The Inheritance
On borrowed grief, chosen lives & the women who made me
A Mother’s Day Essay
I remember the email.
It showed up like any other one...buried between a promo code and some shipping notification for something I absolutely don’t remember ordering, and right there in the subject line, cheerful as anything: “Happy Mother’s Day.”
Maybe someone, somewhere, thought it was a good idea to send to an entire email list without stopping to consider that some of the women opening that email were not, in fact, mothers, and were very much in the thick of grieving that very thing, quietly, privately, on their own.
Infertility is one of the quietest and loneliest griefs there is, something you carry in your body, silently, while the world just keeps sending emails and throwing baby showers and asking when it’s your turn, as if your turn is something that just hasn’t come yet rather than something your body has been refusing for years.
For years...and I mean YEARS...I wanted something my body wouldn’t give me. On the outside I labeled it as just unexplained infertility, but inside, silently and painfully, it all felt like more evidence of something fundamentally wrong with me. I mean…women are designed for this, right? Or so I told myself. We are literally the only humans on earth who can create life, and if my body won’t do it, what does that say about me? Am I even fully a woman if the one thing women are built to do is the one thing I cannot?
I know how that sounds…ridiculously over-simplified. I also know that knowing how it sounds doesn’t actually stop you from feeling it at 3am.
Mother’s Day was the hardest...not because I begrudged anyone their day of celebration, because I really didn’t. I genuinely love the mothers in my life. I showed up for every baby shower and meant every card I signed…I held their babies and felt real joy...and also knew I would completely fall apart in the car on the way back home. That grief has a very specific texture: loving people through an experience you want so desperately for yourself.
Joy and grief share the same room, both of them real…and both of them mine.
That pain was real…I still feel it with everything inside of me. It’s a constant tug-o-war between my inherent positivity and cup-overflowing with joy and contentment with my life as it is vs. the cynical and painful feelings of unworthiness or brokenness.
I’ve had some pretty intensive therapy sessions since January, and the result is that I’ve been sitting with a lot of different questions lately. I’ve been reframing my thoughts, my assumptions, my why…And the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about those early days of wanting to be a mother, and my infertility journey as a whole…I’ve been thinking about the hurt I carried…and wondering if it had to hurt quite this much?
There’s a path, and some of you know this all too well...maybe in a church bulletin or a holiday dinner conversation or just the general ambient pressure of being a woman in a place that has opinions about what you should do with your body. Graduate, get a job, find a partner, get married, have kids, in that order, in that timeline, the whole conveyor belt of acceptable adulthood predestined as if someone decided the sequence and forgot to tell you it was optional. In the South where I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, that path wasn’t a suggestion…it was THE measure of your success…your worth…your having it all. And in the evangelical South where I grew up, the church reinforces every rung of it, because family is sacred and motherhood is a calling and your body, apparently, is purposeful.
So when my body didn’t cooperate, I didn’t just feel sad about it...I felt like I had failed a test I didn’t even have time to prepare for. I mean, a test implies a score-keeper and a standard…a standard that implies someone decided what the right answer would be…and I’m pretty sure that someone wasn’t me.
I emailed my friend a few days ago…one of my closest friends who has been in New York City for over 10 years now. She and her husband don’t have kids and don’t really ever talk about it. I emailed her to see if she would share her feelings about Mother’s Day. With my questions ready and my narrative already half-formed, I assumed I would find something recognizable in her experience…that I would see some similar version of my own grief, my own defense, or my complicated relationship with a choice that wasn’t entirely up to me.
But, she didn’t reply to my email, she called me instead.
She told me, gently and graciously, that my questions were leading her somewhere she’d never actually been. That she actually had NOT spent her life defending her childless choice or even grieving some parallel life she didn’t take...it just wasn’t her reality. She had aunts and uncles who didn’t have kids, her family never made it a measure of anyone’s value. Conversely to my experience, she didn’t grow up in the church. She moved from the South in her twenties and built her whole adult life in a city where nobody tracks your reproductive timeline like it’s a scoreboard. That weight I carried...the one I thought was a shared weight and experience...had not landed on her the same way or even at all.
She didn’t feel the mold, which meant she never felt the cost of not being able to fit it. So, she politely declined to answer the questions because they were leading her to a place that didn’t quite resonate or fit her experience. I love her for her words…for her honesty…and I love her for the way that she tore through my assumptions and helped me reframe and reconsider the whole dang thing. I sat with all her insight and what she shared for a long time after we hung up.
The thing I still think about, the question that still makes me fidget with discomfort is…Would I have even called it infertility if I’d grown up somewhere else?
