There are questions we don’t ask out loud. Are you a mom? Did you want to be? Did you try? Did you lose someone? Did you choose something else? There are entire universes behind these questions, and we tiptoe around them like a fault line. But the truth is, motherhood, or the lack of it, isn't just a box to check. It’s a shape that forms around your life, visible or not. What we carry is not always a child. Sometimes it’s the ache. Sometimes it’s the freedom. Sometimes it’s both.
I have two children who are the center of my universe and define me like nothing else. They are, without exaggeration, the most meaningful part of my life. Raising them has been the most profound and grounding experience I’ve ever known. And if I’m being honest, that fierce devotion was one of the fault lines of my marriage. I wanted to be everything to them. To show up in every way, be present for every moment, hold them through every high and low. That kind of all-consuming love, while beautiful, came at a cost. It reordered my priorities. And not everyone around me was ready for that.
Motherhood is often spoken of as a binary: you are or you aren't. But in reality, it lives on a spectrum of longing and loss, of decision and chance. I have friends who mother in ways that have nothing to do with biology. I know women who would have made extraordinary mothers but didn’t get the timing, or the partner, or the miracle. And I know women who never wanted it, never chased it, and still carry the occasional whisper of wondering: what if?
I also know what it means to mother through fear, through doubt, through exhaustion so deep it rewires your brain. To look at your children and feel so cracked open with love and terror that it almost undoes you. To worry, always. About everything. And still show up. Because you want to. Because you have to. Because their wellbeing is braided into your own.
I think often about how much of my identity is tied to being their mother. How little I care about most other labels. How the sound of their voices can recalibrate an entire day. And how hard it is to explain to anyone who hasn't lived it what that kind of tether feels like—soft and fierce, gentle and immovable all at once.
For the past fifteen years, I’ve had the same group of women in my life. Eight of us, brought together by our children. We met when our kids were in elementary school. They played on the same soccer and baseball teams, took the same swimming lessons, sprawled across each other’s living room floors. I loved those days of four boys in the back of my car after practice, muddy and loud and full of life. The very youngest of that original crew is now in high school. Mine have moved beyond. The kids have mostly gone their separate ways, as they should. But the friendships between their mothers have remained.
It’s fascinating how that happens. How motherhood creates a kind of kinship among women who might never have crossed paths otherwise. We are a group with differences in personality, in background, in outlook. And yet we keep finding our way back to each other. It wasn’t shared taste in books or politics that bound us. It was field trip forms and snack duty and the kind of deep-in-the-trenches solidarity that comes from wiping tears and noses and scraped knees together. That kind of connection is forged in the most ordinary, unglamorous moments. And it lasts.
So when I meet someone who flinches at the question of motherhood, whether they are a mom, wanted to be, tried to be, or chose not to be, I try to offer softness. I try to let the silence be enough. Because we never know what someone carries. And sometimes, the gentlest thing we can do is let them carry it without explaining.
Motherhood, or not, we are all carrying something. A memory. A hope. A grief. A tether to someone we love more than ourselves. Or a vision of a life that could have been. Or the quiet gratitude for a life that, against all odds, is already more than enough.