Samantha Busch is continuing to be candid about the realities of living with infertility challenges, including how it has affected her relationship with her husband, NASCAR driver Kyle Busch.
“It was really hard,” Samantha says on Wednesday’s episode of the Infertile AF podcast, referring to the miscarriage she suffered after she and Kyle, 34, announced in November 2018 that they had conceived a daughter via in vitro fertilization. (They already share son Brexton Locke, now 4½.)
“At first we were grieving together and there for each other, but then Kyle was in the mindset of like, ‘Okay, this has happened, and it’s sad and it sucks, but we have to move on,’ ” she continues “And I could not physically, emotionally, mentally move on. And so that caused a lot of tension because I wanted to talk about it every day, and every day I was upset.”
“And he was like, ‘Okay, we have to move on,’ and I was like, ‘How dare you? We can’t move on. We can’t ever forget about her,’ ” Samantha recalls. “He’s like, ‘I’m not saying we’re gonna forget about her but we have to start picking up the pieces.’ And it was a lot of tension. It wasn’t until finally we went to a therapist to be like, ‘We’re fighting all the time. This is not good.’ “
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Like many couples who have experienced difficulties in trying to conceive, the stress made it difficult for Kyle and Samantha to connect on not only an emotional level, but a physically intimate one as well.
“With all the hormones and obsessiveness about having a child, it was like, making love was gone. It was just a job, it was a chore, it was so much pressure,” she says. “I felt like the littlest thing would set me off, and that was hard, and then it would set Kyle off, and it was just fights over nothing.”
“Fights because we were both so frustrated with not being able to get pregnant that we’d pick fights with each other over stupid stuff — dishes, laundry. It doesn’t matter, just because you are so angry,” Samantha says.
She also opens up feeling “jealous” of friends who get pregnant, saying that she’d “be lying” if she pretended otherwise and explaining, “Going to baby showers and seeing all these announcements on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter — it hurts. You want that so badly, and it’s like you’re trying everything. Every sex position, every natural supplement, every timed ovulation, everything, and it’s not working, and it’s hard.”
Samantha’s inspiration in sharing her story came after a “mentally exhausting” time where she felt like she had “to pretend for people” and “lie and lie” about why they didn’t have a baby yet before Brexton was born.
“Kyle and I finally came up with a statement that each of us felt comfortable saying so that we weren’t caught off guard anymore, because it happened so often,” she says of how they handled the baby question with the press.
“It was hard though. We would have to go to appearances or sponsor events and it was during this huge NASCAR baby boom — everybody was pregnant, babies everywhere. And it was so hard to just smile and be like, ‘Oh, you know, one day,’ or ‘We’re kinda busy right now but we do want a family,’ to just have to lie and lie,” she adds.
“It was so much pressure that I finally was like, ‘You know what? Nope, I’m laying it all on the table. I would rather be honest and tell it like it is versus doing this fake smile, happy-go-lucky [attitude] when you don’t feel that way,’ ” Samantha says. “It’s mentally exhausting to have to pretend for people. And I was like, ‘I can’t do it ever again.’ “
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