Why Did I Decide to Become a Mother?

My dear friend asked me a couple of years ago: "Ewelina, why did you decide to become a mother? Can you put it in writing?"

She is still waiting for my answer.

Because when I put pen to paper, I froze.

Not from confusion. From depth... I went somewhere I hadn't expected - through layers of conditioning, social expectation, my own unmet needs, all the unexamined ideas I had absorbed across a lifetime without ever once stopping to question them. And somewhere in that silence, something surfaced that shook me:

No one had ever asked me that question in my 20s. Not once.

I think I have always been a mother, long before I became one.

I mothered my emotionally immature mother. I mothered my little brother. I mothered my stepdaughter. Care has run through me like a current since I was small and the world around me was more than happy to confirm it. The dolls (a copy of an actual new born) and prams I received as a child. My own mother's barely concealed excitement at the idea of becoming a grandmother, at getting what felt like her “second chance”. The quiet (or loud for some), persistent whisper of an entire culture that said: this is what you are for.

And then there was my own inner cinema. A film I had been directing in my mind for years - a dining table bathed in warm light, amazing home made food, a loving husband, a few children, laughter, meals shared, love that flowed easily between people who felt safe and at ease with each other. A scene I had never lived but always, desperately, longed for. I wanted to be the one to finally produce it. To write a different ending. To build, with my own hands, what I never had growing up.

And I did. The movie came to life - the table exists, the safety is real, the love is there.

But to get to that truth, I had to first walk through another one...

As a child, I learned that love had to be earned.

Be obedient. Be good. Be nice. Be easy. Don't take up too much space. And so I became very skilled at being those things, for everyone. A people pleaser, convinced from a very young age that the only way to receive love was to perform for it. To put on a mask and keep it on. To be the version of myself that made others comfortable, rather than the one that was simply, fully, me.

So when I tell you that part of why I wanted to become a mother was because I was starving for unconditional love - I want you to really hear that. Not as a confession of weakness. As an act of honesty that took me years to arrive at.

Children love you as you are, they don't care about your performance. They reach for you in the dark without checking whether you have earned it first. And I had been waiting my whole life for exactly that.

Both things were true - the genuine calling and the wound underneath it. The love I had to give and the love I was desperately searching for. That's what it means to be human. We rarely arrive at our most important decisions from one clean, simple place.

I was one of the first among my friends to have a child. No one ahead of me was asking the difficult questions. No one said: wait … have you thought about why? 

So I didn't.

And maybe that was exactly how it was supposed to be.

Because here is also true: sometimes there is no answer that fits into words.

Sometimes there is only this deep, quiet inner knowing. A pull that lives beneath logic. A sense, cellular and ancient, that this is your path. And perhaps that doesn't need explaining. Perhaps it only needs honouring.

But I want something different for the women who come after me.

I want every woman to have a moment of real awareness before she makes this decision. Not fear. Not doubt. But genuine, unrushed, honest self-inquiry. I want her to ask: does this come from within me or from the noise outside? From my own truth or from years of conditioning I never had the chance to question?

This is one of the last great taboos. And I know this because I have sat with these women - brave, fierce, honest women who looked me in the eye and said: "I regret this decision. I did it because I believed I was supposed to. Because I am a woman and that is what women do. And now I know that was a lie I was told, and a lie I told myself."

I sat with them, I held them. I felt a profound respect, a complete absence of judgement. But I also felt something else -  a flash of anger. At the society that sold them this story, at the world that never gave them the space to question it before it was already their life.

There is no judgement here, only grace. But what I want, truly want is for every woman to know she has a real choice. Not the version of choice that arrives pre-shaped by someone else's expectations.

And then there is the part no one tells you about.

Becoming a mother costs you something. It asks you to let go, and what you let go of matters, even when the thing you receive is greater.

I lost a lot of my identity. For a long time I couldn't even find the edges of who I was anymore. And then slowly, painstakingly, I began picking up the pieces - putting myself back together like a puzzle.

But here is the thing about that puzzle - the pieces didn't fit the same way anymore. They had changed, weathered, aged, been through things. And the picture they made when I laid them out - it wasn't the same picture as before.

It was different. Better, I think but also new. And for a while that was disorienting, because I kept trying to rebuild the old image with pieces that no longer fit it. Until I understood: I don't need to reassemble the old puzzle. I need to make a new one.

And that is okay. More than okay. That is the alchemy.

Would I do it again?

Without a single breath of hesitation - YES.

Becoming a mother is the most transformative thing I have ever done. It changed and shaped me in ways nothing else could have. My children cracked me open in the most necessary ways.

But! and this matters - I don't think we should ever place that burden on them. Children should never have to be the catalysts for their parents healing, even when they are exactly that.

What I know now, and wish I had known then: if I had done the inner work first -  if I had reparented myself, understood my own needs, met my own inner child with the love she deserved, I would have shown up differently. Not perfectly but more freely. And that freedom would have been a gift to them, too.

That is the work. It was never about becoming a perfect mother. It was always about becoming a more honest one.

She is still waiting for my answer, my dear friend.

Maybe this is it.

by Ewelina, The Alchemist Parent