On Sunday, ESPN sportscaster Sara Walsh celebrated Mother's Day with her twins — but also took a moment to reflect upon the fact that things haven't always been so positive.
Walsh, who was an anchor on SportsCenter, opened up in an Instagram post on Sunday, writing that her journey to motherhood hasn't been easy. Alongside a photo of herself with her twins, Walsh revealed that she suffered from three miscarriages, one of which occurred while she was working.
"The road down a dark path began while hosting Sportscenter on the road from Alabama," she wrote. "I arrived in Tuscaloosa almost three months pregnant. I wouldn't return the same way."
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Though Walsh doesn't provide too many details (nor should she have to), she wrote that "I was scared, nobody knew I was pregnant, so I did the show while having a miscarriage. On television."
"My husband had to watch this unfold from more than a thousand miles away, texting me hospital options during commercial breaks," she wrote.
She recalled two more miscarriages after this, writing that she would "have surgery on one day and be on SportsCenter the next so as not to draw attention to my situation."
"We then went down the IVF road of endless shots and procedures," she continued. "After several rounds, we could only salvage two eggs. I refused to even use them for a long time, because I couldn't bear the idea of all hope being gone. I blew off pregnancy tests, scared to know if it worked. It had. Times two."
But after the heartbreak they had been through, Walsh and her husband, professional baseball player Matt Buschmann, decided to hold off on any announcements.
"There would be no baby announcement, no shower, we didn't buy a single thing in preparation for the babies, because I wasn't sure they'd show up," she wrote. "We told very few people we were pregnant, and almost no one there were two. For those that thought I was weirdly quiet about my pregnancy, now you know why."
Walsh wrote that this Mother's Day has been all the more gratifying now that she gets to spend it with her twins, who were decked out in "Good Egg" onesies her mother had bought for them in reference to their IVF conception.
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"For as long as I can remember I hosted Sportscenter on Mother's Day, and the last couple years doing that have been personally brutal," she admitted. "An hours-long reminder of everything that had gone wrong. I wasn't on tv today, and I'm not sure when I will be again, but instead I got to hang with these two good eggs. My ONLY good eggs. And I know how lucky I really am."
Welcome to Mothership: Parenting stories you actually want to read, whether you're thinking about or passing on kids, from egg-freezing to taking home baby and beyond. Because motherhood is a big if — not when — and it's time we talked about it that way.
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