Motherhood: A Resurrection by Magda Stoenescu

Pregnancy No. 1

Gestation: 6 weeks, 1 day

I was a girl trying to be a woman in a man’s world, a fledgling New York City architect. With a work ethic inherited from immigrant parents who fled communist Poland with two-year-old me in tow and not much more, my mindset thrived on self-discipline. Between my education and working harder than anyone else, I could do anything. I’d sworn off children, so determined I was to make something of myself, unhindered. It was an unquestioning, blind drive propelling me forward. As if not racing towards something, but away from it.

Then: a week after the initial impact of two pink lines, I crouched mid-pee at LaGuardia Airport, staring at the bullseye centered in my underwear. It was the smallest of deaths, but a death all the same.

When moment becomes momentous, you just know. Moment brushes past you in that fleeting, breeze-like way, leaving its menacing cousin momentous to do its dirty work, reaching deep into your gut and turning you inside out.

As I staggered out of the bathroom, time tore through me like a slow-motion car wreck. I sidled up to the out-of-order stanchion blocking the escalators as the terminal tilted and veered. Scanning the crowd for my loving husband, security announcements pierced my ears. Please report all suspicious activities. Off came my sweater in a hot flush of panic. An airport employee rescued me with a wheelchair that had surely never been occupied by someone my age.  

I didn’t want to be a mother. So why the cataclysmic reaction?

Pregnancy No. 2

Gestation: 6 weeks, 5 days

There’s nothing like an existential theft of the womb to send you into a tailspin. I hadn’t experienced such a fundamental reorganization of my sense of self since my mother’s death when I was ten, an event I’d still not entirely processed at twenty-nine.

Identity is the most intimate of things, each experience a thread stitched tight in a tapestry of the exotic and mundane. But embedded within that neatly woven geometry lurk the deceptions you’ve held onto all your life, wearing thin, waiting to be tested. 

I’d been convinced I didn’t want children, but now I had a sneaking suspicion I’d been lying to myself. Did I…want a child? I sprinted past Maybe and settled on Yes, absolutely. 

Years ago, the decision against children had been instinctive. Motherhood terrified me, for reasons I thought I understood. Scanning lists of notable architects, what I found notable was the utter scarcity of women. Of those achieving the distinction, scant few were mothers. I comprehended this implicitly; my all-nighters at work seemed irreconcilable with the demands of raising another human. 

My success-at-all-costs approach had propelled me my whole life, like many children of immigrants. I felt the need to validate the struggles my family had endured. My mother never made it to 40; her father succumbed early to the same disease. I was driven to architecture by a compulsion to create things with a sense of permanence. Building structures that could outlast me was a seductive proposition; evidence I’d had an impact if I prematurely vanished. Okay, I’ll say it: died. 

Now, a new desire spewed up, hot like a volcano I’d mistakenly assumed dormant. Dissipating hormonal fumes were to blame, surely, or my bruised ego balking at failure. 

My gynecologist possessed impressive credentials, a fancy office, and the empathy of a piece of cardboard. Try again later, he said, with all the warmth of a voicemail recording.

Three months passed; I was pregnant again. See, the universe radiated, it’s so easy! 

I took to avoiding mirrors—I knew I wouldn’t recognize myself, that stranger with the unquenchable thirst for baby. A mysterious hand had hijacked my rational brain from terra firma and dropped it onto stormy waters that refused to abide by my usual principles of navigation. It was jarring to transition from an autonomous person to something ambiguously more: the host of a parasite commanding your body, securing its future by chemically altering your brain to carve-your-heart-out love it: who’s in control now, sucker?

With a cold wand deep in my vagina, the gynecologist delivered the news a week later like a jaded waiter reciting the soup of the day. Back home I went, with a special pill and no special instructions. I scrutinized the golf-ball-sized clots popping out of me in a spectacle of misfortune, a madwoman searching for the unknowable. 

