“I have always wanted to be a mother.
I watched my niece and nephew grow up under the strong loving hand of my sister, reflected upon the guidance and support of my own mother and knew in my heart I wanted to be that for someone, someday. With my style, success, and a handsome husband at my side. Would I not in fact make a wonderful mother?
I knew the truth: I would.
Another truth: I couldn’t.
After losing the child I was so grateful to carry, my heart began to change.”
“Poised to join my weak and tired egg with my husband’s damaged sperm in my own body, I had doubts. I thought about the babies that needed arms to hold them; and I thought of my own arms: empty, despite the money, time, and effort spent to fill them. I could be a mother, I decided, to the motherless. And though my saddened heart, betrayed by my broken body, had indeed changed, my husband’s had not, and I was alone -- neither a wife nor a mother.
“Why don’t you foster,” my friend Claudia asked repeatedly since taking in her sister’s brood to raise as her own. I eyed her messy, complicated life as one walking in the shoes of another. Could I do what she had done? Could I raise a baby I had no claim or right to? Could I fully give my love to a child that may, at any moment, be snatched from me by a system that cares more about biology than people?
I could.
I did.”
“My son, my sweet little boy, came into the world humbly, delivered to me in a sack full of poison by his mother, Montaya, Montaya, “MawMaw,” as he would later come to call her, would for me represent everything that could be wrong with motherhood. She’ll forever be the woman that gave me my child. She will forever be the woman who tried her best to take him away.”