This week’s episode dives into one of the most personal decisions many women face: whether or not to have children.

Part 1: When a piece of her IUD breaks off, Bailey Swilley’s spirals about her choice never to have children.

Bailey Swilley is a writer and comedian based in Brooklyn. In August 2024, she took two storytelling shows to the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and most recently, she won her first StorySLAM at The Moth. Since 2021, she’s hosted the monthly storytelling hour, We Love a Theme, in Brooklyn.

Part 2: Christel Bartelse takes an unconventional approach to figure out if she wants to be a mother or not.

Christel Bartelse is an Actor/Comedic Performer, Storyteller, Clown, Writer, and Educator. She got her start in comedy and improv with the Physical Comedy Duo "The Burnt Marshmallows (Canadian Comedy Award Nominees). She has created and written six award winning Solo Shows "Chaotica", "ONEymoon", "Significant Me", "All KIDDIng Aside", "The Surprise" and "Encore" and has toured them all across Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Most recently she wrote "A Woman of my Age" which she continues to develop. She can be seen on stages all over Toronto with her comedy, character work, and storytelling. She was the Co-Producer and Co-Host of the hit Storytelling Show "But That's Another Story" for over five years. She now produces and hosts, "Age Ain't Nothing but a Number" at the Burdock, Bi-Monthly, which features veteran comedians/storytellers sharing material on the theme of Age. She also teaches numerous workshops in improv, physical comedy, solo creation and storytelling around the city and is proud faculty member of Humber College, Toronto Film School, and George Brown College.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

PART 1

I have never wanted to have kids, not when I was a kid and not now that I'm a baby. This was never really a big deal. I kind of just coasted through life with this fact and it was totally fine, until I got married. Then all of a sudden, everyone in my life, my neighbors, my friends, my family, everyone wants me to have a baby.

It started at my wedding. At my wedding, my girlfriends came up to me and they were like, "Are you having kids?"

I was like, "No, I don't think so."

And they're like, "You've just got to."

Then my husband, all of his guy friends came to him and they were like, "Hey, are you going to have kids?"

Bailey Swilley shares her story at QED Astoria in Queens, NY in November 2024. Photo by Zhen Qin.

He was like, "No, I don't think so."

And they're like, "Good. Don't. It's not fun."

But nobody in my life wants me to have a baby more than my Taiwanese grandmother, my amah. The rings were barely on, the vowels were just uttered, and she comes to me and is like, "Please, please promise me, promise me you'll have kids,” like completely having a tantrum over it.

And she's like, “You've just got to, you've just got to,” like, tears running down her eyes.

So, we have the wedding. Everything goes nicely. About seven months later, it's time to celebrate the Lunar New Year. So I go down to visit my grandmother in Atlanta.

I think I'm visiting her for Chinese New Year, but it became very clear that she was actually campaign headquarters. She was determined to elect baby for a nine‑month term in my uterus.

So she had these different campaign tactics she was using.

I'm sorry, this is all really fresh. Sorry, I didn't think about that before.

She was using all of these tactics. And so tactic number one, she comes to me. It's very simple. She says, “You're going to run out of time and you're going to regret it.”

And I tell her, “You might be right. I might regret it, but I think I can live with that.”

So then I think that's the end of it. It's not the end of it.

The next night, I turn on RuPaul's Drag Race. Yeah, give it up for RuPaul's Drag Race. I sit down and I'm like, “This will be some nice family viewing.” So we sit down on the couch, she cozies up next to me. I'm like, “Oh, she likes the Queens. This is great.”

She gets very close to me, and she says, “I think they're gay.”

I tell her, “I agree.”

Then she comes even closer, she grabs my hand and she says, “Where'd you get that engagement ring?”

And she knows where I got this engagement ring. I tell her again, I remind her, “This was my mother‑in‑law's ring.”

And she says, “Well, it's a really nice ring.” And she's right, it is a nice ring. And she says, “Don't you think if she can give you a ring like that, you could give her a baby?”

I know that this is my grandmother and I need to be respectful, but I just get up and walk away.

About an hour later, it's still not over. She's really getting out her best ammo. She points to the center of the living room where she has a shrine to my dead father, her dead son. It's a shelf with little American flags up and down and then my dad's funeral portrait at the top. She points at his face and says, “He wants you to have kids.”

I don't know what to do. I don't know what to say. I just kind of like sit with that for a long time.

