciate we have to start. And if we focus on our shame and our discomfort with talking about it, we're not gonna get there. We really have to let ourselves off the hook and say, okay, we need to get to it. And how can we get to it? How can we tell in a way that's going to be helpful for our particular situation? So I had parents who came to me recently who their kids were in high school already. And so we made it this kind of pre graduate before they graduate. This is important as they launch into the world for them to and it's really an important thing for people to know about their genetics, particularly because these children will have genetic siblings and it's not a matter of if there may be hundreds of them. And I work with families where their child is in the same math class as a donor sibling. And so this is something that the kids are going to need to know. So we can talk about it in different ways. But I think it's really important then to think about your own child's personality and sensitivities around this topic before you make it decision about how to broach it.
- [29:03]
Dr. Susan Swick
Sit tight. We're going to take one more quick break and we'll be right back with more from Lisa.
- [29:26]
Podcast Host
Parents may be dealing with their own feelings, including grief, maybe unprocessed grief, presumably about the failure to have children the way they had expected to. Could you share a little bit about how maybe an example and how you help families manage that grief?
- [29:46]
Lisa Schumann
Well, I think that's so great, the way that you frame that, because it's so true. I think it's hard to appreciate because parents very often feel like, well, if I feel grief, what does this mean? Does this mean that I shouldn't have children? Does it mean I should fully grieve and then I can start, what should I be thinking of? And I think it's important for parents to know that they are going to process this over time. And I kind of make a metaphor with the changing of the seasons attached to this theory, because as we move from one season to another, we can kind of see how, like our experience in grief, things come and go, right? We might have in the spring, some cold days, and then maybe we have a bunch of warm days, and then all of a sudden we have one cold day or two cold days, and then eventually they're only warm days. Right? And I think parents are going to go through that. They don't expect that to happen maybe, but they may feel a lot of grief over this, and then as time goes by, they might feel a little bit better. And then they have their child and they feel even because now they're no longer infertile, they now have a child and they're parenting. But what about this grief? And I wanted to mention something else about that in a moment. But what about this grief? This grief is going to subside over time, and then maybe one day they're going to walk into the supermarket, and somebody's gonna say, oh, your daughter looks just like you. And then all of a sudden, there's this pang of pain and sadness, and the sorrow comes flooding back for a moment. Oh, my God. I forgo forgot my child's donor conceived this kid that I was just snuggling with, just reading with, just playing with my daughter. Oh, my God, I forgot. And so it can come back. And over time, I think that feeling will fade. And parents don't necessarily expect that that's the way it's going to go, but it is typically how that experience happens. And what people who are going through fertility treatment, I think very often don't realize that they have two sources of pa so they have the pain of going through treatment and all the difficulties inherent in that. And we do have research that shows that people going through fertility treatment unsuccessfully can have the same levels of depression as chemotherapy patients. So people can be very, very. Yes, very depressed as they're going through treatment. Right. And they want to have a baby then. The other piece is that they are in this situation where they need to use donor conception.
- [32:36]
Dr. Susan Swick
Now.
- [32:37]
Lisa Schumann
When the treatment's over and they're a parent, they're gonna be a parent. So half of that pain is gone. All the things that they've ever dreamed of. I'm gonna have my mom snuggle with and read stories to my kid. I'm gonna go to the playground, I'm gonna hang out with my sister and her kids, and all these dreams come true. And they're so happy. And they have. But this other pain and is not connected to the child is connected to them. The other pain that's left is I am not genetically related to my child. And that pain can hurt. But what parents get confused about very often is they think that pain means something for their child. It means, do I not love my child enough? Am I not going to bond with my child? Is my child not going to bond with me? How can I have this feeling of pain and upset about using donor conception and still bond with my child? Well, the truth is, that's a personal issue. That's your issue to resolve. That's not about your parenting. That's not about you're going to love your kid. You're going to be so happy with your kid, and your kid comes out as an innocent being. You're their parent. They don't know any different. They're going to love you, and so you're going to have this great life with your child. The pain around your infertility the pain around using the genetics from somebody that you don't know, which can feel really uncomfortable, is your issue to resolve and not about your child.
- [34:04]
Podcast Host
Oh, I love that. So you're making me think so. Lorraine and Michael had talked about a lot of different feelings around how Sadie was conceived, but they had a lot of worry that she was going to know something was wrong and would develop a sense that she was somehow broken or worth less than other kids. And I. I love the fact that in some ways, the reassurance that you want to offer is that just couldn't be farther from the truth. Your complicated feelings are real and they're your own, and ignoring them won't make them go away. And your child's sense of worth comes from how. How you engage with them, how they live in the world and doesn't have to be affected at all by the fact of those feelings and how you deal with them. It's very powerful. Very powerful. You mentioned something a little earlier about the question of who else to tell beyond your child. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about how you help families so parents, maybe eventually the children themselves, assess who should be in the circle of knowledge. Very, very few of us talk with people about exactly how and when our biological children were conceived. It's not a common story at a cocktail party. So how do you help parents think about that?
