How I Became the Mother I Never Had

And found out what love truly is...

“I love to capture the two of you together,” our family photographer said. Every year for the past five, she’d taken a picture of my son and me, marking the years I was officially a single mom. “You guys have such a special relationship.”

Coming from a woman who documented the lives of hundreds of families in Los Angeles, I wanted, needed to believe her. Being a good enough mother, a loving mother, was the one goal I was determined to reach.

“Your father doesn’t love you. He never wanted children,” my mother had said to me forty-nine years earlier.

This is the very first thing I remember my mother telling me. I was three years old, and she was scolding me. My toddler snap back was too ‘fresh.’ Her eyes blazed with anger. She gripped my arm tight enough to bruise, pulled me within an inch of her, looked me in the eye, and then told me that I was lucky to have her because she wanted me when my father never had, that our relationship was very special because of it.

While I was growing up, I was told in so many ways big and small that I wasn’t wanted. My mother’s words were the exact opposite of her actions.

When, as a child, I asked what so many children did about my birth story, or what those first few years I didn’t remember were like, my mother’s answers weren’t delivered with a smile.

The story I heard more times than I can count went like this: My mother wanted a child, a daughter, more than anything. She’d gotten pregnant easily, three times before me, but couldn’t carry any of the babies to term. After she lost that third pregnancy in a three-day labor that ended in a stillbirth to a perfectly formed, but dead, little boy, she and my father went on a recovery vacation to Puerto Rico escaping a cold New York City February.

My mother forgot her diaphragm. My parents ignored the obstetrician’s orders to refrain from sex, and I was conceived.

From the moment she knew I was inside of her womb, I was a tough baby to carry. My mother had surgery to keep her cervix closed and was on bed rest for long agonizingly boring months filled with All My Children and Swanson’s fried chicken dinners.

My birth was an assault on her body, the story a litany of painful twilight labor. Then breastfeeding was a hassle she quit because she’d ingeniously decided to make her own baby formula from scratch, a mixture of Karo corn syrup and condensed milk. I heard that she was happy to get back to work weeks after I was born because she couldn’t imagine taking care of a child.

When I asked if I slept through the night, she smiled when she told me the story of how she’d fill a bottle with grits or cream of wheat, cut a bigger hole in the nipple, and continue to feed me even when I was full. If I overate, I slept longer.

When I was a toddler, she gave me steeped marijuana leaves she called ‘tea bush’ to get me to sleep through the night. The refrain never changed, I should be grateful because she was the only person who could love me.

My last memory of her admitting to me I couldn’t be loved was when I was forty-one, and my then-husband wanted to film our parents’ musings on our lives.

In my mother’s interview, he asked what regrets she had. The only one she could muster was that corporal punishment was probably a bad idea. She was a great mother, overall, she mused. A veritable Tiger Mom. I should be grateful, she said, for insisting I go to law school because no one would love me if I hadn’t completed my graduate education.

After a glimpse into my childhood, it shocks no one that I never wanted children. My mother’s tale of woe was not one I wanted to repeat. My maternal grandmother had grown up as a sharecropper before her family migrated north and she traded picking cotton for cleaning houses and dishwashing in a Manhattan restaurant.

She had my mother at twenty-four after her husband had taken her first four children and left her alone and pregnant. Neither my grandmother nor mother sugarcoated that era of their lives where they moved from one cold water flat to another first in the Bronx, then in Brooklyn. My grandmother’s second marriage provided a step-father but also drama and chaos.

These stories were in sharp contrast to television’s stay-at-home, apron-wearing, cookie-baking, soft-speaking moms. I knew I didn’t want to be a mother like the women in my family. I couldn’t figure out how or even if I wanted to achieve this nineteen fifties ideal, either. So I vowed not to repeat the traumas of the past.

Hormones are a funny thing, though.

When I was thirty-six I wavered on my no-child stance. An adorable toddler in a grocery store shopping cart did me in. My ex had always wanted kids to extend his legacy, but that and a cute kid weren’t enough reasons to turn my life upside down. What I did was ask a group of mid-sixties black women at a brunch in Harlem what their greatest regret was. Universally, the answer was not having had children.

