Some Wombs Break Cycles Instead of Bearing Children

Born from a lineage of silence, I choose to speak.

I’ve said it before, sometimes in passing, sometimes with conviction: I could never be a mum. But the truth is more complicated. I could. And I know I’d be a damn good one.

I would mother from a place of deep awareness. I would protect softness, offer safety, see the things that go unsaid in a child’s silence. I would put their needs before mine, not out of martyrdom, but instinct. And maybe that’s exactly why, for now, I’m choosing not to become a mother. Because I know what it takes. And I know what it costs.

In therapy, we spoke of how the idea of motherhood can be one of the most triggering mirrors, not just for our daily lives, but for our deepest histories. To raise a child is to be face-to-face with your own inner child. Their joy might stir memories of your absence. Their pain might awaken yours. And their needs? They might remind you of everything you were taught to suppress. Sometimes the scariest part of parenthood is the possibility that we might recreate what broke us, or that we might overcorrect and lose ourselves entirely in the process.

Motherhood, in my lineage, was more than complicated. My mother didn’t want children. Her mother didn’t either. But they had them anyway. Out of pressure. Out of survival. Out of roles assigned long before they could ask themselves what they actually wanted. And it showed.

My mother had six abortions before me. I found this out not as a child, but much later when I was already unraveling my own sense of worth and trying to piece together why love had always felt conditional. It didn’t make me angry. It just explained something. It placed a subtle weight on the story of my existence, the sense that I wasn’t really meant to arrive, that I slipped through a gate that had been shut so many times before. I started to understand the quiet pressure I carried: the need to justify being here, to earn my place, to become the child that made it all mean something.

They fed us, clothed us, maybe even loved us in their own fractured way. But they never knew how to see us. To be warm without conditions. To love without control. The girls born into this lineage weren’t nurtured, they were tasked. Expected to fix what came before. Expected to succeed where others fell silent. We were daughters, yes. But also bandages. Mirrors. Emotional currency.

And that inheritance lives somewhere in the body, in flinches, in guilt, in the constant checking: Am I too much? Am I not enough? It lives in the subconscious, where logic cannot reach, and where every choice about motherhood becomes more than personal, it becomes ancestral.

So when I say I might not become a mother, at least not now, it isn’t out of fear or a lack of love to give. It’s because I have learned, through grief, therapy, and painful honesty, that I cannot build a new beginning if I am still living out someone else’s ending. I’ve spent years trying to be who my mother needed me to be. I’ve played both child and caretaker. But now, I am trying to become someone I myself can trust.

I am the mothering type. I know that now. I have been mothering others for as long as I can remember: friends, strangers, even my own mother. I have offered tenderness I never received, learned to speak the language of care without anyone teaching me how. And I have been mothering myself in quiet, radical ways: learning to rest, to feel, to stop earning my right to exist.

Some women are meant to mother the world through art, through friendship, through the simple act of surviving with tenderness intact. Some women are meant to rewrite the story by not writing another chapter just to prove they can.

My reason, today, is not rooted in fear or selfishness, but in something far more difficult to claim: self-awareness, hard-won boundaries, and the kind of love that refuses to replicate harm. I would give everything to a child. But I am learning to keep some of myself for me. Not as a rejection of motherhood, but as a radical act of presence. The kind of presence no one ever gave to me.

Kotryna