- [35:36]
Lisa Schumann
So I think that it's really important for parents to appreciate that their dynamic might be different than they expect. And it's important for them, if they're a couple, if they're two people in the family, to talk about it with each other in the same way. I think when talking to the outside world, it can be so complicated. So I saw this man who. He was donating his sperm to his brother, and his brother was really nervous because in their family, the sperm donor brother grew up as the favorite child in the family. So he was afraid if the parents knew what was gonna happen at the Thanksgiving table. Now he's already an elevated member of the family, but now he's really the hero. And is this going to diminish the brother even more? And are they always gonna be looking at this kid as the brother's kid? Right. And how are they gonna feel about it? And, you know, he had to really be able to process that. His wife had to understand what that meant to him. They had to make a decision about how they were gonn this with the family, with other people, because even outside of the family, he was very sensitive to that. Having Grown up this way. Right? And so it was really important for him to not feel diminished. He needed to feel strong in his role as a. As the father to his child. And so he had to make these decisions based upon his history and work that through with his partner and figure out what worked for them. Now, that might change over time, right? The kid may grow up and that may change, but in that moment, everything is so raw. And you want to be there for your child, right? You don't want to have more reasons to feel distracted from your child's story, more reasons to feel like you can't engage with your kids because you're dealing with your own grief. You want to make it as easy for yourself as possible, and why make it miserable? So I think it's really important for parents to figure out as they go through this, what works for them, how they can manage it. And certainly in Sadie's story, this couple have to make so many decisions about this. How are they going to talk to other people about it? Are they going to engage with other families who might be related? Are they gonna share that with other people? But based upon the two partners and their personalities and their relationships, they're going to have to make those decisions that are going to work for them. And different people have different cultural experiences. I know in lots of cultures, there are, you know, very strong feelings about being genetically linked and what that's going to mean. You're not gonna receive an inheritance if you're not genetically linked. People are going to exclude you from things. And maybe it's not as overt as that, but it's really important to think about what it means to you and your family and practice that with your partner, if you're a single parent, with your friends, and practice through some of those things and get a sense of what's gonna work for you. Because the worst feeling is to just share that at a cocktail party, and then all of a sudden, you come home and you're upset. Why did I say that? Your partner's upset with you. You're arguing about it. It's not worth it. Yes, it's really important to prepare.
- [39:01]
Podcast Host
I love your reminder, too, that in a partnership, the partners may be in different places for a host of reasons. And it's so important to have protected a little time and space to think and talk about this, explore it, be respectful and caring of one another. So then I'm wondering if you had to give advice to families of all shapes and sizes who are just setting out on this journey, that would be Protective of the parents well being. I mean, parenting is hard enough of their ability to be fully equipped and protective of their child, their developing child, their new baby. What advice would you give these families?
- [39:43]
Lisa Schumann
Well, I think, as I said before, it's really important to remember that your feelings are not going to be the same as your children's. Right. People assume. Well, I feel really nervous about this. I feel that people are going to look at me a certain way. I feel upset about using donor conception. I feel ashamed that I'm upset. Maybe I shouldn't be upset. I feel worried that my second child's going to be donor conceived and my first one wasn't. And you have all these anxieties and then you assume that your child's going to have the same anxieties. They may or they may not. Right. We really need to be able to give our children the ability to form their own opinions. And just like this situation with Sadie, if she wants to throw the book, okay, you know, you can tell her in a different way. If she still doesn't like, like the topic, then you drop the scene another time and see what happens. But inside of her heart, there's always going to be a part of her that knows that she's attached someplace else. Right. We all walk around in our families knowing not just socially that we're connected to our parents, but genetically we're connected. If your donor conceives, you have this other person out there in the world that you're connected to. And so even if you don't want to meet your donor, don't want meet siblings, not interested at all, you still need to feel good about yourself. And even if you feel like you're completely like your parents, there may be 2% of you that knows that, yeah, I have my donor's freckles or cleft chin or, you know, musical talent. And so as parents, we want our children to feel good about all of themselves, not just the parts of themselves that are related to us. And so we need to continue to feel good about the donors and about the donor conception, even if we have heartache about it ourselves. We need to feel gratitude towards the donors and warm feelings towards the donors because that will translate into that's how the child feels about that part of themselves.
- [41:48]
Podcast Host
Well, that's a wonderful frame. It's useful for other situations for parents that are getting divorced where it's acrimonious and helping parents remember that their child needs to feel good about all parts of themselves. You're reminding parents that they're going to have lots of feelings. These feelings are real and important and deserve to be processed and dealt with, but they're not necessarily the same feelings that their child will have and they don't mean that their child will be in any way less than or diminished and that then to focus for their child on really child centered honesty. Lisa Schuman thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate you doing that work and being part of this conversation.
- [42:37]
Lisa Schumann
Well, thank you for having me. It's been wonderful and so wonderful to meet you. Dr. Swick. I love your work and I'm grateful to be part of your community.
- [42:45]
Podcast Host
Yeah, well I feel the same way. Welcome.
- [42:48]
Lisa Schumann
Thank you.
- [42:51]
Dr. Susan Swick
If you haven't subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet, now is the perfect time. You can listen to Talk about Able completely ad free. Plus you'll unlock exclusive content like even more helpful advice and tips on the challenges parents are facing. Just tap that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or go to lemonadapremium.com to subscribe on any other app. You can also listen ad free on Amazon Music with your prime membership. Talk about Able is produced by Lemonada Media in partnership with Montage Health and their Ohana center for Child and Family Mental Health, and it's made possible through funding from the Montaj Health Foundation. Together we're committed to helping families talk about the issues that children, teens and young adults are facing today. We believe that when these conversations happen at home, even about the most challenging subjects, children build the skills they need to flourish. Because when families are connected, the hard moments become more bearable, the good moments become even better, and it all becomes Talk About Able. The show is produced by Hannah Boomershine and James Barber. Our senior producer is Muna Danish, mixing and sound design by James Farber. Kristen Lepore is our VP of Content Development and Jackie Danziger is Head of Content. Maggie Crowshaw is our Senior Director of Partnerships. Executive producers include myself, Stephanie Whittles Wax and Jack Jessica Cordova Kramer. Special thanks to Kelsey Talley and Maya Smith. You can help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Thanks so much for listening and we'll
- [44:28]
Podcast Host
see you next week.