As a perennial overachiever with the armor of a turtle, I employed my time-tested strategy for hardship I’d learned from my mother’s passing: pack in the tender bits and plod on. Grief and deep self-examination were not my strengths. If you cut yourself off from pain, you don’t have to feel it—that, I excelled at. I was so good I could count the memories of my mother on one hand. We had ten years together, and that’s all I had to show for it. In one heart-warming highlight, I remember running around laughing during her wake. What a party. My childhood continued as if nothing had happened. Shame, it turns out, is harder to bury than grief. What kind of mother could I be if I couldn’t even grieve my own?

Pregnancy No. 3

Gestation: 8 weeks, 0 days

Throughout my twenties, I proudly considered myself immune to the maternal impulse, as if I’d dodged some virus. You’d never catch me in a baby store, ogling pastel ruffles. Yet now my eyes snapped to every crying infant like a paranoid addict. I was infected. Who was I? I had been a competitive, career-driven millennial, racing to leave my mark on the world. Was I going soft? And why was it so important, this leaving a mark?

An intuitive sense of obligation pressed me. My grandfather narrowly escaped death in the Soviet gulags, the same people who brutally murdered his father in the Katyn Massacre. Decades later, my parents faced political persecution and threats, fleeing Poland to America, where my astronomer mother and journalist father washed dishes to feed me. My inherited indebtedness was great. It was a wonder I was even alive. Had they done all that for me to pop out babies, sipping bubble tea at mommy-and-me yoga? 

But here I was. Desperate to be a mother.

Why do people choose to have children, I mused. Some did it to save a marriage—that never ended well. For others, action came first, questions second. How many would admit to a purely selfish act: who do you want changing your diaper as you lounge upon your final bed, a stranger or the strange creature bred from your womb? Well, one must plan ahead. Just like a 401k. 

Was the urge driven by a biological desire to replicate oneself? I thought of those men who donated sperm on a regular basis, like tithing at church. Maybe they were paying their way through college. Maybe they were bending the rules of mortality. Maybe they weren’t so crazy after all.

I moved with Tai Chi focus through my third pregnancy, lest I jar the embryo’s microscopic foothold on my uterus. My efforts were rewarded with the flicker of a tadpole swimming on a screen. The gynecologist waited for our flash of elation to arc. Slow, he said, like the man from the Dry Eyes commercial: The heartbeat is too slow.

I faced my third miscarriage with stunned stupor. Was I being punished for my initial lack of enthusiasm? This time, I elected a Dilation and Curettage, a procedure evoking an extravagant spa treatment. Dressed in fanciful language, a D & C is the surgical equivalent of putting a Hoover to your uterus and sucking out its contents, leaving only fragmented emotional remnants to fester in its wake. 

I was wheeled into the “operating theater,” a room with the ambiance of a walk-in refrigerator. Awaiting surgery, the sounds and smells of my mother’s fight against leukemia accosted me. She, too, had lain in one of these beds. Months before her death, she gave me a piggy bank she’d hand-painted; a stone blue wash with delicate flowers sprouting from its coin slot. Years later, I realized it was missing; a clear sign of my neglect in fulfilling the contract of love between mother and child. Knowing death was imminent, she’d given me a token to remember her by, and I hadn’t cared enough to ensure its safekeeping. Like that lost cassette tape with the only recording of her voice, a testament of her existence. Lost artifacts of a lost history. Lost, as if I’d intended to erase her.

Figures shrouded in white floated around like ghosts in a morgue. Speared by a needle, glacial liquid rolled through my veins, imbuing me with an odd, corpse-like sensation as I drifted off.

Pregnancy No. 4

Gestation: 7 weeks, 2 days

Three miscarriages in a row elevated me to the exclusive status of “recurrent miscarriage,” like a frequent flyer but without the perks. A dubious honor bestowed upon 1% of the population, I was an overachiever even in miscarriage. Our reward: an appointment with an infertility specialist. 

Infertile. The word rolled over my tongue with bitterness. My whole life had been a pursuit of achievement, yet here I was, incapable of fulfilling the most natural human process. 

