At What Cost?
On motherhood, ambition, and the system that was never built for us...
There’s a story women are handed down early...about what their bodies are for, about how motherhood arrives naturally and inevitably…like how seasons change…and how when it does, something clicks into place that was always meant to be there.
I waited seven years for that to click the way I thought it was supposed to.
Seven years of trying and failing, of watching everyone around me move forward into a life I thought I was supposed to have...baby showers and birth stories and that specific exhaustion in a new mother’s eyes…the one I would have traded anything to feel. My body wasn’t doing the thing bodies were designed to do. Unless you’ve dealt with infertility, you can’t truly know just how quietly and painfully devastating it is to feel broken at a biological level. To grieve something you never had (or will ever have)…to paste on a smile and keep showing up to a world that continues to ask when you’re going to start a family. As if you haven’t been trying…as if the trying isn’t killing your soul…or as if the grief you will continue to carry years later knows your body will never do that thing “it was designed to do.”
At the time, I poured myself into everything else...my little blog, my friendships, my marriage that didn’t quite fit, and a job I was genuinely good at. Marketing director, graphic designer, track coach…mentor to kids who weren’t mine but needed someone anyway. I leaned hard into every maternal instinct I had and aimed it sideways, at the world, at work, at anything that offered to hold the weight of it. I told myself I was fine, and mostly I believed it...until a failed adoption. A birthmother forced to keep the baby she wanted a different life for, at the 11th hour, by a birthfather who showed up out of nowhere just so he could have control of her. And me? I sat with a room full of baby things and an empty crib, weeping. I closed the door to that room and refused to open it for months. And that piece of me that wailed on the floor, she stayed in there behind that door.
Then there was Amelia Rose...just seven days old, placed in my arms in Asheville NC. An adoption that worked. She was my daughter.
I left my job to work part-time from home so that I could be with her because I had waited for so long to become a mother. I wanted to soak up every second, and also I knew that bonding after adoption doesn’t necessarily happen as naturally, as seamlessly as the other. It isn’t automatic or hormonal or guaranteed. We had to build it, the two of us, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Amelia was an amazing baby, and our time together was so special. And yet, it was also the hardest thing I had ever done. Having this tiny human depend on you for its every need, 24-7. There’s an unmatched beauty in that bond, but it’s also the most difficult, exhausting exchange of energies I’ve ever experienced.
I loved and cherished that time with Amelia. I want to say that clearly, before I say everything else. I loved her unconditionally from the very first moment I held her.
And…I also fell apart.
I fell apart in ways no one could see. I walked into motherhood expecting to fold it into who I already was, just add the title and carry on…and instead, it swallowed me whole. My identity of who I was dissolved away…my friends disappeared into their own lives, my husband turned toward the baby and away from me in ways that I never fully recovered from. I tried to hold onto my design career part-time from home, doing the work I used to love during nap windows, feeling inadequate…replaceable…like the world was just quietly moving on without me. At the same time…somewhere in the quiet spaces of those early days…I started watching cooking shows & experimenting in the kitchen during her naps. Something inside me began to stir…something that had nothing to do with motherhood and everything to do with who I was still becoming.
And yet, there was this baby…this perfect, beautiful wailing baby, who needed all of me. And, I gave it. And…it still felt like not enough. That motherly instinct everyone promises you have doesn’t always come in the shape you might expect. No one talks about how love and rage can live in the same body…that sometimes, the version of postpartum that arrives without the birth hormones is still postpartum. It’s real, and it’s worth naming.
There was one particular night I remember so vividly. It was 3am, and I was sleep-deprived past reason, rocking Millie in the dark while she cried those loud, blood-curdling newborn shrills…the ones that feel like a special kind of torture. Nothing I did soothed her, and my body, without my permission, squeezed her tighter to my chest. So tight…not to hurt her, but out of sheer desperation, out of the kind of exhaustion that rearranges your insides. I felt something in that moment I had not felt before…and was probably too ashamed to say out loud…rage or grief or sadness or disappointment…or the specific terror of realizing you are standing at the very edge of yourself. I put her down in her crib, and I let her cry it out for the next few hours. The next day, I called my mom because I knew…I couldn’t keep swallowing it alone.
How could I feel sad or angry or disappointed? I waited so long to become a mother and now I was. What did I have to complain about? Why did I feel all these feelings? Was something else broken inside of me?
What I know now, looking back with the clarity of the ADHD diagnosis I didn’t have then, is that I was dysregulated in ways I couldn’t control or even identify...that my rage wasn’t a character flaw, it was my nervous system doing the best it could with more than it could hold. And even then, somehow we made it.
We found our rhythm eventually, Millie and I, in a strict daily routine that became our anchor. Our time was chunked into walking and playing and learning and eating and then a sacred 45 minutes every afternoon where Millie was in her room, lamp on, books out, alone with herself. It saved us both, honestly. She learned autonomy, and I learned how to exhale. Millie is 10 years old now and still guards that alone time. I think about that often...how one of my greatest parenting wins came directly out of those early days of survival.
When Millie was almost three, we put her in a Montessori program, and I went back to work part-time. Something in me exhaled differently...the working mother identity fit so naturally for me. It felt like I was coming back to a version of myself I recognized. And a huge part of me felt guilty for that. For parents, there’s an invisible tug-of-war between work and their children. You never quite feel very good at either thing, and are always weighed down by the guilt of having to choose. For single parents, especially, that weight is almost impossible to hold.
