Mothering the Mothers

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my choice not to have kids, and what has shaped it. When I was little, I used to tell my family I was going to have nine girls someday — nine, because it felt like such an enormous, impossible number. I didn’t know then that motherhood wouldn’t be part of my own story — at least not in the way I imagined as a kid.

When I was 13, I asked my parents if I could spend my spring break with my Aunt Maureen at the freestanding birth center she ran. That week was my first real glimpse into birth work. I got puked on, scooped poop out of birthing tubs, massaged women for hours, and mopped floors after families went home with their babies. It was messy and intense and I loved every second of it.

Reenie was one of the most impactful people in my professional life. She was a midwife for 30 years, a pillar in her community, and the kind of person people don’t stop talking about, even after they’ve lost her. Watching her move through the world — seeing how families trusted her, how she held them during such vulnerable moments — shaped me as a provider more than anyone else I've worked with. I couldn’t articulate it at 13, but being around mothers in that raw, real moment made me feel alive and useful.

When I was in my twenties and working as a labor and delivery nurse, I used to automatically feel self-conscious and inadequate when a laboring mother asked me if I had kids. I felt like they might think I couldn’t fully support them because I hadn’t experienced birth myself. People also asked me all the time if the reason I didn’t want kids was because of everything I saw in labor and delivery — the emergencies, the intensity, the unexpected things that can happen. But that was never the reason.

 If anything, one of the biggest unanswered questions of my life — I wouldn’t call it a regret — is not experiencing pregnancy, labor, and birth myself. I’ve seen it a thousand times. I know the rhythm, the magnitude, and how everything can change in a moment. I’m envious, in a very real way, when my friends talk about their births — the good, the bad, the agonizing, the amazing. There’s a part of me that will always wonder what that would have felt like in my own body.

There’s also a part of this that belongs to my partner. He grieves it too. He’ll never get to look at me with that stunned, reverent, “holy shit, you did that” expression I see on our friends’ partners after birth. That’s a loss we chose, knowingly.

As I grow into my work, I've found myself starting to call on the women in my family — my mom, my aunties, my grandmothers, my sister, my cousins — all of whom mothered me in their own ways. When I’m doing Tui Na and moving around the table, letting my hands figure out what someone needs, I ask them for help. I feel them in those moments, and it quiets the voice that second-guesses my ability to help the person on my table. 

As I look at my life right now, something has become clear to me: it’s the women who have let me into their pregnancies, their labors, their postpartum weeks and months, their grief, their joy, their exhaustion, their healing — who have made me realize how right this role feels for me. 

Some people feel something profound when they hold their child. I think I feel a version of that when I tuck a blanket around a mom who needs a soft landing on my table, when I walk into a home where everyone is running on fumes, when I show up at 6am so friends can finally get a few hours of real sleep, or when I babysit so new parents can go on their first date night and feel okay being away from their baby for the first time.

And I don’t think I could have spent two months caring for my sister-in-law during her pregnancy and postpartum, or shown up to my sister’s second birth and been the one who caught her postpartum hemorrhage, or fed my friend her first meal at home and held her while she sobbed, while her baby stayed admitted in the hospital — not in the same way — if I’d had my own family to care for. 

Caring for mothers has become one of the most meaningful parts of my life. You’ve trusted me in some of the most tender, vulnerable seasons a person can go through. You’ve let me witness you become mothers, become yourselves, become new versions of who you were before.

And I don’t think I’d be able to do this work — at least not in the same wholehearted way — if I had daughters of my own. My life ended up looking different than I imagined, and it feels right.

To every mother who has let me be part of your story: thank you. You’ve given my life a shape I couldn’t have predicted when I was that little girl imagining nine daughters.

Turns out nine wasn’t even close.