Also, around this time I have to get my IUD replaced. So, I go to my gynecologist and it's a very routine procedure, as far as I know. She takes some pliers and she yanks out my IUD. Then she holds it up to my face and I'm like, “Why? Why are you showing me this?”

And she goes, "It's missing a piece."

So, I say, "Is that normal?"

She's like, "No, it's never. It's only happened once and we never found it."

So, I'm like, "Okay. Cool, cool, cool.” I leave her office and I start thinking about the option she's given me. She says that I could take the abortion pill and maybe it'll fall out. Or maybe it's lodged in there somewhere and I have to have a surgery.

So, I'm Googling all of this and thinking about this and I come across this article that says, if you do have the surgery, if it has lodged itself in your uterus and you take it out, it could leave a punctured hole in your uterus and then you may never be able to have kids.

So I think maybe I'm relieved by this news. Like, if this is me, then it's done. My grandmother will leave me alone, I can't have kids, right? But then I think, “Oh, if I am relieved, maybe I feel guilty about that relief? Also, if I can't have kids, am I going to want them now?” I'm just kind of completely spiraling.

But before I can completely go down that rabbit hole, I have to go get an ultrasound. Now, I'm not sure if any of you have had an ultrasound in your reproductive organs, but it is exactly like having sex with a robot.

The piece is there. They see the piece in the imaging. So, now, it's time for me to go see a specialist.

I go to the specialist's office and she walks in. She's got a cart full of different tools and a camera and a big plastic bag and a giant needle.

She says, “Hey, we're going to dilate you and we're going to retrieve the piece of the IUD.”

I'm like, “Fabulous. Sounds like a great plan.” I think I'm being a little naive and not thinking about all the steps it's going to take to get there.

She's got me dilated. She's got the duck lips. She does the cranking, I'm dilated. She sticks the camera in and then she says, “Oh, my God, we forgot the anesthetic.”

You need to know that getting a shot in your cervix is not like the COVID shot, okay.

So, she tells me, “There's going to be some rushing.”

So, I'm like, “Okay. Great.” I don't even ask her what that means.

She sticks me in the cervix with the needle and, immediately, my entire body feels like it is completely convulsing and shaking. My heartbeat feels like it's at, I don't know. It's just racing harder than it's ever raced before. And I don't do drugs, so this was a very new feeling for me. That's the rushing.

And she's screaming at me. She's like, "Bailey, how are you doing? How are we doing? How's it going?"

I'm like, "Why is she yelling at me?"

And she's like, "You were very pale for a second."

I was like about to pass out.

Okay. She's got the camera in and she's digging around in there. I haven't even mentioned that, on the side of the room, there is a technician. She's pumping water in and out of me. I mentioned the plastic bag earlier, so there is like an elementary school lunch‑size trash bag underneath my nethers.

So, this technician is just pumping water in and out. I can hear water coming in and out of me. I'm looking at the doctor and five minutes have gone by. She's just making a face you never want to see your doctor make. She's making this grimacing face. She's just like…

And she's like, “We can't find it.” She uses a word that I wish she hadn't. She says, “There's just so much gunk in there.”

I think she's a bit of like a litigious doctor, because she's like, “I want you to watch me.” She moves the TV screen next to my head so I can watch her dig around in my gunk.

She's still making that face and she's like, “We're not finding it. We're not finding it.”

I'm sitting here thinking, “Is this my punishment for not wanting to have kids? And when she's done with all of this, am I going to want to get another IUD? Maybe this is a wake‑up call. Maybe my amah is right. Like, I'm running out of time and this is it and I've got to do it.”

So, I'm kind of like spiraling and I decide that the best thing for me to do is just to pull out my phone and dissociate for a little while.

So, they're digging, around, the water is going in and out, and I'm on my Instagram. It's the holiday season. My entire feed is just people I went to high school with, their families dressed in matching Christmas clothes.

I'm seeing these photos and I'm just like, “I do not ever want to dress up my husband and children in matching Christmas clothes. I don't want to help anybody with their homework. I don't want to teach anybody how to drive. I don't want to pay for private school or college. I don't ever want to go to the zoo on purpose. I don't want to watch anything on Disney Plus. I certainly never want to see anything on ice. I know that I would be a fabulous mother. I just do not want to, okay?”

So, I'm realizing, like— you can clap for that.

So, I realize in this moment, I look back at the doctor and she's like, “Hey, we're not going to find it so we're just going to put in a new one.”

