When I was only twenty years old, I had to undergo a full hysterectomy. At an age where most people are just beginning to dream about the future, mine suddenly felt shattered. Ever since I was a little girl, when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was always the same. A mom. More than anything in the world, I wanted children. I wanted bedtime stories and scraped knees and Christmas mornings and school concerts. I wanted the ordinary magic of motherhood. Losing the ability to carry my own children felt like losing the life I had always imagined for myself.
There were years of heartbreak after that. Closed doors. Failed adoption attempts. Endless disappointment. I remember feeling like motherhood was always standing just outside my reach. One night, after another painful setback, I sat at my aunt’s house during a Scentsy party fighting tears as I admitted out loud how badly I just wanted to be a mom. I did not know that moment would change my life forever.
My sweet cousin looked at me with the kind of compassion that only comes from someone with a truly beautiful soul and simply said, “I’ll do it.”
At first I thought she was just trying to comfort me. I could not imagine someone making that kind of sacrifice for another person. But she meant it. Through conversations, doctor appointments, fear, hope, and uncertainty, she made the impossible possible. She chose to carry my babies for me. She gave her body, her strength, and pieces of herself so I could finally become the mother I had dreamed of being my entire life.
Of course, we transferred two embryos, and somehow both tiny miracles held on. The pregnancy was not easy on her. The boys arrived far too early and our lives became wrapped in NICU machines, sleepless nights, fear, prayers, and fragile hope. But even in the hardest moments, there was this overwhelming feeling that these boys were fought for long before they ever entered the world. They were loved into existence by a woman who gave me the greatest gift one human being could ever give another.
My boys are the reason I am alive in so many ways. They filled a place in my heart that had ached for years. They gave my life meaning, purpose, chaos, laughter, exhaustion, and a kind of love so deep it can bring me to tears just thinking about it. And still, over these fourteen years, I have quietly carried guilt alongside that gratitude.
Life did not unfold the way we once imagined it would. I went through a divorce. I became a single mom. There were hard seasons, failed relationships, health struggles, and moments where I felt like I was drowning while trying to hold everything together for my children. Somewhere along the way, I began believing I had failed not only myself, but Chrystal too. I worried that the beautiful dream she helped create had become messy and broken. I feared she would look at my life and think I did not deserve the gift she gave me. The guilt became so heavy that sometimes it was easier to pull away than to admit how deeply I feared letting her down.
But as I sit here now, looking at the boys who made me a mother, I realize something important. Love is not measured by perfection. Families are not valuable because they are flawless. They are valuable because they are real. Because people choose each other again and again through every difficult chapter.
She did not just help bring children into this world. She gave me a life I never thought I would get to have. She gave me first words and first steps and late night cuddles and school pictures and fourteen Mother’s Days that I once believed would never belong to me. There will never be enough words to properly thank her for that.
I blinked, and now my boys are growing into young men. In only a few short years they will graduate and begin building lives of their own, and like every mother, part of me aches knowing how quickly time moves. But no matter how old they become, every beautiful thing in my life traces back to one woman’s extraordinary act of love.
My story is only one example of the many ways women become mothers. This month of May, I want to celebrate those stories. The women who became mothers through adoption, surrogacy, foster care, loss, miracles, heartbreak, waiting, and hope. Because motherhood is not defined by one path. It is defined by love.
Some heroes do not wear capes. Some simply sit across from you one ordinary evening and say, “I’ll do it,” never fully realizing they are about to save someone’s entire world.
