I broke free from the traditional fairy tale of love and family. You can too.
Have you ever wondered, “Am I trapped in someone else’s fairy tale?” I was.
Once upon a time, I yearned for my life to follow a beautiful storyline – the one where the successful career woman finds her Prince Charming and effortlessly transitions into a blissful life of motherhood and family. Like many ambitious women, I was so focused on my career and didn’t stress much when my romantic relationships failed because I believed I had all the time in the world to create my happily ever after.
The feminist movement promised we could have it all, so I lived the dream without a care.
As a high-tech marketing executive, I didn't just climb the corporate ladder – I sprinted up it. I was conquering boardrooms, leading international teams, and shattering glass ceilings. All the while, my biological clock wasn't just ticking – it was on a rapid countdown.
But then one day, I woke to find myself suddenly forty years old, sitting in the cold office of a fertility doctor facing a harsh reality that I couldn’t negotiate my way past: biology doesn't give a crap about the time it takes to build a career or find the perfect partner.
While I was busy collecting frequent flyer miles and gunning for promotions, my fertility had been in a nosedive. Like a dot-com crash freefall! All those stories about celebrities having babies in their late forties? They'd sold me a fantasy that even the best medical science I could buy couldn’t necessarily deliver.
I realized I’d focused all my efforts on succeeding in business but was at risk of missing my ultimate definition of success: becoming a mother.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying. For years, I tried to force-fit myself into the traditional fairy tale mold. I married, divorced, and married again, always believing I needed Prince Charming before I could have children.
As a powerful woman in the corporate world, the men I encountered were either intimidated by my success or expected me to diminish myself to fit their notion of a doting wife. The fairy tale books forgot to mention a nasty thorn on the rose—being a strong and successful female made finding the right partner ever more challenging.
But here's the plot twist no one told me: we don't have to accept the fairy tale. Career first, marriage second, and baby third as a hard-coded path is a myth. It’s one path out of many that can lead to happiness, but it’s not the only one. Whether through single parenthood, donors, fostering, adoption, or other alternatives, we can write our own motherhood stories. The key is to recognize what you truly want and be brave enough to pursue it on your own terms.
This is why I wrote my book, Mission: Motherhood—coming out on May 6, 2025!
I share my epic quest to become a mother that’s filled with triumphs and tragedies even I find hard to believe I lived through. Looking back, I desperately wished I had one girlfriend—just one—who truly understood what I was going through and could walk beside me every step of the way. But sisterhood sometimes fails in the pursuit of motherhood. For some of my friends, my experiences were just too painful to witness. For others, my ‘unconventional’ choices challenged their ‘traditional’ values. And for many, the whole ordeal simply demanded more time and energy than they could spare.
I don't want that to be your experience too. Women often face fertility, conception, and pregnancy struggles alone. Everyone is quick to tell us what version of motherhood is acceptable and judge us when our path doesn't align with their ideals.
Now that I have the family of my dreams, my new mission is to be that girlfriend for other career women and would-be mothers to spare them from some of the pain and trauma I went through.
So if you feel trapped by fairy tale expectations and are growing desperate because your biological clock is ticking closer and closer to midnight, you're not alone.
Let this sink in—if the glass slipper doesn't fit, then screw the fairy tale. Your happily-ever-after might look different from what society expects, and that's not just okay – it's magnificent.
After all, the best fairy tales are the ones we write for ourselves.