After 15yrs in the same career, I wanted to switch it up and cook professionally, and I wanted to do it in New York City. My then-husband and I agreed that with Millie heading into Kindergarten soon, the timing was right. We could do anything for a year, or three to five years tops. I said that sentiment out loud, I said it convincingly, but in my heart of hearts…I knew I wasn’t coming back.
We sold everything…the house, cars, years of collected furniture, all of it. Packed a tiny U-Haul and pointed ourselves toward a new life...and then March 2020 happened…the world shut down, and our drive to New York was rerouted to my parents’ house in South Carolina. We lived in a state of limbo for seven weeks. Ironically, it was a little utopia, while the world around us went into chaos. Amelia became a fish and lived in the swimming pool. My mom & I cooked together and had daily happy hour by the pool while the men worked on renovating the garage, and I got to spend some very sweet moments with my Nanny Sis before dementia stole her away. I loved having that time with my family. And yet…every night, I went to sleep with the quiet dread that if I didn’t leave soon, I would never. That the woman I was trying to become would just…dissolve…back into the life I had already outgrown.
We decided to keep going and moved into a quarantined New York in May 2020. With the world shut down, I started blind-emailing restaurants and chefs, and slowly, impossibly, it worked. A private chef first, then a line cook in October 2021, then Sous Chef six months later, then Executive Chef by May 2023. As that new identity caught fire, everything around it started to burn, too.
My marriage had been fraying for years, threadbare in places I had stopped looking at…his quiet disappointment in my pursuit and the weight of feeling like my becoming was an inconvenience to the life he’d signed up for…all became too heavy to keep carrying. I asked for a separation, and a couple of months later, he told me I needed to move into my own apartment. The thing that suffered the most, the casualty I will carry the longest, was my relationship with my daughter.
My ex wouldn’t pay for childcare while I worked nights on the line, so during my 50-hour work week, I saw Millie two days. Two. I had gone from the woman who built her entire early motherhood around being present, available, and almost desperately bonded to her child...to a mother who saw her kid two days a week. I was pursuing the truest version of myself I had ever been and simultaneously looking into the eyes of my daughter…feeling like I was failing her in the most fundamental way imaginable. That kind of torn feels like drowning, not ambition.
And woof…the guilt and shame and pressure of being the one who pushed to uproot your child from everything and everyone she loved…on top of breaking up the family unit that held her so secure and safe in her tiny 5 years of life because of a risky, professional pursuit…well, that shit sticks to you like molasses that never fully wipes clean.
The restaurant industry, my industry, was the place where I eventually found the version of myself I had been looking for my whole life. The industry where only 6% of head chefs are women. Six. I fought my way from zero experience to Executive Chef in under two years in New York City. I did the impossible thing; I was that 6%. And my identity? I was finally mother AND chef. I really thought I could do and be both.
I made $90k, but as we all know too well, in New York City, $90k is more like $40k after taxes, which pays for exactly nothing. And for me, I was a single mother with no partner splitting rent, no family nearby to take a shift, no backup plan for the nights Amelia begged me to stay home, and back-to-back nights of 250 covers on the books and a full line to run. That money disappeared, and the Tetris to make all the pieces fit together didn’t quite work.
I told myself I had a choice. I told myself I was weighing it, turning it over, considering all the angles like a reasonable person would...but deep down, I already knew. There was never a choice. My kid needed me more…end of story.
At the peak of my chef career, in the happiest moment of my professional life, I chose to leave the restaurant. Amelia needed me, and there was no safety net, no supports in place to let me do both. That choice cost me something I still can’t fully name...the rush of the line, the most alive I ever felt, the proof that I could do the impossible, the version of myself I burned everything around me to find. I grieved it…hell, I’m still grieving it.
I’m sitting here on the other side of that time, and I now know this…The system was never built to hold a woman like me. I don’t mean that as a rallying cry, not yet. I mean it the way gravity is a fact, just true and everywhere…something you move through, whether you name it or not. It took me the last few years to accept that it wasn’t a personal failing that I couldn’t make it fit.
It was never going to fit, the fucking architecture was wrong from the start.
The world will tell you this was a scheduling problem, a you-didn’t-plan-well-enough problem...that women who want careers should think about this before they have children, or that women who want children should plan before they build careers, that surely there’s a way to do both if you’re just creative enough, resilient enough, flexible enough.
It’s all a lie dressed up as a personal choice, and I am done pretending otherwise.
The Freckled Fork was born out of that grief…out of necessity, out of the stubborn refusal to accept that those were my only two options…the truest version of myself or my daughter. I am only in the beginning stages of building this business. My one-year anniversary came and went last week, and I was too busy to notice. The Freckled Fork is still becoming, slower and much less certain than the restaurant ever was…but it’s mine, all the way down.
Millie is watching all of this, too. She is opinionated and stubborn and completely herself, still insisting on her alone time, still surprising me. She is watching me hold all of it at once...watching me do the hard thing, the impossible thing, the thing the numbers say I shouldn’t be able to pull off. She and I have a long way to go in mending and rebuilding what we’ve lost.
I am a mother and a chef, and I am done apologizing for needing to be both. This time, I know it's not just for me...it never was. She's my reason why. It finally clicked.
I spent years not knowing which version of myself was allowed to exist at once. Now I know…they all get to stay.
I hope one day, Amelia will look back at this journey, and feel empowered, feel inspired, and feel supported as she herself sets out to do the impossible things…and every version of herself and who she wants to be will click right into place.