I understand why some young people look at the state of our world today and question whether bringing children into it is the right thing to do. I hear their concerns. I understand the fear, the uncertainty, the heartbreak. When the world feels so fractured, so angry, and so frightening, it’s understandable to wonder whether it is fair to bring another life into it.
And for some, I suspect those feelings run even deeper. Perhaps their own childhoods were marked by trauma, instability, or pain. Perhaps the idea of creating a family feels less like a dream and more like a risk they cannot bear to take. That breaks my heart, because no child should ever have to grow up without feeling safe, seen, valued, and loved.
But I also think about history.
Humanity has always lived through frightening times. War, famine, poverty, disease, injustice, and suffering are not new chapters in the human story. Every generation has faced its own version of uncertainty, and parents throughout history have brought children into a world they could not promise would be gentle.
And yet, they LOVED them.
They fed them, held them, taught them, protected them, fought for them, and prayed over them. They planted gardens whose shade they might never sit beneath. They built homes, told stories, passed down traditions, and dared to hope that the world their children inherited might be a little kinder than the one they knew.
And here we are.
For all the darkness in our world, we also live in a time of extraordinary privilege in many ways, particularly here in America. We have opportunities, knowledge, medical advances, and freedoms that countless generations before us could scarcely have imagined. We have made progress, even as we continue to struggle with the things that still need to change.
The world is not without Darkness. But neither has it ever been without LIGHT.
And sometimes, I wonder if we have become so focused on the darkness that we forget one of the most powerful ways we have to create MORE light.
LOVE.
Not the easy kind of love that exists only when life cooperates. Not the kind that disappears when things get difficult. But the kind of love that builds something lasting. The kind that HEALS. The kind that changes us so profoundly that we can never again be only who we were before.
I think about the love my husband and I share. The kind of love that makes you believe, without hesitation, that SOULMATES ARE REAL and FOREVER. ❤️
And then I think about what happened when that love became four little heartbeats, four tiny bodies, four brand-new souls taking their first breaths.
We became something MORE.
We were no longer simply two individuals who loved each other. We became the beginning of a Family. We became someone’s safe place. Someone’s first home. Someone’s first experience of trust, comfort, belonging, and unconditional love.
Our hearts somehow learned to live outside our bodies.
And with each child, I discovered that a heart does not divide its love into smaller pieces. IT GROWS. It stretches. It becomes capable of loving in ways we could never have imagined before we were asked to do so.
Our children became the POEMS written on our HEARTS.
Their stories began with us, but they were never ours to write entirely. We were given the extraordinary privilege of helping shape their opening chapters, of loving them through the messy middle, of being there for the heartbreaks and triumphs, the questions and discoveries, the scraped knees and the broken hearts, the first steps and the giant leaps.
Each day added another verse.
Every bedtime prayer, every whispered reassurance, every hard conversation, every apology, every moment of laughter, every time we chose patience when we were tired and tenderness when life was hard — another line of the poem was written.
And those poems kept growing.
They grew beyond our home, beyond our arms, beyond the little lives we once held against our chests. They began to touch other lives, other hearts, other futures.
And someday, long after we are gone, the LOVE we poured into them will still be moving through this wonderful world.
In the people they love. In the kindness they offer. In the families they create, if they choose to. In the lives they change. In the memories someone will carry because our children were here.
Perhaps that is one of the closest things we humans will ever come to IMMORTALITY.
Love that continues long after the hands that first held it are gone.
And here’s another beautiful truth about parenthood: sometimes, our children become the reason we finally face the things in ourselves that have needed healing for years.
We carry our own childhoods into parenthood. Some of us carry wounds we never asked for, pain we didn’t know how to name, and patterns we swore we would never repeat.
Then we look into the eyes of these tiny, trusting humans, and something inside us shifts.
We want better for them.
We want them to know that home can be safe. That love does not have to be earned. That their feelings matter. That their voices deserve to be heard. That mistakes do not make them unworthy. That they can be fully, imperfectly, gloriously themselves and still be loved beyond measure.
And so we begin the work.
We learn. We grow. We confront our own pain. We apologize when we get it wrong. We try again. We discover that humility is not weakness, that vulnerability is not failure, and that the most profound kind of strength sometimes looks like admitting we have more to learn.
