Finding Forty

How My Winding Road to Motherhood Taught Me to See Beauty in the Unlikely

I’m a mother to two boys—one in utero and one nearly two. Before this, I was a stepmom (full-time), a bonus mom, a foster mom, and a plant mom. Maybe one day I’ll be a dog mom, too.

My dream of motherhood never required pregnancy or birth. I’ve always felt drawn to care for anyone—or anything—that needed it. Traditional paradigms don’t come naturally to me. I often feel like I’m reading the script of social norms in a language I don’t quite understand. Masking is a full-time job, and the older I get, the less energy I have to put on that particular costume.

One of the darkest reasons I hesitated to try intensely for biological children was genetics—both mine and my husband’s. We are the chain-breakers of our lineages. In our biological families, children were seen as burdens. To be loved was to be spoiled. I feared looking into my child’s face and seeing my father’s eyes, my uncle’s sense of humor, or my mother’s jawline. The fears were endless. Ultimately, I feared biology would betray me—that I’d despise the children I longed to love.

Therapy helped. I started in 2008 and have returned off and on since. We worked through those fears. I came to peace with the idea of fostering or adopting—offering permanence to a child who needed it felt like more than enough.

I remember sitting in a foster/adoption class surrounded by couples sharing heartbreaking stories of infertility. My husband and I had never truly tried to conceive. Passing on our genetics had never been the goal.

Then we had our first placement. Two years. They reunified with their mom, and my husband was shattered. Heartbroken. He had loved being a father, and when the plan shifted from adoption to reunification, grief overcame him.

I process life through humor—dark or otherwise. When we got into the car after that goodbye, I joked, “They’re sad, but they have a gift: a free card. They can have unlimited sex with no consequences.”

I turned to my husband and said, half-laughing, “What if we have a free card too? And we’re letting it go to waste? What if we tried—just for the fun of it?”

He laughed with me, and we agreed.

Eleven days later—eleven!—we had a positive pregnancy test. What a crock. So much for the free card.

At the time, we were still fostering, my husband was beginning to experience unexplained, crippling pain (later diagnosed as Stiff Person Syndrome), and I was finishing a two-year career commitment that had taken everything out of me.

As expected, motherhood brought triggers. But not in the ways I feared. In fact, it’s offered glimmers of hope. Even though I’m estranged from my biological family, I now get the unexpected privilege of seeing the best of them—traits and features I had once feared—in my children. And I get to love those parts, free from the stains of generational trauma.

It feels like I’m seeing a glimpse of who they might’ve been if they hadn’t been such a burden to the ones before them.

If you’ve taken an unexpected path into parenthood—or still find yourself questioning what that path should be—you’re not alone. I’m rooting for the caregivers, the questioners, the ones who carry hope and hurt in equal measure. Always.