My husband and I stumbled up a tilting stairwell to a shabby, windowless waiting area packed with huddled couples. Gazes fell like rocks to the scuffed linoleum, as if we were all there for sex addiction therapy. The doctor shuffled into the exam room, disarming me with a crooked grin and sparkling, sad eyes. My uterus glowed eerily from a screen resembling the original Apple I computer. 

His thick accent carried the comforting undertone of a benevolent grandpa. “My dear, you have a uterine septum!”

In less than a minute, he’d solved my infertility: a congenital anomaly in which a membrane bisects your uterus. You would think a person with essentially two uteruses would churn out offspring like a happy little bunny, but no.

As it turns out, the gods of fertility have an odd sense of humor. Six months after reshaping my two half-uteruses into one whole, I was back on the gurney with my fourth miscarriage. The uterine septum was not the cause of my miscarriages. Just a little something thrown in for extra credit. 

How was the earth overpopulated when babies flushed through me like fleeting bouts of stomach flu? I resented that the biology of my brain was hellbent on driving me towards motherhood, while the rest of my body seemed allergic to the notion.

Pregnancy No. 5

Gestation: 9 weeks, 1 day

It turns out there’s a limit to how much you can handle when repeatedly assailed by traumatic events. Every loss was a reminder of my bloodline, a trail of premature deaths sprinkled along its path like black pebbles. My brain withdrew into low-power mode, severing its connection to the world. No signal. It was a self-protective measure of numbness I knew well, the same state of emotional paralysis I’d floated through my entire adolescence. 

The weight of absence can be paradoxically heavy, like a black hole at the center of the universe sucking everything in, including light. In her astronomy research, my mother had computed complex mathematical processes to decode the world’s existential mysteries. All I wanted was to know her. But she was unknowable, an abstract entity forever out of reach.

Maybe I wasn’t meant to be a mother. 

Maybe losing my mother so young had cursed me, eradicated my potential for inhabiting the mother-child bond in all its forms. Maybe I had flung myself into academics and career as a defense mechanism.

My mind busied itself processing 1’s and 0’s: life boiled down to the most basic code, calibrated for survival. Occasionally, I popped my head out from within my shell to reevaluate my realm, monochrome and choppy like an old silent film. Hello, world. Pop back in. Just another miscarriage. Nothing to see here.

Pregnancy No. 6

Gestation: 39 weeks, 0 days

Unconditional love: a slogan thrown from the lips of many doe-eyed new parents like an infomercial. I never knew love until… 

My analytical, emotionless temperament never grasped this concept. Assuming such a thing existed, what happens to unconditional love when one half disappears? Is it possible to refill its void, like some drought-ravaged aquifer? 

Soon enough, I was pregnant again, a revelation that filled me with dread. The fertility specialist prescribed a blood thinner.

“A blood thinner?” I was the picture of perfect health—miscarriages notwithstanding. 

He cocked his head as if weighing incalculable odds. “For some women, a blood thinner helps. No one knows why.” 

Wasn’t that scientific. Hadn’t millions of years of procreation yielded more intelligent insights? He handed me a needle. Inject yourself in the stomach. Daily. 

My blood pressure collapsed like a balloon against a butcher knife. “For how long?”

The crooked grin. “We’ll see!”

I was a walking experiment. Meanwhile: avoid sharp objects and car accidents, as you will most definitely bleed out.

Stabbing myself in the stomach was an art which I, a compulsive perfectionist, quickly mastered. I was a clandestine artist, considering where to land my next brushstroke, my skin a constellation of ochre, eggplant, splashes of vermillion. Syringes accumulated in gallon-sized Ziploc bags like little black ops soldiers—253 in total. My secret weapons.

As my sixth pregnancy stretched from weeks to months, my fear expanded like spiderwebs in the attic. I stared at my decaf latte as if it was a murder weapon. Were traces of caffeine lurking in there, waiting to strangle a burgeoning heartbeat? Losing an embryo was one thing; I didn’t know if I could handle the loss of a fetus. If I got beyond that, how would motherhood change me? I hardly recognized myself as it was.