I'm panicking again. I'm like, “Oh, my God. There's this piece of plastic probably lodged in…”

There's probably a lot of scientists and doctors here, so don't judge me. But I'm like, “Oh, it's probably lodged into my colon at this point. Who knows?”

I'm like, I've got to just kind of accept defeat here. I've got to accept that my amah is going to be mad at me, I've got to accept that there's this IUD floating around in me somewhere, and I've got to accept that I just simply do not want children and that is okay.

As soon as I realize that, as soon as I have accepted all of that, the doctor looks at me and says, "Aha, we found it." It came out with the gunk.

Thank you all so much.

PART 2

Ever since I was little, I've had a hard time making a decision. It always gets narrowed down to two choices, and that's where I am perpetually stuck. I am always on the fence.

I think my fear about making a decision is surrounded by the fact of, "God, what if I make the wrong choice?" or "What if the thing that I didn't choose was actually the way better thing?”

Now, my first memory of this, of having to make this really hard decision of being on the fence, is when I'm seven years old. I go bathing suit shopping with my mom at Sears. Yes, because I'm a woman of an age who had to go shopping for a bathing suit at Sears. My mom and I spend ages in that changing room as I deliberate, waver, contemplate between the final two selections: the white bathing suit with the strawberries or the yellow bathing suit with the polka dots.

Christel Bartelse shares her story at Burdock Brewery in Toronto, ON in February 2025. Photo by Yanni Tong.

“Mom, I don't know.”

When I'm 25 years old, my parents gift me with a choice to pick out a leather jacket for my 25th birthday, something I had always wanted. And with my parents, we spent six hours in Danier Leather. We remember, we remember. As I had to decide between the black leather jacket or the brown leather jacket. “God, I don't know.”

And then even for my own wedding dress, I cut it very close to the date because I could not decide between that slim fitting, classic white dress or the big, poofy princess ballgown. “Oh, Mom, I don't know.”

Then I finally decided upon the big, poofy princess ballgown. In fact, the dress that I had always dreamed of and also the very first wedding dress I tried on. It just took us a while to get there.

Now, in October of 2014, I married my loving husband, David. I will say that I did choose to marry David. I did. It wasn't like I was in some reality TV show, like The Bachelorette, you know, standing at the altar and I had to decide between David or Richard. I actually chose to marry David.

Right now, David's like, "Who the fuck is Richard?"

But the next day, at our post‑wedding day brunch after we just got married, everyone had a comment for us. "Oh, that was a great wedding. So when are you having kids?” “Ooh, you're a cute couple. You'd be even cuter parents.” “Now, would you send your child to private school?”

You know what kind of people were always asking us if we were going to have kids? Other parents. That's who. But it was usually parents of little mischievous whipper snapper kids, people who were so jealous of our freedom that they wanted us to come over to the dark side.

And whenever a woman would say to me, “Hey, Christel, are you going to have a baby of your own?” I usually just looked at them as their kid was wiping his snotty nose on my sleeve and think, “You're not selling this to me. Your kid right now isn't the poster child for me making this decision.”

You see, David and I were both kind of on the fence about having kids. What mattered to me was that I had a partner who was open to the fact of having a child. That was important.

But I was on the fence about having a kid because I just never had that strong maternal instinct, even though I have an insanely close relationship with my own mother. And when I think of my mom having kids, she never thought about it. She just did it. It's what women did.

But by the time I got into my age of maybe having a kid, we had so many more choices, so many options, whether to have one or not.

Now, my other reason for being on the fence about having a kid is I have a great fear about giving birth. Just, it looked so painful, so intense. I could bleed to death on the floor and I don't even know what blood type I am. Then I just wasn't thinking I wanted to push something out of me that looked like all my insides mashed together.

And the thing that I swore I would never do is have a C‑section, because I didn't want an incision to my vagina and abdomen. Ugh!

Now, the other reason I was really on the fence about having a kid, because ever since the age of 19, it had been ingrained in my mind that I probably couldn't have one. This was after diagnosing myself and then eventually by a doctor that I had endometriosis. Now, after years of complaining about having a painful period, finally at 19, one doctor took me serious, gave me a laparoscopy, which is where they make a small incision just under your belly button, put a scope in and have a look around, and he told me that I had endometriosis. This is a chronic disease that causes pelvic pain and can cause infertility.

My husband's reason for being on the fence was just more about the state of the world. Did he want to bring a kid into what was going on, climate change, all of that?

So, for two years after our wedding, we just didn't really think about it. We just enjoyed being newly married, calling each other husband and wife, having this freedom, going traveling, and it was great. While people continually asked us when we were going to have a kid, which was very, very annoying.

