My Supporting Role as a Childless Mother of Two by Chelsey Drysdale

A few months after I acknowledged my time to bear children was almost up, my sister and her husband announced their pregnancy. As we stood in her Los Feliz dining room, my parents and I hugged twenty-seven-year-old Tessa and wept. Our tight-knit family would soon add a fifth member, not including her husband. My sister hesitated to discuss her new precarious, yet planned, situation. My parents, on the other hand, were thrilled. They would finally have a grandchild. At the same time, ambiguous grief tempered my genuine enthusiasm.

By all appearances, Tessa had everything a Gen-X woman like me wanted. In her twenties, my sister checked off all the arbitrary adult milestones in the “correct” order: fall in love; get married; create a home; have a baby. At thirty-eight, I’d done the opposite. That previous fall, while dating a tepid man nine years my junior, I said, “I love you,” while lying on his mom’s couch covered in dog hair in the dark, crying. He held me and replied, “I know. I’m sorry.” Like with other men I’d scampered after, awaiting dollops of nonnutritive affection, I’d wasted one of the last baby-making years I had left—long after devastating collegiate heartbreak, a six-month do-over marriage, and a broken engagement with a standup man with whom I shared few commonalities. When the latest target of my longing revealed he dated men, the mourning period for my unborn children landed like a bomb. If I never became a mother, what was my role as an adult supposed to be? 

In the months leading up to my nephew’s birth, my sister navigated swollen feet, insatiable hunger, and tremendous weight gain. Her apprehension morphed into excitement as she designed a homey nursery in her sunroom. Simultaneously, sixty miles south, I moved home for the fourth time and unpacked my oft-traveling furniture in my childhood bedroom. Tessa took risks to build a rewarding life while I retreated into an erstwhile, familiar one. 

All the while, pregnant women materialized everywhere like morel mushrooms in a forest. Some I knew. Some walked past or popped up on a screen, all nurturing cells inside their supple bodies while my empty uterus ached. Waterworks were always one mother-adjacent reference or glimpse of chubby infant thighs away. I grieved for the warm foreheads I’d never kiss and the squishy hands I’d never hold. It was as if my unborn offspring had perished before I met them. 

Meanwhile Tessa read about pregnancy and motherhood, endured frequent blood draws, avoided booze and raw fish, and showed us 4-D ultrasound images of a wavy, water-logged figure with a face. With each new unique bodily event she experienced, I had no advice, yet my surprising maternal instincts for her returned. In adulthood we’re best friends, but until Tessa was in high school, I was more caretaker than pal. 

Once, on a trip to Lake Tahoe when I was eleven and Tessa was ten months old, my parents and I left her in a nearby daycare center so we could ski. In white-out conditions, I threw my new white gloves down a steep run. I was a cranky kid who couldn’t handle first-world adversity, but when we picked up Tessa from daycare and saw her slumped over unattended on the floor, listless with a fever, I forgot about my miserable day. My impulse as an unobligated third parent was to nurture her back to health. 

The next morning, I offered to watch Tessa alone for the first time. That sunny afternoon while my parents skied, I sat on the couch, my skinny arms wrapped around my sleeping sister, cooing and caressing her hot skin. From then on, I mothered her like she was my own. The vulnerable urge to safeguard Tessa only resurfaced while she was pregnant. How had I forgotten?

As a new aunt, the solid connection I’d have with my nephew as the family assembled at Cedars-Sinai to await his arrival during a scheduled C-section was abstract. After five hours, Tessa’s husband texted everyone a photo of a pink-skinned Bix, proclaiming he had a “giant head.” In the recovery room, we passed the swaddled bundle around—his tiny features reminiscent of Tessa’s the day I tended to her on that couch in the mountains nearly three decades earlier. The same protective feelings I’d felt for her spilled over as I cradled her son.

Before long, Bix grew into a resolute toddler. On the rare day I picked him up from preschool, his eyes would light up, and he’d proclaim, “My Chelsey is here!” I was an enthusiastic stand-in parent with a similar shape to the film’s star but with a much less ubiquitous role. Walking to the car, I held Bix’s sweaty hand as he bestowed compliments. “I like your jacket and your boots and your stripy shirt,” he once said. 

“Thank you!” I replied. “I love you.”

“I love you too. Can I have graham crackers and cream cheese?”