Considered high risk, I maneuvered my body with precision amidst a haze of dread, careful not to become attached to the hiccupping little human swimming laps in the Olympic-sized pool of my stomach. Just in case.

Clinging to my ambitions, I waddled to the last of my seven licensing exams within a week of my due date. I thought of my grandfather. After nearly starving to death, he had made his way back from Siberia to Poland—on foot—to become a respected surgeon. My parents, despite their education, started over in America, rebuilding a life from the ground up. I owed them, and wanted to make the most of what could be a short time on this wonderful earth. The exam proctor eyed me, clearly nervous my supernova-sized stomach would explode onto the cheap carpeting. I gave him a look that said, You’re damn right I want to be an architect with a capital A, and squeezed myself in front of a computer for four hours of fun.  

Days later, my husband wrung his hands after a painstaking 34 hours massaging the feet of my laboring body. Told it was time for an emergency cesarean, I didn’t know whether to cheer or weep. I wasn’t ready to be under the lights again. For the antiseptic miasma of death. There was no anesthesia to subdue my anxiety as masked, white-cloaked bodies scurried through the doors. A tent appeared in front of my face as a flurry of anonymous latex fingers prodded my stomach. Just another day at the office.

My too-lucid brain struggled to process the scalpel tearing through my abdomen like a T-bone steak. Someone failed to mention that although you’re not in pain during a C-section (let’s not talk about after), every other sensation remains sharp as a cloudless minus 40-degree day in North Dakota. Hands slithered inside me, taking the lay of the land. Pushing. Tugging.

“Here she comes!” The doctor exclaimed, so giddy I wondered if this was a first-time experience for us both.

An alien, guttural groan spewed from my mouth as my baby was extricated in one swift movement, an extraordinary sensation I can only describe as being gut-punched by Muhammad Ali, but in reverse. 

My daughter emerged from my womb with the shrill cry of a bird, untangled from the burdens of my being. We were no longer one organism. We would forever be two.

Pregnancy No. 7

Gestation: 9 weeks, 5 days

There I was, six pregnancies in and one baby to show for it: a mom, all the same. 

At some point during my daughter’s first year, I experienced an epiphany when I realized the gaping hole left by my mom’s death 24 years earlier had shrunk. Being a mother mysteriously filled the void of losing one, or at least, allowed the light of day to trickle back in. Though she’d never be in my life again, I felt closer to her, paradoxically bonded by being her, by sharing this role. Becoming a mother had resurrected her, and she lived through me with new vitality. 

I realized that my desperation for motherhood had been, in part, a need to reconnect with her and accept the past. It was as if time had looped back on itself and reforged our bond, a quantum entanglement my mother would have surely appreciated.

Then there was the vaporous enigma of unconditional love, rolling in like a sun-drenched fog, blinding me with its disorienting luminescence. Was this what my mother had felt for me? Intense connection with another human demands equivalent vulnerability. It’s a volatile environment, in which the wild garden of your deepest self can be trampled on a whim. But it can also flourish.

Along my bloodline’s trailing path of black pebbles, my spirited daughter sparkled like a piece of quartz caught in the sun. Breaking the cycle suddenly felt possible. 

Despite extreme sleep deprivation, panicked ER visits, and the impossible logistics of balancing parenthood with career, my husband and I decided to double down. Yes, we most definitely wanted more of that.

It’s funny how quickly a false sense of security settles in. I relaxed with the knowledge—the fact—that what my body already did, it could do again. Pregnant a seventh time, I didn’t look to my five failed attempts, but smiled down at my successful one. The blood thinner was my missing link. The reason I had my sweet daughter. 

But ten weeks in, I faced another miscarriage. I couldn’t attribute my miscarriages to anything concrete, couldn’t impose control over a lurking enemy. I didn’t even have the luxury of knowing its name. 

