YouTube/Refinery29
You either love GloZell Green’s eccentric act or you side-eye it all. But a recent interview with Refinery29 is exposing a different, vulnerable side of Green that is making everyone pay attention, and is also making the colorful comedian all the more relatable.
She spoke with the publication about infertility for National Infertility Week (which was last week, from April 24-30) and explained that while she was making people laugh in front of the camera, for the last few years, she was going through a painful fertility journey behind the camera. As Green, who is married, pointed out, she decided to put her quest for motherhood on overdrive at the age of 39, and her doctors told her that it was pretty much too late for her.
“My mom told me, ‘Make sure you do everything you want to do before you have kids,'” Green told Refinery29. “So that’s what I was doing. But biologically, the body is just like, well, you should have done it. And all the doctors that I went to, except for the last one, made me feel like I was just so old. You know, ‘You should have frozen your eggs at 20.’ Well, who’s thinking about that at 20?”
But Green didn’t give up. She pursued all of her options before eventually being blessed to have a surrogate offer to help, going that route because she had endometriosis and her uterine lining was thin. (Note: She did share that the surrogate is a White woman, which some people gave her flack over. But as she put it, “when you get to that point, you don’t care. You’re just happy that someone is willing to do be [sic] your surrogate, because it’s very dangerous.”)
“I started looking into this at 39, and I’m 43, and it’s just now happening,” Green said. “The only procedure I had done was the egg retrieval, and I had that done six times. I wasn’t going to carry the child myself, so I didn’t have to do any other procedures. It took three years from talking about it, to meeting with Wendie Wilson-Miller from Gifted Journeys Surrogacy, to finding the right doctor, to doing the egg retrieval, and finding the right surrogate.”
The baby, a girl, is set to be born in August, and in the meantime, Green is trying not to stress herself, or her surrogate out. She often finds herself worried when her surrogate travels, but she doesn’t want to keep the woman from doing what she wants and needs to for herself, in order for her pregnancy to be an easy and happy one.
As she waits, she’s also looking forward to hopefully having another child (“I have a few more eggs left that passed the test”) and continuing with sharing her story, so that other women know they’re not alone. And also so other women know that they shouldn’t let the ups and downs of such a painful process stop them from seeing it through.
“Don’t stop. It can get discouraging — Oh, it didn’t work or Oh, I lost the baby or I can’t do this again. You can. And when you get the kid, you’ll be happy that you did. But it’s a very painful process for a lot of people. You just have to figure out how it’s gonna get done.”