If I’d been in New York in my twenties, working on my career and living in a place that didn’t measure a woman’s worth in reproductive milestones...would my body’s inability to conceive have felt like failure? Or would it have felt like...just information…just a true thing about my body that wasn’t necessarily a verdict of my worth…just merely a condition of my body in that moment rather than an indictment of my womanhood as a whole.
Would I have gotten married as young as I did if nobody was keeping quiet score? Would I have spent those years feeling fundamentally broken, or would I have spent them living my life without the constant low hum of not being enough?
I genuinely don’t know, but reconsidering it all is doing a LOT of unraveling…a lot of reframing all the things I thought I knew and felt.
All things considered…I do know the grief I carried each Mother’s Day wasn’t made of just one thing. Some of it was a real and honest loss...the pregnancy I would never have. That grief is real…it’s mine…it existed and I still carry it even today. But some of it…some of that grief, I’m realizing…was borrowed…and maybe was inherited from a place, a region, maybe even a religion, or a culture that handed down a very specific definition of womanhood and measurement.
Finally, after years of infertility, I did become a mother.
I became a mother through adoption, and Millie is mine in every way that matters and even in ways I don’t even have words for. I wouldn’t trade her or our story for anything. And yet…if I’m being honest, there is always a ghost of the other thing lingering...the wondering, the quiet curiosity if my body will ever decide to start working…the manic “checking” process (IYKYK) if I’m even a day or two late.
I’m learning that I’m allowed to hold both of those things at once…the fullness of the love I already have and the realness of the loss I carry. I’m also learning, slowly, to tell the difference between grief that is actually mine and grief that was assigned to me…between mourning something I genuinely lost and performing a loss that society expected me to perform.
Knowing the difference between the two…matters like hell.
In the middle of all that grief, all that reframing, all that slow and painful unlearning...a single thought keeps filling my mind and my heart, and it continues to lift me now.
I was never actually alone in it.
I have been mothered my entire life…ferociously…specifically…and by women who showed up in every chapter and held me in ways I didn’t always know I needed. Some of them were mothers in the way the world counts it, and some of them never had children or never wanted any, and every single one of them was and is a mother to me.
My own mother first, obviously, because she is the best and I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it...she worked full time and raised three kids with my dad and they busted their asses to give us every opportunity and the space to grow without hovering over every inch of it, and I am so deeply proud to be hers.
And then there’s Linda Branham from my early church days, who kept up with me and my life and let us come swim at her pool and have a place to breathe. She genuinely cared about who I was becoming as a person and not just who I was at the moment. She still keeps up with me virtually all these years later and is rooting for every single thing I’m building now...she is a mother to me.
My friend Nicole Verrone, who had small children of her own at the time but whose arms, whose strong and steady arms, held me and so many other twenty-somethings wading through the beginning days of adulthood. She was one of the first people to hold all of me…sitting at a table over a meal. She provided the table and made sure everyone had a seat, had time and space to just be, and had a heart big enough and ears open enough to hear whatever was weighing us down. She writes the most beautiful poetry and calls us her little birds…she is a mother to me.
And Tachi and Linda...sisters, two of the most remarkable women I’ve ever had the privilege of being loved by...Tachi, a former teacher with the most inspiring passion for flowers and monarch butterflies and herbs and castles and cooking. She stood shoulder to shoulder with me in a cooking class with thirty years of age between us and not a single inch of distance in spirit. She mothered me through my early days of infertility by painting me peaceful watercolor prints and showing up with tiny pottery pieces. Tachi was my very first paid Substack subscriber and has been by me every step of my adult life...and her sister Linda, mother to one of my dearest friends Massie. Linda gave the gift of her porch swing and a bottle of wine (or two) after a hard day of work. She has a way of grabbing your arm and pulling you in for the kind of hug where you could lift your feet off the ground and just float because she has completely, entirely got you. They are mothers to me.
My friend Laurie Martin, beautifully sarcastic with the most genuine heart of any woman I’ve ever known, who says the thing you’re not supposed to say but gets away with it because you know her heart is pure and her curiosity comes from wanting real connection. She walked with me through infertility, we were part of a support group we affectionately called the Infertile Myrtles, and she wrote me a journal about the kind of mother she knew I already was, even without kids, and the mother she knew I would grow into. Laurie’s hope and faith held me up on the days I had none of my own. She is the one who drops everything to bring someone dinner, who sees someone in need and rallies, who pulls people together and makes them feel genuinely seen. She mothered me the way she now mothers her three kids and the way she’s mothered everyone who’s walked through her door or battled her in ping pong. She is a mother to me.