We don’t become perfect parents.
We become human beings who understand that our choices matter to someone else’s heart.
And perhaps, perhaps, and with great hope, in loving our children well, we begin to heal some of the children we once were, too.
For me, there is something SCARED about that.
Something sacred about taking the pain we inherited and refusing to make it the only thing we pass down. About turning our wounds into wisdom, our struggles into compassion, and our love into a foundation upon which another human being can build a life.
We cannot protect our children from every heartbreak. We cannot guarantee them an easy world. We cannot make every decision for them or spare them every hard lesson.
But we can give them roots.
Roots deep enough to remind them where they belong, where they are loved, and where they can return when the world feels too heavy.
And we can give them wings.
Wings strong enough to carry them toward their own dreams, their own discoveries, their own loves, and their own lives.
We can try to teach them that the world is worth caring about, even when it disappoints us. That goodness still matters. That kindness is never wasted. That courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision to do what is right despite it.
We can raise people who bring more love into the world than they take from it.
And what a LEGACY that is.
Now, please hear me when I say this: I wholeheartedly respect the choice not to have children. Parenthood is not an obligation, and no one should ever be pressured, shamed, or made to feel less whole because they choose a different path. Having children is not the only way to live a meaningful life, to love deeply, or to leave the world better than we found it.
Every person deserves the freedom to make that choice for themselves.
But I also cannot stay quiet about what becoming a Mother has meant to me.
It has been one of the greatest HONORS of my life.
Not because it was always easy. Not because I always knew what I was doing. Not because our family has been untouched by pain, challenges, or the ordinary messiness of being human.
But because I have been entrusted with four extraordinary lives.
Four people who began as tiny miracles inside me and then our arms and grew into remarkable human beings with minds, hearts, dreams, convictions, and stories of their own.
Four people I have had the privilege of nurturing, encouraging, protecting, challenging, and loving as fiercely as my heart knows how.
Four people who will never fully understand how much of my soul lives in them — just as I will never fully understand how a love so enormous can fit inside one human heart.
I thank God for them.
I thank Him for every ordinary day I have been given with them. For every laugh, every conversation, every milestone, every moment I get to watch them become more fully themselves.
I thank Him for the PRIVILEGE of being their mother, even on the days when motherhood stretched me beyond what I thought I could bear.
Especially on those days.
Because the greatest gifts of my life were never things I could hold on to forever.
They were people I was given the privilege of loving.
And maybe that’s what I most want to say to a generation looking at this world and wondering whether there is still room for hope.
The world does not have to be perfect for love to be worth creating.
We do not need guarantees that our children will never suffer. We need the courage to build homes where they are not alone in their suffering. We need the willingness to do the work of healing, to choose compassion, to nurture goodness, and to raise human beings who understand that their lives have meaning and that their presence matters.
The world has always needed more love.
And every time we choose to create it, nurture it, protect it, and pass it forward, we give the world a reason to hope.
So today, I am simply overwhelmed with GRATITUDE.
For the man who has loved me through the chapters of our own story.
For the four beautiful souls whose stories became forever intertwined with ours.
For the family we built, the lessons we learned, the wounds we worked to heal, and the love that continues to grow beyond anything we could have imagined when we began.
Thank you, God.
Thank you for the prayers whispered before we knew their faces. Thank you for the tiny hands that once wrapped around our fingers. Thank you for the little voices that became grown voices, the little feet that learned to run, and the little people who somehow became the incredible humans I now have the privilege of knowing and loving.
Thank you for allowing me to be part of their stories.
Thank you for the beautiful, messy, miraculous experience of watching them fly.
Because our children are not possessions to keep. They are people to prepare for a world that needs them.
And if we do our jobs with enough love, perhaps they will leave our arms carrying something even greater than the love we gave them.
They will carry the knowledge that they were LOVED here.
That they BELONGED here.
That they MATTERED here.
And that no matter how frightening the world may sometimes seem, there will always be something worth fighting for, something worth protecting, something worth believing in.
LOVE.
Our children are our pieces of history, our living poetry, our prayers made flesh, and our hearts walking outside our bodies.
They are not proof that the world is perfect.
They are proof that even in an imperfect world, something beautiful can begin.
And I will never, not for one single moment, stop thanking God for the honor of being their mother.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ❤️