Then, eventually, all of our friends that had gotten married around the same time as us or that were just getting married, they all started to have kids. In the odd time, we would get a night out with them or see them, they'd just complain to us. They told us how exhausted they were, how they wanted their old life back. They missed their freedom. And then they would ask when we were doing it. We just thought, “Again, you're not selling this to us.”

Now, in 2016, when I turned 37, I realized that if my husband and I were going to maybe try to have a baby, we should probably do it now. Not that I have any qualms about what age a woman wants to have a baby. I just knew that the older I get with my condition, it would get more complicated.

Soon after I turn 37, one day I'm sitting with my friend Kristen at a cafe. She got married just a week before us. As we're sipping our cappuccinos, she says to me, “We're actively trying to get pregnant. Are you going to have one?”

And I said, “Ah, I don't know.”

Then she looks right at me and says, “Can you imagine being one of those women over the age of 35 and having a baby? That is so wrong.” Even though she knows right in that moment that I'm 37. Like, if I were to give birth right now, I'm already over the age of 35.

But I don't say anything because still, at this point, I'm on the fence.

Now, because of everyone asking me over and over again if I was going to have a kid and being 37, I decide to write a one‑woman show. If you don't know this about me, up until the point I was 37, I had already written several one‑woman shows, and I find that every time I'm in a crisis in my life, I write a one‑woman show.

So, I decide to write a one‑woman show called All KIDding Aside. Yes, get the pun. Very clever. I write that show because it is my response to being constantly asked about whether we're going to have a kid or not. It's a show about the pressures we put on women to have a kid. And it's a show about, even if I'm able to have a baby.

And also, as I'm creating that show, I'm inspired by one day when I realize I'm late. I'm three weeks late.

Now, a lot of women in their 30s would be excited to go and get that pregnancy test. I went and got one, and as I peed on that stick, I freaked out.

When the test finally came back negative, I secretly celebrated. I was so happy. Maybe this should have been a sign.

Now, my period didn't come for a long time and I did numerous pregnancy tests, and I didn't have an answer.

So, going back to the show, All KIDding Aside, there was a moment at the end of the show where, finally, I break out to the audience. I really address the audience like this, very truthfully, as vulnerable as possible, and I announce to the audience that I am pregnant.

I explained that through the creation of the show I have become pregnant. I even throw on one of those t‑shirts that says "Mom To Be." And when I say this moment as honest and truthfully as possible, every night the audience gives me a standing ovation. And a few of my child‑free friends look very angry and confused.

But then at the end of the show, there's this other character, a doctor that comes in and we rip the rug from under the audience and myself. We reveal that I am not pregnant. Remember all those negative pregnancy tests I was having? Well, that was because my doctor had put me on a medication called Visanne, which is supposed to help with the endometriosis, but it stops your period. But no one told me that.

So I had had this sort of wishy‑washy, "Am I pregnant? Am I not?" I put that in the show because I also realized people treated me differently thinking that I was going to be this mom‑to‑be.

And even though the show is that we should just stop asking women whether they're having kids or not, I was astounded at how many people came up to me after the show and still said, "You should have a baby."

Now, as I stand here, or I should tell you. Actually, the ending of that show, true to form, the show ended with me still, like I always am, being on the fence. I hadn't fully made the decision should I have a baby, should I not. I explain that bathing suit story in the show that I'm always challenged to make a decision.

Now, today, right now I am 46 years old. I'll let you know that David and I, we don't have a child. Let's face it. At this point, we're probably not going to have one. And we really just never made that decision. For the first time, that decision was sort of made for us. I mean, we just kind of let it go. We didn't actively try but we didn't actively not try. I'm still convinced I'm infertile, but it just never happened.

And I'm finally okay with that decision. Because, for a long time, anytime someone announced that they were pregnant, I was extremely emotional. But also, secretly, every time I left my house and saw that woman fighting with her toddler in the park or anyone with a kid on a plane, I went, “Thank God, that's not me.”

And finally, I can accept it. Sometimes decisions are made for us, and sometimes we have to make them, but sometimes they just happen.

I love my life now. I love my freedom. I don't know what I'm missing out. It's great. I love my life with my husband.

And as I share this story with you tonight, I thank you for listening, because when I was asked to do Story Collider, I was torn so hard between two stories. But I chose this one. And for the other one, you'll have to hear it another time.

Thank you.