For me motherhood has never looked like the greeting card aisle on Mothers Day. The stores stocked with flowers and candy just for mom. Pinks, purples, chocolates, and a false depiction of what motherhood is truly like. And I truly believe most women feel this way; just a hunch.
It has looked more like a rose bush left wild in the heat; beautiful, overgrown, thorny, impossible to hold without bleeding and taking on scars.
There was a season of my life when my body became a passage for futures that never got to form or for me to keep close. They were once tiny flickers of possibility, and hope, something to look forward to. Now they are names never picked nor spoken out loud. Hands I never got to hold long enough to memorize.
The first loss cracked something open in me. Not loudly. More like the way frost splits a branch from the inside — invisibly, until one day the limb cannot hold its own weight anymore. I have plenty of those in my backyard of life to almost predict it.
I carried that grief close and folded it into the lining of my life. I went on and did so well at being useful, functional, pleasant. The good wife, student, granddaughter, and friend. But grief has roots. And roots do not ask permission before they begin to spread and sink in to our heavily soiled lives.
Somewhere in those storms came my oldest son. The spirited one. Living proof that scorched earth can still grow something good. He was the sunflower that pushed through blistering asphalt.
He arrived in the middle of a life that was still learning the difference between survival and safety. And somehow, despite the shaking ground beneath me then, and the cracking floor I created for us throughout his life, he grew into the man who runs toward people in their worst moments instead of away from them. A man who saves lives. A man who carries tenderness without embarrassment. A man who became evidence that love can survive even in imperfect soil; because he wanted to.
And maybe that is part of motherhood too. You know, the terrifying realization that children do not always become what happened to you or to them. Sometimes they become what they witnessed you fight to overcome. And sometimes they write their own story.
Then came the twins. And they didn’t stay very long. Even though they warmed my belly and grew, and my breasts were swollen anticipating their nurturing.
Some losses do not arrive as sadness. My twins arrived like weather and left like floodwaters in a Texas summer storm relentless, sparing no life that gets in the way of the rushing Colorado. Like standing barefoot in a house while the beams crack above your head and realizing no one else can hear it yet.
My body was exhausted from surviving things my mouth did not know how to explain. My marriage had already become a place where love felt transactional and survival felt performative. And yet there I was, the wife that kept trying to build a home inside a burning structure.
Losing the twins was not the beginning of the collapse. It was the moment I could no longer pretend I wasn’t standing in ruins. And underneath all that grief was anger.
At the mothers and fathers who treat children carelessly. Who abandon emotionally and physically while the children feel like a burden instead of a living, breathing miracle.
I thought often about my own parents then. It was the one and only time in my life I remember being angry at all the women who played the role of mom in my life. I wanted my mom (well, not my actual mom, but the idea of a mom) who would come and make everything better even though things were bleak and somber. When every day carried a weight of darkness and there wasn’t any hope offered to me. So I had to make it myself.
How strange it is to mourn children you never got to raise while also mourning the ways you were never fully held yourself.
That contradiction sat inside me for years like a stone in the soil. Because motherhood can be both nurturing and confrontation.
It has forced me to meet every wound I inherited. Every tenderness I was denied. Every survival tactic that kept me alive but cannot be passed down another generation unchanged.
Motherhood asks a heavy oath of us. Will you repeat the story or rewrite it? I was tempted plenty to repeat it, because the truth was that rewriting hurt more than complacency. But I have the battle scars from fighting upstream against everything history was trying to repeat with me.
Six years after the twins came my youngest son. My last child. Not as a replacement. Nothing in motherhood works that neatly. He arrived as a gift and a reminder of what my body could do when I was on the verge of giving up.
He arrived more like green growth after wildfire. Fragile at first. Tentative. The kind of beauty you almost distrust because you have already learned how quickly beautiful things can disappear. And yet there he was.
Another boy asking me to stay soft in a world that had repeatedly rewarded hardness.
That is the part no one explains about motherhood. How it stretches across both grief and gratitude at the same time. How you can mourn what was lost while fiercely loving what remains. How sometimes the deepest ache in a mother comes not from the children she failed, but from the children she would have done anything to keep.
The babies I lost never learned to walk. Never scraped their knees. Never rolled their eyes at me across the kitchen counter. But they still mothered something inside me.
They taught me reverence. They taught me how fragile people really are. They taught me how fragile I really was. And they taught me to stop treating love like it is guaranteed.
And maybe that is what motherhood has ultimately been for me. Not perfection. Not softness alone. Not sacrifice alone. But a cultivation of the sort.
A lifelong tending of thorny things. A decision to keep growing despite the droughts and floods. A willingness to believe something beautiful can still come from these damaged grounds.
So for now, the rose bush sits wild in the heat; thorny and overgrown. And yet here I am, tending it anyway.