The Birds and Bees Lied.

Mother’s Day is hard for me in a way I am not always allowed to say out loud.

Because I didn’t get here easily.

I didn’t get here “when the timing was right." I didn't get here "when we stopped trying and just had fun." I didn't get here with an adorable stuffed-bear holding a sonogram photo, or an Insta-worthy family photoshoot on the beach. I didn’t get here the way people usually picture when they talk about arriving to motherhood using a turn-by-turn GPS.

I got here through needles.

Through bruises and rashes and incisions.

Through waiting rooms where I stared at the floor because looking at anyone else felt impossible.

Through IUIs. Through meds. Through several rounds of IVF. Through surgeries, and loss after loss that even now I don’t always have words for. Through eight years.

Fertility treatments take more from you than just time and your life savings. They take your sense of control. Your sense of identity and value. Your ability to exist without emotions showing up at inopportune times. They take the version of you that thought trying hard enough or praying hard enough would guarantee anything.

So you learn how to smile when you’re not okay. You learn how to keep showing up even when your body feels like it’s been through something you can’t explain in casual conversation. And then when you do explain, it's 'too much' or too hard for other people to hear. But you still have to function while all of that is happening. You still answer texts. You still have to go to work. You still have to try to act like everything is normal when internally nothing feels normal at all.

Your world is falling apart every time you leave your house or open your phone.

Your emotions are literally not yours and you live by a detailed calendar; scribbled with dates and medication doses.

And then there are the opinions.

The ones people say out loud and the ones they don’t. The idea that motherhood should come easily. Or naturally. Or the “right” way as if it's a contest. That part still gets me.

Because why should pain ever be a contest?

So when I say Happy Mother’s Day, I mean it in the most honest way I can.

I mean it for the moms who are barely holding it together today and doing it anyway.

For the ones running on no sleep and reheated coffee and pure instinct.

For the ones it did come easily for.

For the stepmoms raising kids they didn’t get to meet first, but loving them fully anyway.

For the adoptive and foster moms navigating systems and paperwork and emotions that don’t come with instructions.

For the single moms doing everything without relief and still being told they’re “so strong” when what they really need is just someone to notice how tired they are, and to give them some damn gas money.

For the working moms answering emails while someone is screaming from three feet away like it’s urgent life or death (and it’s just a lost shoe).

For the moms carrying babies only in their hearts.

For the ones who wanted motherhood so badly it physically hurt and kept going anyway, or even those who decided to choose peace.

For the moms whose babies were here for moments, months, or years, but are loved forever all the same.

Motherhood isn’t one story. It’s not one experience. It’s not one feeling. It's not a contest.

It’s love and exhaustion and grief and joy sometimes in the same hour.

Mine came through years of not knowing if it would ever happen at all.

So yes I am grateful, but I am also tired in ways I can’t fully describe. I am emotional about things that still don’t feel completely real sometimes.

And I am a mom. I am a "Mama" to the ones I hold now, and the ones I believe I will hold someday.

I am a mom writing this in between the chaos of a normal day, still trying to process how something I fought so hard for can also feel so.many.ways now. It's the best and strangest and most exhausting and hardest and most wonderful thing I have ever done.

Happy Mother’s Day to all of us who got here in completely different ways, but are all still doing the same impossible job anyway.

xoxo

Madi