When does motherhood begin?

Tomorrow I'm scheduled for an induction.

This is my third pregnancy, but the first baby I'll be bringing home.

During this long journey of child loss, secondary infertility and now coming full-term with a baby, there's a question that I haven't been able to answer until now:

When does motherhood begin, and does it have anything to do with pregnancy?

My first daughter died at 21-and-a-half weeks gestation in March 2019. It was a pregnancy rife with complications like unexplained bleeding in week 9 and which culminated in a chronic placental abruption, premature membrane rupturing, last-minute surgery and a placental infection.

Like anyone who has lost a child in utero, this experience left me spinning in grief.

What qualifies someone for motherhood?

In child loss circles, one of the resounding messages to all new loss mamas is that you are a mother. No matter when, where, why or how your baby didn't come home, you are their mother. Initially I felt this notion was just pandering to my lowest level of intelligence, mainly because I hadn't actually done anything to be my daughter's mother.

Practically speaking, my body had been taken hostage by a biological process, then attempted to grow an embryo with no direct efforts of my own—and then, powerless to save the baby, my body stopped cooperating.

How on earth, I wondered, did those 21 pregnant weeks qualify me for motherhood?

In the first months after losing my daughter, I had a lot of questions about my biology, but what so clearly gutted me was the loss of the future. The things I had longed for most were relational, not biological.

I wanted to teach my child her ABCs, to take her on adventures in the Colorado mountains, to give her the gift of choice and to nurture her self-expression. The dream in my heart wasn't bound up inside some biological claim to a small human who may or may not take on my childhood freckles. The dream was to nurture, care and guide her, giving the world the best possible gift I could imagine: a child who was raised in a loving, safe home.

Trying to get pregnant, despite resenting the implications

We got pregnant again about six months after our first girl, only to lose another daughter in the same year at 16 weeks gestation. This was when things went especially dark. The lights went out on everything I thought I understood about myself, so much so that I questioned whether I wanted to try to get pregnant again. Perhaps, I wondered, I could bypass the biologically infuriating part of my experience and just get to the part where I hold a baby in my arms.

Despite this inner tension, I jumped back on the wagon of tracking my cycles, wearing a fertility watch at night and generally trying to coerce a process that did not seem to want to cooperate with my body. After six months of trying to get pregnant, we turned to a fertility clinic for help—a choice I made ever so reluctantly.

I knew that if I didn't give my body the most robust chance to carry a baby to term, I would wonder for the rest of my life. Even still, I wasn't thrilled about the idea of getting pregnant because it felt like signing up to gamble with even more grief, heartache and physical pain—all elements I couldn't influence or possibly know how to manage in a third pregnancy.

All the while I knew I was cooperating with the process of trying to get pregnant, I still felt angry that the road to motherhood was so damn passive. I wasn't proactively, creatively or enthusiastically contributing anything to this great experiment besides a set of ovaries and a uterus. Outside of that, I was a walking consent form, letting myself be poked, prodded, scheduled and rescheduled, driving an hour one way into Denver multiple times a week.

After six months of testing, we were able to get pregnant through IUI in June 2021, and I was back where I had been more than two years earlier: along for a ride I couldn't truly influence. Of course, during my pregnancy I took medications for thyroid and high blood pressure; eventually I had to track my eating for gestational diabetes; and I attended all my checkups, etc. But nothing about my contribution to being pregnant felt like I was directly touching or nurturing the well-being of my daughter. It's been eight months of sitting and hoping that everything is still generally OK, tracking every pinch, squeeze and moment of breathlessness to report in to my high-risk doctor group.

Carrying to term doesn't make me a mother, it makes me lucky

Even within this "successful" pregnancy, even as I write all this down and feel my daughter's small kicks and jabs inside me, I still do not feel pregnancy is some battle I have finally conquered. Because I largely have had no say in whether or not my body carries to term. The fact that my body's biology has cooperated is mostly a matter of luck. Which is why I am thinking today about when motherhood actually begins.

For my own purposes, with all the complexity of child loss and infertility, I have decided pregnancy is best seen as untethered from motherhood.

Where pregnancy is biological, almost mechanical, motherhood is a dynamic, exhausting series of choices to respond to and meet the needs of someone in need.

Where pregnancy is passive cooperation, motherhood is proactive—an energy that is seeking and providing the best support and nourishment possible.

To me, seeing motherhood as something you walk into and separate from pregnancy creates space for all the women in my life who are mothers and who have also never carried a child to term.

Their examples have taught me for decades now that motherhood is love transformed into action and direct care. And when my daughter comes into the world this week, I will rejoice in knowing and experiencing what it's like to be her mother—to be the person who holds her, who comforts her when she cries, who sings her the soundtrack to Sound of Music from memory, who focuses deeply to learn the differences in a "hungry cry" versus a "hold me cry." For me, my journey into motherhood begins when my pregnancy comes to an end.

There's a line in "The Invitation" written by Oriah Mountain Dreamer where she says, "I want to know if you can get up after a night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children."

This is when motherhood begins to me—when, despite our exhaustion, grief and anger, we show up ready to keep giving.