No Babies

On motherhood, survival, safety, and the freedom to return to yourself

Trigger Warning: This writing is connected to my poem “Court Room” and reflects on experiences involving domestic violence, coercive control, and custody-related systems. It also explores themes of motherhood, survival, identity, and healing.

I want to start out by saying how much I love and adore being a mom. How much I admire women who are able to carry and birth healthy babies and carry on—pursuing their goals, their dreams, reaching their highest levels of achievement while still holding the weight and beauty of motherhood. I speak for both single and married mothers.

I have lived on both sides of that coin.

Being a momma is hard work, but we are the biggest creators and generators of life. Men could not run a country, let alone survive without our existence, and their legacy couldn’t continue without a woman. With that said, there is a certain level of pressure that comes with such great power—the pressure to raise healthy, self-sufficient humans, and to love openly in a way you may have never thought possible before because children unlock a part of you that nothing else can reach.

And still… I want to talk about what it means when motherhood is not the only thing shaping a woman’s life.

In my recent poem “Court Room”Court Room Poem I reflect on a time where I was young and vulnerable and just becoming a mother. During a tumultuous time in my life, I was also morphing into this super-being—this powerful woman who would do anything, become anything she needed to be, for the sake of her baby.

But what I don’t always say out loud is that there are versions of motherhood that are not just tender and glowing. There are versions that are forged in survival. There are versions shaped inside courtrooms, in paperwork, in whispered fear, in decisions made under pressure rather than peace.

And sometimes, when you are in the middle of that kind of becoming, you begin to realize something unsettling:

It is possible to love your child deeply… and still feel overwhelmed by the world that child arrived into with you.

It is possible to be devoted… and still be drowning.

It is possible to be a mother… and still question everything about your environment, your safety, your capacity, your future.

This is where I find myself reflecting not only on motherhood, but on identity itself. Who I was before. Who I became during. And who I am still becoming after.

Because I am a mother again now—at this big age, in a different season of life—and I am not the same woman I was the first time.

The mother I am now is softer. I love without restriction, without the fear that once shaped so many of my choices. I am still just as curious, still deeply observant of life, but I am safe here. I am safe with my husband. I am raising two healthy, beautifully intelligent, loving boys.

And for the first time in a long time, safety is not something I am chasing. It is something I live inside of.

But what I have also realized is that safety is not the same as freedom.

There is something I did not fully understand I was missing until I had already learned how to survive without it. And that something was freedom.

Not the freedom to be a mother—that I have fully embraced—but the freedom to exist as myself without fear, without survival mode shaping every decision. I never really felt free, not because I have children, but because my freedoms were stolen from me in a way I would not wish on any mother. And in that loss, I also lost pieces of myself in survival.

Now, in this new chapter, I am refusing to live inside that same survival complex.

I am loosening my grip on everything that once required me to shrink—my dreams, my hopes, my voice—because my sons are watching their mother in that way too. They are learning from what I embody, not just what I say.

I need to live in every version of who I am.

The mother. The writer. The woman. The dreamer.

All of it.

Because I am not only raising them to become something—I am showing them what they will accept, what they will expect, and what they will believe love and life should look like.

So the sacrifice of self cannot be the cost of motherhood.

In fact, I am learning that erasing myself does not make life easier for them as they grow. It makes it more complicated.

I want to be not only an example of who they will become, but an example of who they will attract. An example of what they will accept. An example of what they will refuse.

And maybe most importantly, an example of a woman who did not disappear inside motherhood… but expanded because of it.

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If this piece resonated with you, I invite you to stay connected here with me. I am still writing through layers of motherhood, identity, healing, and becoming—learning how to hold all versions of myself without letting any of them disappear.

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Thank you for reading. Truly.