Julia is building a family. Along the way, she is asking anyone and everyone about how they came to make the decisions they did regarding family life. She's opening up an honest, funny, raw, and earnest conversation looking at what creating a family really means and how it might show up differently than expected.

There is no perfect way to blend families and co-parent, yet Molly makes it work and loves the life she’s created. She shares why you shouldn’t be afraid to “take the detour” and how her kids are more resilient as a result of being part of a blending family.

This episode is about shaping and reshaping our families. Sometimes the paths that we forge result from external constraints. For Cristin Marona, that constraint was posed by the global COVID 19 Pandemic.

Arden answers the big questions for herself about how she defines family and how she wants to build hers. Her choices are influenced by her health risks, a tragic loss in her family, her Catholic upbringing, and a lot of deep introspection.

Jamie and Christian describe ways in which polyamorous relationships require the same core elements of communication, respect, and foundational trust as successful monogamous relationships—perhaps even more so since they involve more than one person.

In this episode, we dive into Suman’s experiences during the last 8 years, detailing his vision for a family, the difficulty of seeing his wife go through multiple medical procedures, and the other paths they considered to build a family.

Grief, love, and pain can be hard to talk about and articulate in words with family members. With this loss, Brooke had to reformulate her own expectations around what a family life looked like.

Detailing monumental moments of growth and learning, Ashon describes what it’s like to feel the pressure to provide for his child and figure out what to do with his life as a teenager, as well as navigate adulthood with an unconventional family dynamic.

Maureen and her husband experienced unexplained infertility as they were trying to conceive their first born. With fewer support groups and products, they created a product, the Mosie syringe, to add a low risk, low intervention option.

In this episode, we follow Raven through her fertility journey, including the decision to try for a baby, creative ways of finding and choosing a sperm donor, and how she and her wife, Brittany, decided at home-insemination was right for them.

Mia is 39 and pregnant with her first child after becoming diagnosed with PCOS and having a few miscarriages along her fertility journey. She joins Julia on this episode of Stork’d to speak on the challenges of being divorced in her mid-thirties and not letting her biological clock stop her from making her dreams of becoming a mother a reality.

This special edition episode is a compilation of 11 special guests from Season 1 answering the question, “What Does Family Mean To You?” This compilation is pulled from informative interviews with a range of everyday friends, family, neighbors, and experts sharing their own journey to define and create a family. This episode features Molly, Cristin Marona, Arden O’Connor, Christian & Jamie, Suman, Brooke James, David Vendetti, Keren Eldad, Ashon Avent, Raven, Mia, and Maureen Brown.