By then, my love for Bix was boundless, but after wrangling a picky eater, watching mind-numbing cartoons, begging him to bathe, wrestling his pajamas on, and coaxing him back to bed when he appeared in the living room with a drowsy smirk, I was exhausted. How did Tessa do this every day? She was a superhero without a cape. She was also now single because there’s no such thing as the “correct” order of signposts to mark off a list. Being an aunt comes with perks, I realized. Most nights I was free. 

Nonetheless, the maternal ache persisted into my mid-forties. One night my five-year-old nephew looked at me with his inquisitive hazel eyes and asked, “Whose mom are you?” Lately he’d been piecing together the family trees and didn’t understand I was a lone branch. 

“I’m no one’s mom,” I said, tearing up.

“But who calls you mom?”

His bewildered expression walloped me. “No one calls me mom,” I said. 

“But I’m your Bix,” he said, smiling. 

I squeezed him. “Yes, baby, you’re my nephew, and that’s all I need.” 

Is it? I wondered. 

I wouldn’t wonder forever, however, because perimenopause soon invaded my body like an elephant stampede. As abruptly as the lamentation for my imaginary babies arrived, it left. One day I stopped sobbing and couldn’t explain why. I was astonished to finally feel resolved about missing my window. I chalked it up to biology, particularly when an X-ray technician scanned my belly for fibroids—the only uterine ultrasound I’d ever had. There was no heartbeat. There was no tadpole-shaped organism. There were no tears. There weren’t even any fibroids. “Rip it all out anyway,” I joked. I got an IUD instead, and with that, the monthly hormonal whiplash waned.

On a much later trip to Palm Springs, Tessa, Bix, and I hiked through an oasis on a sunny, cool day after a rainstorm, my nephew sporting his favorite mocha-colored hoodie and a green safari hat. As he climbed onto a large rock to take in the wildflowers, cacti, and wispy clouds in a cobalt sky before we tackled the trail where palms flourished and a creek rushed through a crevice, I marveled at how quickly he’d grown. That his beanstalk legs rendered him eye-level with Grandma wasn’t what struck me most. The hike showcased everything else I admire about the astonishing boy in the throes of middle school. Unprompted, he led us, forging the safest path. We turned our dry shoes into a game as we traversed through the swift-moving water several times to reach the peak. Bix nimbly crossed the creek, hopping onto slippery rocks and scurrying across fallen tree trunks. Then he directed our steps so we, too, could avoid plunging our shoes into the icy water. The goal: to stay on “Team Dry.” When I neared him, he held his hand out to pull me back onto the trail as if to say, “I’ve got you.” 

Later we paused on a ledge to take a selfie, the three of us wrapped together like a burrito. On this beautiful afternoon, my body buzzed with overexertion as I did what brings me the most joy in midlife: bear witness to the impenetrable bond between a playful, strong mother and her thoughtful, sweet son—the two people I happen to adore most. My role as an adult doesn’t have to be as conventional mother. The abundance of reciprocal devotion in my orbit is extraordinary regardless. 

As a seasoned aunt, I once attended a mindfulness writing workshop at the Hugo House in Seattle, where I practiced breathing exercises between freewrites with like-minded authors in a candle-lit room. There I screwed up the nerve to complete an essay about a different carrot dangler of a man who neither asked for nor earned my emotional energy. During class, when I shared my grief about being single and childless, the woman next to me said, “But you are a mother. You’re a mother to all of us.” She gestured toward a fellow writer whom I’d donated a blank notebook and a pen because she’d forgotten hers. The observant stranger intuited what I now identified in myself: I’m a guardian. I will always be on the sidelines supporting my nephew as he adeptly swings his golf club, brings home stellar grades, plays the flute, and studies chess strategies. But I also recognize the pressure of being the only grandchild shared with three sets of grandparents. Bix is imperfect like the rest of us, and he isn’t responsible for my happiness; I am—which is why I retain a sliver of hope that I’ll meet a suitable partner at an opportune moment. Perhaps he’ll have a grandchild, making it conceivable someday someone might call me “Grandma” in lieu of “Mom.” With the bravery of openness, it’s not too late to become the protagonist in my own story.

Chelsey Drysdale’s essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Brevity, The Coachella Review, Buzzfeed, PS (PopSugar), The Manifest-Station, and others. She edits at drysdaleeditorial.com. 

5 February 2026