Lilliana Vazquez is pregnant!
“It was just complete and over the top elation,” she tells PEOPLE as she shares the news. “I don’t think it’s a feeling I’d ever really felt before.”
Despite the pandemic and a professional upset afterE!canceled her show— “The biggest professional disappointment and heartache that I’ve ever gone through,” she says — Vazquez and McGrath decided to go forward with focusing on becoming parents.
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“I took inventory of the things that I valued, that my husband and I prioritized, and it was being parents. We just wanted to be parents,” she says. “We put that intention out there and I said, ‘Let’s just, let’s do it. Let’s go for it.’ "
So they did. And several weeks after a treatment last year, they got the news that there was a heart beating in her belly. “I thought it was a prank call,” she says with a laugh. “I’m 40 years old and I’m pregnant for the first time, and so I think when you’ve experienced so much loss… it hardens you and it makes you so scared.”
“It’s heartbreaking to say, but for the first trimester every day, I was like, ‘Is today the last day I’m going to be pregnant?’ " she adds. “It took a long time for me to get out of that phase to feel like, ‘Okay, Lilliana, you can’t be afraid. You have to let this feel like what it is, which is a miracle.’ "
Lilliana Vazquez
“I do not take no for an answer. So you can imagine, for me to finally say, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ how broken I was and how beat down I was, for me to actually stop. Because stop and slow are not in my vocabulary. They do not exist,” she says. “I physically couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t recognize myself. Hormones make you crazy. It created a real division between my husband and I.”
“We’ve been married for 13 years, and as much as they go through this with you, physically you go through this alone. And he can be as empathetic and as supportive as he can be, but at the end of the day, those shots go in your stomach. You’re the one that has to carry the physical burden of putting your body through that,” she adds. “And I think that’s the point that I hit many times, but you know that little immigrant girl, that mentality when you grow up with your parents and you see them struggle so hard. You’re like, ‘No, I can do this. Look at what they did.’ "
As she awaits her little “miracle,” Vazquez is also reflecting on the “isolating” feeling of being a Latina going through infertility struggles. She says that oftentimes Latinas are stereotyped as being fertile when in actuality Latinas' fertility rate has dropped 31 percent from 2006 to 2017, according toChild Trends.
“We’re not creating a space for people to feel comfortable and we’re not creating access to these resources and this education. And I think that’s really important,” she says.
So to help defeat that stigma, Vazquez is working withKindbody— an organization that specializes in women’s reproductive health — to help a dozen Latinas receive a free full fertility assessment.
“I actually reached out and said ‘Listen, Latinas are so under-serviced when it comes to reproductive health. Help me educate this incredible group of women that are choosing education and profession over family planning at this phase in their life,’ " she says. “I just want them to understand what their options are. I mean, I took it in 2015 and I’m pregnant in 2021.”
“If I had not taken that test, could I ever have realized this dream? I don’t know,” she says. “But that information was such a pivotal moment in my life.”
source: people.com
