Featured in the AllPaths Magazine, 2024 Volume 1
Last November, we were excited to welcome Chiemi Rajamahendran, an Infertility and Grief Specialist who is better known as Miss.Conception Coach, as the Keynote Speaker at our 30th annual Family Building Conference.
Chiemi’s work centers around helping people better understand, validate, and process their infertility journey. In addition to her work with individuals worldwide, she uses her popular Instagram platform to raise awareness about the emotions felt and the reality of the mental health issues people experience when they are struggling to grow their families.
Join AllPaths Executive Director Kate Weldon LeBlanc for a conversation with Chiemi about grief, disappointment, and how to process the complex emotions that can accompany a complicated family building journey.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Kate:
There are so many things we could talk about, but two of the things that are all too prevalent in struggling to grow your family are waiting and disappointment. No matter what path you take, it seems like waiting is an inevitable part of the process, and unfortunately most people don’t get out of this struggle to become parents without experiencing disappointment. And that can take many different forms, there many different parts of this journey can cause disappointment. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Chiemi:
Yes, I think those are the two words that really jumped out at us when we were thinking and collaborating about some of the ideas around what this whole journey takes out of us.
From just the diagnosis alone and the processing of what that feels like to have to acknowledge and now deal with something like that. Because it’s not the way that I think a lot of couples or individuals assume or dream that they will end up starting a family and growing a family, so that’s where I think it’s a really important thing to have that support and community, just even being part of a diagnosis like that.
And then just all the information that receiving a diagnosis takes, the googling and the searching and acknowledging your own individual story, which I think is so unique to this whole community. Even though we have so many different people working through this space, it’s really an individual journey with unique, individual needs.
So even from the get-go, of having a deal with that, and approaching treatment and deciding, that’s a really nuanced space. Not everyone can have the privilege to do treatment, and we know RNE works tirelessly just trying to make fertility and family building options more accessible to people. So I think we have to be really soft in the wording of when we acknowledge and suggest treatment to people because it’s not always something that they’re able to receive due considering individual medical cases and financial constraints.
The emotional toll of family building also needs to be considered. We might be able to do treatment and go through IUIs and IVF, but the toll that takes emotionally, physically, mentally. The exhaustion of just having to contemplate it and starting that protocol is immense. Every step along the road of processing and waiting and just getting to terms with all of that is really where the support is needed for sure.