And my girl Sals, wise beyond her years in ways that have always quietly stunned me...we met when she was in her twenties and I was in my thirties but she has always mothered me, she’s taught me that laughter is the best medicine and that rest is not laziness and that standing up for yourself is non-negotiable. She taught me that things are just things but when they carry a story or a meaning, they are worth more than gold. Sals taught me that your word is currency, and if it has no value then you have nothing. She’s a mother to me.
My dear Nicole Godshall, more accurately my sister from another mister but the first actual mother in my adult friend group…joy explosion…and she has always been exactly that. Nicole taught me the value of fun and the fundamentals of gathering people, and how to make a beautiful spread of food out of whatever’s left in the refrigerator. She is the busy little bee in the background making sure everything is available for whoever needs it, and she is a mother to me.
And Marie, my best friend since freshman year of college, the only teenager I ever knew who wore Merle Norman makeup and was therefore always, clearly, operating on a completely different level than the rest of us. She is a caretaker in every sense of the word, a provider in more ways than should be humanly possible. She has organized, celebrated and marked every occasion. She has cried and screamed and laughed me through every chapter from our college days through first marriages and first divorces…through infertility and first kids and big moves…and through second marriages and beyond. Marie is the one who shows up at your door with your coffee order memorized because she knows you need it...that and a hug, and that is genuinely everything, and she is a mother to me.
Then there are the women who mothered me without ever knowing my name...Alanis Morissette, Fiona Apple, Erykah Badu, Jewel, Florence and the Machine, Adele and Amy Winehouse, Rihanna and Sade and Lauryn Hill and Cleo Sol…even motherfucking Missy Elliott. Their words carried me, lifted me, and wrapped me in strength that finds you at 16 with the volume maxed out in a parking lot somewhere, or in moments when you can’t explain why you’re crying, or when a song comes on, and suddenly you remember who you really are. They gave language to the things I felt inside. They showed me that women can be complicated and angry and tender and fearless and broken and whole…sometimes in the same song, sometimes in the same breath. They mothered me, too.
And Heather, Sarah, Renee, Olga, Nicole, Nancy, Emily, Sally, Marie, Sara, Michelle, Olivia, Catherine, Rachel, Erica, Gloria, Jennifer, Tammy, Sis, Donna, Patsy, Megan, Ashley, Carol, Katie, Anna, Alyssa, Maggie, Wendy, Sherita, Jen, Kim, Chris, Caroline, Kristin, Tania, Nadia, Rifat, Nimi, Joy, Selena, Char, Christine, Lila, Leah, Allison, Amy, Vanessa, Lara, Tiffany, Lorean, Virginie, Lisa, Collette, Lauren, Yasmin, Cami, Kayla, Brenna, Brooke, Bri, April, Camille, Mika, Bracken, Rose, Christie, Angela, Monica, Zikki, Grace, Courtney, Ria, Kari, Lindsay, Leslie, Kriska, Diane, Blair, Haley, Sandra, Emma, Amelia, Julie, Mai, Erin, Phyllis, Gaby, Robin, Ruth, Martha, Chloe, Greer, Katrina, Hannah, Jess, Susan, Melissa, Zenovia, Kasey, Carr, Iris, Louise, Roxanna, Julia, Karina, Kat, Kelly, Mahrina, Kristina, Shannon, Tracy, Lia, Lilla, Ellie, Livi, Mary Kate, Memme, Kate, Molly, Liz, Kara, Meredith, Michelle, Muna, Lucy, Paige, Patty, Krystle, Mary Ruth, Lori, Rebecca, Rosa, Margaret, Molly, Alexis, Isabela, Jean...all of you and more. You mothered me.
And if that isn’t mothering in its most honest, its most real, and most generous form...then I don’t know what we’ve been celebrating all this time.
It’s Mother’s Day today, and for the first time in a long time, I don’t dread it the way I used to...not because everything is resolved or healed, because it’s not. I feel love and joy for my daughter, for my family, for all the women who have mothered me. And now, I feel gratitude for the clarity I’m getting…understanding which feelings actually belong to me and trying to let go of the ones that don’t.
If you’re reading this and today is complicated, in any direction, for any reason, I see you. For the women who wanted children and couldn’t have them…the ones who chose differently and are exhausted from explaining themselves…the women who are mothers and yet, still feel like something is missing…the ones who are somewhere in the middle, still figuring out what this day even means for them. For the women who would give anything for one more day with their mother taken too soon…or the ones whose relationship with their mother or with their children is complicated and messy and painful. I see all of you, every last one.
If any part of the grief you’re carrying feels like it doesn’t quite fit or feels like it was handed to you by someone else’s measurement or expectations...you’re allowed to hand it back. You don’t have to keep hauling that shit around like it’s yours.
Happy Mother’s Day, friends.
xoxo,
Jess