So I was one of those people that always wanted kids, and I kind of assumed I’d always have them. It just didn’t occur to me that maybe my life wouldn’t go down that path. My family is very fertile. There’s like a lot of examples in my family of people having unplanned pregnancies, on both the men and the women’s side. And so I just took that as like, okay, we’re very fertile. Like we’re gonna have fertility for decades, for ages. And it just didn’t even resonate with people that were struggling with fertility, and I was like, oh, that’s so sad for them. Like, I never put myself in those shoes.
I had a ton of trouble dating in my thirties. Like, I’m proud of myself – I didn’t partner with anybody because I was choosing myself over these potential partners. And it just occurred to me when I was like 35 or 36, I was like, okay, I’m gonna get my fertility values checked. Cause things just started feeling a little different. And when I finally went to the doctors, they were like, you have longstanding PCOS and you haven’t been ovulating. The way they described it to me was like, it’s over for you. They’re like, if you wanted to freeze your eggs, you should have done that like a year ago. But I just didn’t have the money to freeze my eggs right then anyway. And it kind of doesn’t matter, but I didn’t have a partner, and I just mourned it. It felt like I was shot in the heart and I was just, really just, hurt by that.
Of course I have this idea that there’s many ways to have kids, and there’s adoption, there’s always having step kids and there’s a lot of other avenues. But it was hard to even go down those avenues in my head without even a partner there. Because I was raised by a single mom, I made a conscious choice. I did not want to be a single mom. And so I knew that was also an option, but that’s an option I don’t desire. So I just felt reeling. And almost every friend – their first thing was to, like, nullify the pain. They were like, but you can adopt. Like, it was always the first thing out of their mouth. And I was aware of that option. I am aware. It was just not helpful or kind in that moment.
The turning point just came over time. I put it as the center of my healing journey that year. It was a couple years ago. I actually got the news of it on Mother’s Day, which was tough. My poor mom, she doesn’t have any grandkids and she’d be an amazing grandmother. And it was just hard to celebrate Mother’s Day with my mom and kind of be in that headspace. But over time I did all the things, like I had a therapist, I had sound baths, yoga retreats and I was loving every minute of that. It was a central tenet of my healing during that time.
And it hit me, like the healing point kind of hit me, like an epiphany. I think time wasn’t ready for me to feel that or hear that or understand that – until one day it was. It came by way of an analogy, because I had just envisioned the one way that I had seen it done in my family. I pictured – this is the analogy – I’m holding a flashlight and I’m pointing it, and it’s nighttime, and I’m in the forest and I’m just pointing it at one piece of the forest. So I can see the path really, really well. And in my mind, that was the only way, and then it was like the sun rose and I could see 360 degrees.
And I’m like, you know what? There’s so many other ways to be a mother in this community. Like even if I don’t desire, which who knows, I may or may not desire to be an adoptive parent, but even if I don’t desire that, like, how many times am I mothering my best friends’ kids, and like, maybe I am gonna be a partner who has kids that I’m gonna be a stepmom for, maybe. You know, like there’s so many things and I started to realize my dreams of having a clinic and providing these kinds of rooms for women. That’s mothering in some ways. Like there’s so many ways of using that term and word “mother” and just assigning a different meaning to it and finding all that joy. I found quite a bit of healing once that analogy came, and I was like, wow, actually the possibilities are endless. Instead of the one way I’d always expected. Definitely had to give up some expectations.