By Courtney Dercqu 
Today’s no different from yesterday, and tomorrow will be no different from today. If you’re like me and desperate for a baby, that’s how it is. The days are long, the years are short, and as I greet my 34th birthday, I’m reminded of why that saying has endured with such popularity. My mom was 33 when she had me, and I swore, I’d never, ever, wait that long.
In late winter 2023, my best friend asked me how often my husband and I were intimate. It’s the kind of question I hadn’t been asked since high school, maybe even the first few years of college, but now, I don’t answer inquisitions like that so eagerly. It’s become so hard to explain that I want a baby but don’t have any sex drive. So what happened? The answer: my mom died.
My mom died when I was 26 after a six-and-a-half-year battle with metastatic breast cancer. I hate typing those words, let alone even thinking about those words, “metastatic breast cancer.” Her diagnosis scarred me, but her death destroyed me.
Though many friends and family members reminded me that there’s never a right age to lose your mother, I can argue that there are, perhaps, ages I would have preferred, like 42 or 50. I would have gladly taken the age I am now or 35—whatever age I had to be where I could have had, perhaps, a little bit of an opportunity to taste life.
To many, that argument doesn’t make sense. Having gotten married three weeks out of high school and divorced around the time I was legally old enough to order a vodka sour at dinner, I spent a lot of my early 20s feeling as if I were going backward. While my friends were getting their parents to cosign their first apartment, I was moving back into my childhood bedroom—stuffed animals sprawled out on my bedsheet and all. Soon came the engagements and the boyfriends who became husbands. Two of my friends even had babies.
My time eventually came after I turned 24. I had experienced love at first sight when I was 16. Our eyes met across a crowded room and by the time we had broken up, I swore I’d never love again. But the night I met my husband was a different kind of love . . . it was old. We conversed as if we’d known each other for decades. We fell into that old slipper kind of love. The kind of love that doesn’t need to be on its best behavior to be reciprocated. It’s why, two months into dating, I confessed my love for him. He was the one, and 10 years later, still is.
Like all fresh couples, we dreamed about a future, and that future included babies. I’ve dreamt of motherhood my whole life. At six years old, my favorite pastime was balling up a bedsheet or sweatshirt and shoving it beneath my pajamas pretending to be like one of the many mothers I saw picking my classmates up from school. Their bellies were big and beautiful, and I wanted to experience that even as a child. I couldn’t wait to grow up!
And then I did grow up and had to pick out the color of my mother’s casket (white). I went to our favorite store, asking a stranger and her uncle what they thought of the black, laced peplum shirt I had picked out for her funeral. I saw her face—beautiful, wrong shade of lipstick, cold. When the funeral director asked to close the casket, I asked if he could move the picture frame I’d put in; I didn’t want the sharp edges to hurt her.
I wish I could end the story here, but a year and a half later, my dad started his journey on the same road we’d just gotten off. After three years of surgeries, radiation, gout, rehabilitation centers, hospital stays, feeding tubes, and learning how to give insulin injections, my dad joined my mom. He was there . . . until he wasn’t.
In many ways, my mother’s death caused a ripple effect on my life. With caretaking and grief, the idea of making another sacrifice was stifling. The worst day of my life was when I told my husband I didn’t want kids.
But I did then and I do now. I’m still reeling from the loss, but also healing. We moved to a new state. We’re starting over. I know I’ll never go back to who I was before the loss, but I’m trying to stand on my own two feet. I’m trying to be a new me. A me that wants to, finally after years, create the title I know I was born to have.
by Nikki Pennington 
by Jessica Grillo 
by Christie Lynn 
