Cupcakes Everywhere: Finding Your Recipe

Tell us a little about yourself.

Hi! I’m Erin, a digital marketer by day and a mom of three kids and new children’s book author. I live in Chicago with my family, which includes my husband, twin daughters from many years of IVF, and then a bonus singleton son. I’m also a huge fan of Pulling Down the Moon and went there for all of my IVF cycles in Chicago.

Tell us about your journey to motherhood. 

My husband and I got married young, and were just having fun but ‘not not’ trying for a few years and living in Las Vegas. So when I arrived at my gynecologist and told her I was ready to start our family, she was concerned we hadn’t had even one ‘oops’  pregnancy.

We started at my OB-GYN with Clomid cycles and IUIs, quickly realizing that we needed to move to IVF to have a chance at having a baby due to severe male factor issues and unexplained infertility on my end. The first IVF cycle was a big disappointment, generating a few poor quality embryos that didn't even make it to a transfer. We were devastated, especially since I had (naively) assumed it would work on the first try. We moved home to Chicago to commit ourselves to the process and have access to better insurance coverage.

During the next cycle back in Chicago, we tweaked my protocol, which majorly helped the quality and quantity of eggs. I was taking a lot better care of myself during that cycle, doing acupuncture, herbs and a Yoga for Fertility at PTDM. I definitely attribute blending the Western and Eastern approaches to medicine to that cycle’s success, which resulted in having embryos to freeze.

But we did not do PGT testing – for our age, it wasn’t really recommended back then – and we had a lot of challenges getting our embryos to stick around. The first one was a blighted ovum, which I found out about at 8 weeks during my first ultrasound. The next two were both total negatives, despite the aggressive reproductive immunology protocol I adopted. And as a hail mary, we transferred our last two embryos, which are my daughters.

How did your experience with infertility and IVF change your perspective on women’s health and inspire you to write your book ‘Cupcakes Everywhere’?

I wrote ‘Cupcakes Everywhere’ because I wanted to tell a story about infertility that was really honest about how isolating it can be. For years, not being able to get pregnant sent me into a complete existential fog and made it difficult to live in a world where babies seemed to come so easily and readily to anyone who wanted them.

After success with IVF, I found myself in search of a book that could tell my ‘rainbow babies’ about their origin story. There were a lot of infertility children's books alluding to waiting for a baby, or longing for a baby for extended periods, but not one that highlighted the isolation you can experience when it feels like everybody except you has an easy time getting pregnant. And that’s when I realized that my family needed this book to spark a real, authentic discussion — which made me consider that maybe others needed it, too.

I also wanted it to be a book that both children and adults could enjoy together, keeping it age-appropriate by using the power of a simple metaphor. So I chose something that literally makes life sweet — cupcakes — in hopes that it would tell a story about what it feels like to struggle with something that everybody else makes look like the easiest thing in the world. Through the words and illustrations, I wanted the reader to be totally immersed in a world where there are cupcakes everywhere you turn but for some inexplicable reason you can’t have one.

It's my story, but I know it's also the story of so many others, and I hope they will see their experience reflected in the book.

You now have three kids. Tell us how you found out you were pregnant.

I am now the proud mom of two incredible girls that were our last two embryos. And a spontaneous pregnancy with my singleton son!

With the girls, I became pregnant with them from a modified natural FET cycle – no prep meds, just a trigger shot and then transfer during the appropriate window with my natural cycle. After a string of failures, my husband and I were really at a juncture of if we were going to do another round of IVF or pursue another dream for our life together. 

I decided with that cycle I was going to throw a lot of the rules out the window and just try to be happy at all costs. With previous cycles, I barely moved off the couch, only ate healthy food, tried to avoid stressful outings, spent a lot of time reading and re-reading the instructions I had been given from the nurses. 

