Dear the woman who never longed for this,
I never longed for motherhood. Not the way some women do — not the ache, the waiting, the life organized around the arrival. I didn't have many clear dreams growing up, and whatever ones I did have, being a mother wasn't one of them. If it happened, I knew I'd love it completely. If it hadn't happened — not because it couldn't, but simply because it didn't — I think I would have been okay with that too.
I also understood, when I started to think about it clearly, what that kind of longing costs. If I had let myself want it the way you're supposed to — if that ache had taken root — everything else I was building would have started organizing itself around it. I'd watched that happen. I wasn't willing to let it happen to me. The absence was honest, and I left it alone.
What I always knew: once it happened, I'd be completely obsessed. That's just how I'm built. I have very few people in my life I love in that consuming way, and the ones I do, I love without limits. The moment this baby arrived, it was going to be over for me — that little one wrapped around my finger whether I wanted it or not. That part was never the question.
What I was building mattered to me in a way I'd earned. I spent years in banking, then crypto — a world I chose partly because as a woman it felt less crowded, and stayed in because it was genuinely alive in a way I hadn't found anywhere else. Then Modern Mangal, built in every hour outside that job, in every quiet year before anyone knew it existed. The version of me that came out of all of that — the one who runs her own brand, who walked into rooms with no background and figured it out anyway — she was something I made. Deliberately, over time. And I wasn't ready to fold her into something else.
I found out I was pregnant without really trying. The first thing I felt was guilt — not joy. I know how many women are in rooms right now willing this into existence, and I was surprised. There's something that sits wrong about that, something I haven't fully resolved. I also know this life came when it was supposed to — that there is a version of my story where this is exactly how it was always going to happen. I hold both of those things. I've stopped expecting them to stop pulling against each other.
What I can't hold as easily is what I watched growing up. My mother gave everything to her family — every want, every need, everything she'd been before we arrived. She sacrificed in ways I still don't fully understand and probably underestimate. If I'm being honest: I don't know if I have that in me. That might be the most uncomfortable thing I've ever put into writing.
I care about what I've built. My work, my marriage, my friendships, my spirituality, my service — the whole life I've made across all of those things at once. I don't want a child to replace that. I want them to light a bigger fire under all of it.
I know transformation is coming. I'm not fighting that — the version of me on the other side of this will be different and I know it. What I'm resisting is not transformation but disappearance. I've watched women become the role so completely that the person they were becomes the before — past tense, sealed off, referred to in a different tense. I've felt the pull of how quietly that happens. I don't want it. The life I've built, the person I've become — my career, my identity, my ambitions — I want those to still exist on the other side of this. Not in spite of motherhood. Because of it.
Is that selfish? I don't think so. The version of me that exists right now is the one my child is going to grow up watching. I'd rather not leave her behind.
The full version — what I watched my mother give up, and what I'm still working out about it — is on Substack.