“The Talk,” CBS’ answer to the ABC talk show franchise “The View” is in it’s fourth season and already there’s been controversy. Sheryl Underwood angered Black Twitter by responding to guest Heidi Klum’s admission that she saved her biracial children’s hair by deeming “Afro” hair “nasty.”
Underwood, who at first didn’t see the problem, later apologized. But that wasn’t all. In a week where hosts Sara Gilbert, Julie Chen, Underwood, Aisha Tyler and Sharon Osborne all revealed secrets, Chen admitted to plastic surgery to change her Asian eyes and Tyler revealed the painful secret that she and her husband struggled with infertility and had given up on having biological children.
“I think a lot of women nowadays focus on their career first,” Tyler, 43, told the Tom Joyner Morning Show. “I loved what I did and I was working very hard and everybody thinks nowadays with all the medical miracles that you have plenty of time, that you have all the time in the world. Whenever you’re ready to get pregnant, that stuff will be there for you. The fact of the matter is that it isn’t.
Whenever you go in and they tell you the likelihood of getting pregnant after 40 is 10% and for most people it’s 2-7%, couples focus on that and not the 97% that its likely that you’re not going to get pregnant.” Tyler says that she and her husband of 21 years, Jeff Tietjens, were not the only one of their friends who struggled to get pregnant.
She says after a year-and-a-half of trying, it was a devastating moment for her to realize it wasn’t going to happen for them, something she tearfully shared on “The Talk.”
“The more we thought about it, the more we were going through it, it’s a very expensive and painful process, you’re giving yourself shots every day, we just decided we were going to stop. We went through two rounds and we realized how many rounds we were going to have to go through to even be effective to even have a chance at this and we decided we were going to stop.”
The couple will remain child-free for now, but haven’t ruled out adoption, which has been a recurring theme in her standup act. It’s definitely an option and it’s something we’re thinking about down the line. But for me, I think a lot of couples rush through this process, they try IVF, it doesn’t work and then they rush and adopt. We’re just living with the fact that this is where we are right now. We don’t want to then jump into a whole ‘nother process that could be equally emotional.”
Tyler says that her main reason for telling her own personal story was to encourage other couples to ease up on themselves if they decide not to go forward with infertility treatment. Tyler found out that she has a problem with a fallopian tube that makes it difficult for sperm to reach an egg. Coupled with her age, it means it is that much more challenging for her to get pregnant naturally.
“It’s OK to say to yourself and your spouse and your families that we’re not going to put ourselves and our bodies and our emotions through that,” Tyler says. “We’re going to do something different. So many thousands of women stepped forward and said ‘Thank you for not making me feel bad because I didn’t want to put my body through that and not get pregnant anyway. That was why I stepped forward.”
“The Talk” airs weekdays on CBS. Check your local listings for times.
