I used ambition as an excuse.
I didn’t recognize it that way for a long time. It felt responsible. It felt aligned with the life I was building.
I have always been ambitious. There was always something to work toward, something to grow, something to expand.
Somewhere along the way, that ambition became more than just a part of who I am. It became the reason I gave when I didn’t want to look too closely at anything else.
When people would ask, when are you guys having kids of your own, I always had the same answer.
When we’re ready. I’m focused on my career. One day. Probably.
And there is truth in all of that.
But it wasn’t the whole truth.
Because that question has never felt simple to me. It carries more than people realize. It pulls on things that don’t sit perfectly together. My ambition, my timing, my body, the life I’ve already experienced, and the parts I haven’t.
It’s all entangled in a way that doesn’t translate in a quick conversation.
So I don’t explain it.
I give the version that makes sense.
In my twenties, it even felt like the right answer.
Now, in my thirties, it doesn’t feel the same.
My experience with motherhood has never been simple to explain.
One of the first shifts for me came a few years ago.
My cycle has always been irregular. There were times where we weren’t sure if it had happened, so taking a test wasn’t unusual.
But there was one time that felt different.
Like the others, it was negative.
I didn’t expect anything from it. I wasn’t tracking anything closely. I wasn’t in a place where I would have said we’re trying.
But I didn’t just throw it away and move on.
I sat there longer than I normally would have.
And I cried.
It caught me off guard, because nothing about that moment was supposed to feel that way. I remember thinking, why does this feel like something I lost?
I couldn’t explain it in a way that made sense.
It was just tears, there.
Something I hadn’t let myself feel before.
After that, there wasn’t pressure, just enough maybe in allowing it to happen on its own.
But five years later, it hasn’t.
PCOS is the number one cause of infertility in women.
That’s something I’ve known since I was 17, when I was first diagnosed.
For years, it felt like information. Something I carried, but didn’t fully understand what it would ask of me.
Now, at 34, it does.
This past year, I went 310 days without a cycle.
That’s when it really started to feel different. Not just something I knew, but something I had to actually sit with, something that was now asking something of me in a way I couldn’t ignore. Because at some point it stops feeling like something that will figure itself out, and you realize you have to decide what to do with it, to make choices, to get medicine involved, to step into something more intentional.
It stops being just about timing. It becomes the possibility that this might take more than I expected, or that it might not happen the way I thought it would at all.
And if I’m being honest, there’s a part of that I haven’t wanted to fully face.
Because wanting it makes it real.
And once it’s real, you have to sit with everything that comes with it.
And that’s where it doesn’t stay simple.
Because while that’s real,
there’s another reality I’ve been living in at the same time.
Because when people ask, when will you have kids of your own, it doesn’t land as just a question. It carries more than what’s being asked. It reduces something that has already been my lived experience into something that doesn’t always feel like it fully counts.
Because I am a mother already…
Just not in the way people expect. Not in the way that question is actually asking.
And that’s where it gets harder to explain.
This wasn’t something that happened overnight. There wasn’t a moment where I stepped into a title and everything made sense. It’s something that formed over time, through experience, through showing up, until it became what it is now, something that has been shaped over the last twelve years, from when she was two to who she is now.
Sunny is old enough to have her own thoughts, her own opinions, her own sense of who she is.
Watching her grow into herself in ways that don’t happen all at once, but over time, in the small moments that don’t seem like much until you realize they’ve shaped everything.
She’s thoughtful. She’s kind. She pays attention. She processes things in a way that still catches me off guard.
There are moments where she’ll say something, and I can hear pieces of conversations we’ve had over the years come back in her own words, not repeated, but embodied.
And that’s the part that stays with me.
Not just the big moments.
The small ones.
The car rides. The random conversations. The way she moves through something and then comes back to talk about it later.
Watching her become who she is,
and knowing I’ve been part of that.
I don’t have anything to compare it to.
But I know being her parent has been the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever experienced.
More than anything I’ve built.
More than anything I’ve accomplished.
And that’s what makes this harder to admit.
Because what I have already feels so full.
In a way I never would have expected.
In a way I didn’t know I needed.
And at the same time, there’s still a part of me that’s been silenced for a very long time.
Over the last twelve years, I’ve learned more than I expected to, not just about her, but about myself and what it actually looks like to hold both without separating them.
There was a time when I thought I had to.
That I had to be one version of myself at home and another everywhere else, like keeping them apart would protect both. But life didn’t work that way, and neither did I.
There were moments that stayed with me, especially the ones that seemed small…When someone would say, can someone else pick her up, it was always said casually, like it didn’t matter who showed up. But it did to me. Because it wasn’t understood that she wasn’t something I stepped into lightly. She wasn’t my responsibility by default, but by choice, and that choice shaped how I moved, even when no one else saw it.
So I showed up. In the drop offs and the pickups, in packing lunches, in school events, in volunteering to carve pumpkins. I was the parent with the most flexible schedule after all, and that’s what being self-employed afforded me.
At the same time, I was still building, and my business required focus.
For a while, I treated those two things like they were working against each other. Like being present in one meant falling short in the other, so I tried to make everything fit. I took calls in the car, answered emails in between moments, convinced myself that this was what it looked like to do both.
But it didn’t feel right.
Over time, something shifted. Not in what I was capable of, but in what I was willing to allow, especially as she got older.
Car rides became conversations again. After school became time I didn’t want to give away. I stopped treating those moments like space I could fill with work and started seeing them as time to be present.
I didn’t understand it then.
But looking back now, I can see it clearly.
ambition has just been the excuse.
It was never ambition.
It was the way I thought it had to exist.
I got so used to compartmentalizing, to separating that part of my life, that I downplayed how present I actually was.
I kept using ambition as the reason it couldn’t work.
But it never actually got in the way.
If anything, it kept me from admitting what I already knew.
I’ve already lived a version of both.
I’ve been present in the kind of motherhood that doesn’t always get named the same way, and I’ve built a life that I’m proud of alongside it.
So it was never about whether I could.
That part already exists.
What I hadn’t fully sat with was everything else.
What it would take.
What it might look like.
Whether it would happen the way I hope it will.
There is still fear.
Not in my ability to be both.
In everything else.
In not knowing what pursuing this actually means.
In not knowing if something that hasn’t come naturally will eventually come at all.
That I’ve been called mom on accident,
and I’d actually love to be mom on purpose.
Ambition was just an excuse to not to pursue, or claim motherhood.
If this resonated with you in any way, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. I know this is a layered conversation, and maybe more common than we talk about out loud.
xo,
Jaz
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