For that last cycle, I went to yoga almost every day, since that was a big part of my regular routine at the time. I stayed up late at a concert one night. I had a few delicious meals with a glass of wine. I made an effort to see friends and family, and shared with them if I was feeling scared or upset. Basically, I just tried my best to fill my days with things I genuinely loved. 

And then I went in for my blood test at FCI, and it was positive. And a higher beta than I had ever seen! They continued to rise appropriately and at our first ultrasound we found out both embryos stuck around. 

With my son (this could be a whole other post) I was a week or two late and only realized it when we were driving past a CVS. I told my husband, “Hey you should probably pull over so I can get a pregnancy test” and walked back out to my 18-month old twins telling my husband the unbelievably unlikely news that I was pregnant again. It was a complete shock that, still to this day, I don’t quite understand, but am so thankful for.

How did you care for yourself while trying to conceive? During pregnancy?

I am a huge proponent of acupuncture, during infertility, pregnancy/postpartum and just general life. I find it helps so much with my reproductive and mental health, and I felt like PDTM was *the* place to go for your pre-cycle, post-transfer and cleansing after a failed cycle. I was so impressed by how the practitioners were able to blend this ancient, time-tested technique and apply it to things like IVF cycles, which have only been around for a few decades. It truly is the best of both worlds. 

The other thing that really helped me was the PDTM infertility yoga classes. Yes, it was a yoga class, but it was also a safe space to process what you were going through depending on where you were in a treatment cycle. Knowing that others were in similarly unfair and sad situations was much more valuable and reassuring to me than anything else. I personally didn’t really need a professional therapist to help me validate or explore my complicated, dark feelings. I needed a group of fellow infertility warriors to say “I’ve felt that too.” and “You’re not the only one.” 

And I drank a lot of PDTM tea during those years. :)

What stigma(s) in women’s health do you wish to lift the veil on?

I wish more people prepared infertility patients for the fact that they may find the adjustment to motherhood hard, and that’s normal and valid.

But if you rewind the tape a bit and go back to when I was infertile for three years, if I were to EVER hear somebody complaining after finally having their family dreams come true, my response wouldn’t have been very generous. On the internet, there were forums after forums of infertility communities, with lots of very sad, broken people in them, whose ongoing struggles reminded you that if you managed to get pregnant you were one of the lucky ones. 

As a result, postpartum depression after infertility, at least at the time, was a topic that was literally unspeakable. And if I ever write another book, it will be for adults and it will shine a light on this nuanced, complex matter of what happens after infertility is in your rear-view mirror. (Spoiler alert: It’s never fully in your rear-view mirror; it’s just something you learn to live with.)

What advice do you have for other aspiring mamas? 

I am very conscious of infertility patients getting lots of advice (and even devoted a section of my book to this) so I feel a bit hypocritical doling out words of wisdom but here I go anyway.

I’ll preface it by sharing that I did not handle infertility very well. Attending baby showers, seeing a new mom on the sidewalk pushing her stroller and sipping her coffee, people enjoying their newborn out at brunch, seeing celebrity pregnancy announcements — all of it was really hard for me to handle, which is something I felt ashamed of at times. Before infertility I felt like I was generally a nice person, but after infertility I started to think maybe I wasn’t so nice after all – maybe I was, deep down, just bitter and jealous.

But if I had one piece of advice it would be this: Do whatever you need to get through this dark period of your life. This isn’t your forever. Self-care, therapy, extra sleep, special treats, skipping events that make you feel bad, breaks from treatment, breaks from the internet. Your life won’t always be like this — this chapter WILL end — so do what you have to stay sane and be extra gentle with yourself during this season of your life. 

Anything else you’d like to share?

I’m so thankful to Pulling Down the Moon for taking care of my spirit during those tough years. There are lots of places you can go during IVF to tend to your physical body, but it’s also important to keep your mental and emotional state in good working order, as much as you possibly can. I truly feel that’s half the battle in a treatment cycle, and I am so fortunate to have had you all in my corner.

What to learn how Pulling Down the Moon can support your journey too? Start here.