Everyone assumes women are delaying motherhood by choice. For many of us, that’s not the truth.
The story we keep telling
There’s a story we keep telling about women having children later in life: that we waited. That we prioritized careers, or travel, or simply weren’t ready. Part of it is true for me, but I didn’t intend on waiting this long for the sake of travel or work.
What the numbers actually show
A recent New York Times report found that nearly half of American women have never had a child by 30, while by 45, 88 percent are mothers. The headline version of that stat almost always centers choice — women deciding to delay. Yet for a large percentage of us, this wasn’t a choice. We didn’t wait by design. Life, health, and circumstances brought us here.
My timeline wasn’t mine to choose
I didn’t delay motherhood. Endometriosis did.
For over a decade, my body had its own timeline, and it had nothing to do with career planning or lifestyle preference. It looked like years of appointments. An endometriosis diagnosis that took far too long to confirm, the way it does for so many women with this disease. Saturday mornings spent in a waiting room full of women just like me — all there for the same reason, all hoping this IVF cycle would be the one.
I became a mom at 41. Not on my timeline. On the one my body eventually allowed.
Why I started Soy Nueva Mamá
This is part of why I started Soy Nueva Mamá — because the conversation about motherhood after 40 needed more room in it. Not just room for the empowerment version, the one where a woman confidently chose this path on her own terms, as valid as that story is for the women who lived it. Room, too, for delay. For pain. For confusion and ambivalence and the long detours that shape a life whether we asked for them or not.
If you’re in it right now
If you’re in the middle of that fight right now — the appointments, the waiting rooms, the timeline that isn’t following the plan you had — I see you.