Pregnancy No. 8

Gestation: 39 weeks, 0 days

My sixth miscarriage shook me, but it was different. I was different. Childbirth is a process of rebirth, of excavating an expanded version of yourself, perhaps unrecognizable, yet no less authentic. Becoming a mother and finally facing the loss of my own had changed me. In reconnecting with her, I had somehow absorbed some of her wisdom. I was renewed; tougher, calmer, and grateful for what I had. And I wasn’t done fighting.

“So, my dear…” The fertility specialist squinted at my chart. “How old are you?” 

“Thirty-four,” I stated with confidence. As an afterthought, I added, “I’ll be 35 in September.” 

“September…” he repeated, as if it were a critical piece of information.

Out comes the chart: a graph with a line flat as a corpse’s heartbeat, until it dropped like a cliff. “Your fertility at 35,” he said, pointing to the inflection point, “declines rapidly. It’s time to consider IVF.”

A few short weeks later, I waltzed into the IVF clinic for the embryo transfer, confident I could handle a simple turkey-basting on my own. My doctor strode in, clapping his hands.

“We have seven healthy, fertilized embryos! How many should we put in?”

I strained to lift my head from the examination table. I wasn’t prepared for this. Wasn’t the number of embryos dictated by rules of standard medical practice? 

One? Two? I stared at him dumbly. 

“How many miscarriages have you had?” He frowned.

I swallowed. “Six.”

“And one successful pregnancy?” He examined the ceiling. “At that rate…if we put in all seven, we can hope one of them may survive.”

Inseminate myself with…seven fertilized embryos? Was this normal? I cursed myself for failing to research this. Why had I come alone? Bitterly, I thought: this is one of those moments you call your mother for advice. I burned with rage and bafflement at the deep irony of the universe. Yet, I couldn’t deny there was a certain logic to his math.

“What if they…” Breathe. “All survive?”

“That’s unlikely,” he laughed. “In that case, we can do a selective reduction.”

Another topic I had no knowledge of. But the name got the point across. My thoughts tripped over themselves in a dash for the exit. I couldn’t come back another day. The embryos were prepped. My husband was in an important meeting. I’d have to do this on my own.

I winced. “I guess I’ll go with your professional recommendation.” 

It was a cop-out, I knew. But it was all my stunned brain could manage. Before I could backtrack, I watched a backlit screen illuminate a magnified petri dish with seven embryos—seven children?—as they seemed to swim into the pipette of their own free will. 

Was this irrational? Certainly. Was I desperate? Absolutely.

“Here we go!” he exclaimed.

Shit, I thought, I’m going to be an Octomom.

Astonishingly, the kooky fertility math was not far off: two embryos caught hold in the weary walls of my uterus. With eight limbs clawing through my whale-like belly, people asked if I’d seen the movie Alien.

A couple hundred syringes and nine months later—four under mandatory bedrest (can I clarify: not a vacation)—I lay under floodlights like hot Florida sunshine, fearless, ready for the knife and the two punches about to land. I was a pro. 

And, in a feat of existence not to be underappreciated, one became three.

Resurrection

When you know what it’s like to lose one of the greatest loves there is, the decision to start a family becomes a herculean task of shoring up courage and succumbing to vulnerability. Becoming a mother required confronting the reality that I was creating a bond that would, at some point, be severed again.  

I never stopped grieving my mother, but it’s no longer stifling. Chained down by years of ignoring it, my mother’s shadow floats alongside me now, unburdened, a silent companion. I look upon her death in awe of her bravery and grateful for the love I know she must have felt for me, for everything she must have done for me, even if I can’t remember it.

Every year I outlive my mother feels like borrowed time. But also, a gift: a way of seeing the world—not taking anything for granted, appreciating life in all its richness and uncertainty. I’ve realized I don’t need to prove myself to anyone, alive or dead. I don’t need to conquer the world. Life is too short, any way you look at it. That used to be the reason I raced ahead; now, it’s the reason I move slowly, eyes wide open.

Born in Poland, Magda Stoenescu lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her husband and three children. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and UCLA, and is working on her debut novel.

21 May 2026