A study published while I was at Cornell showed that people regret what they didn’t do more than what they did.

I didn’t want to look back on a child-free life with remorse. Despite not being in a good marriage, I figured it was a stable enough union after thirteen years to create a child. Getting pregnant was easy. Six months after making my decision, I was starting at two blue lines.

Living in Los Angeles allowed me to indulge in taking childbirth classes with a woman who specialized in home birth coaching. She was a Godsend in one thousand ways.

During one class, we were talking about the support we’d need from our partners (all male in this class) while laboring. She got on her hands and knees and demonstrated giving lower back massages and breathing exercises. My ex looked at me, and said, ‘You know I’m not doing that, right?’

I knew then like my mother and grandmother before me, I was going to be mostly on my own in my parenting journey. Oddly, I wasn’t scared. Homebirth labor in my bedroom was long, but not hard nor traumatizing. It was the reward after pregnancy which first made me tired, then nauseous, then gave me knowledge of every public bathroom in the city of angels.

The first thing I said to my midwife after giving birth was a relieved, ‘I’m not pregnant.’ Then I asked her to confirm what I’d dreamt, what I’d felt deep in my soul, that my baby was a boy.

I’ve read so many accounts of motherhood where women claim to have fallen in love at first sight. It didn’t happen to me. All I could worry about when I looked at this tiny pale five-pound person, was how to keep him alive. I’d never seen anyone so small and vulnerable.

Thirty-eight years after I was conceived, I had a lot of education, a bit of life experience, and no idea what I was going to do with this little boy. I’d had no experience of healthy, loving parents, but instinctively understood that’s what was going to be required of me.

Shocking myself I answered the call that was coming from inside the house. First, I hired a nanny so I could come to my son as my best, most rested self. Then, I did something I’d never done before in my life. I surrendered.

I exclusively nursed for three years. I never let my son’s cries go unanswered. I bought an endless number of slings and carriers and became a baby wearer. Slowly, unerringly, I found the greatest love of my life.

It was the first time my heart was completely open to any one person. I overcame my aversion to being touched. My mother’s touch was often punishing or in apology for cruelty. My son clung to me as soon as his muscles would allow.

His favorite question when he was seven and I was a FitBit wearer was whether the step counter could be reconfigured for hugs because he wanted ten thousand a day. Seven years later, he still wants as many cuddles as I can give.

One of my fondest memories was attending our first meeting of an after-school activity called Mom and Boys Sports. Mothers and their sons competed hard to win unique games created only an elementary school gym teacher could invent. During that first orientation, my third grader looked at the other boys from eight to eleven who were curled up with their mothers. He happily scooted on my lap, and then looked at me in amazement.

“Mommy, do you think other boys love their mothers as much as I do?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “My love for you will always be special.”

Three years later on middle school admission tours, I remember him being intimidated by clumps of kids from seventh through twelfth grade at one large campus. He got close to me and held my hand tightly for the remainder of the tour. He was the only twelve-year-old walking hand in hand with his mother, and neither he nor I cared.

I’ve never had someone who looked at me as if I were the most important person in the world to them, who loved me just for having given birth to me. I can’t help but give my son, now fourteen, that ‘mommy’ look every so often. Even as he rolls his eyes, I can see him hide his smile.

My greatest achievement isn’t writing books or traveling the world. It was learning to give the love I never received. I’m the mother my son needs. It’s the best gift I’ve given him and myself.

Aime Austin is the author of the Casey Cort and Nicole Long Series of legal thrillers. She is also the host of the podcast, A Time to Thrill. When she's not writing crime fiction or interviewing brilliant creators for her podcast, she's in a yoga pose, knitting, or reading. Aime splits her time between Los Angeles and Budapest. Before turning to writing, Aime practiced family and criminal law in Cleveland, Ohio. His Last Mistress is out April 24, 2025.

(My son was the inspiration for the cartoons used to illustrate this essay. They’re published here and in the Jolie Moore title Maybe Now).