By: Renée Santos
Los Angeles, CA (The Hollywood Times) 8/26/25 – There is a quiet loneliness that accompanies the path not taken—especially when that path is motherhood. As the years unfold and I look around, I see my peers’ cradling infants, posting first-day-of-school photos, navigating playdates and parent-teacher conferences with grace and fatigue. I admire them. I celebrate their fierce devotion, their resilience, their ability to split themselves in a thousand directions and still show up with love. I see the beauty in their world, the unspoken bonds they share as mothers. But I also feel like an alien standing just outside a glowing circle, holding a different kind of torch.
I did not come to this place through bitterness, regret, or biological misfortune. My decision to not become a mother is not a wound I nurse quietly in private—though society sometimes assumes it must be. My choice was intentional, born from a different pull, one that has whispered to me since I was young: Your purpose is elsewhere.
It’s not that I am without nurturing instincts. I have held space for others in countless forms—through mentorship, through friendship, through the deep emotional labor that artists, advocates, and healers often shoulder. I’ve felt the ache of unconditional love and the burden of responsibility. But what I have not felt is the longing to mother in the traditional sense. The call never came, and when I tried to manufacture it out of obligation or conformity, it felt like a costume that didn’t quite fit.
Explaining this to the world, however, is where the alienation settles in. There is no blueprint for the childfree woman that doesn’t involve caricature: the selfish careerist, the lonely cat lady, the bitter skeptic. Rarely are we depicted as whole, purpose-driven people who simply found our calling elsewhere. I have had to forge that image for myself.
And while I do not feel lesser for not having children, I do feel the loneliness of being unrelatable in a room full of mothers. The shorthand they share, the war stories, the midnight feedings, the aspiration to experience the role of motherhood themselves for the women who aren’t there yet but wish to be, the tantrum tales—they are sacred, and I do not speak that language. I am fluent in other things: in solitude, in pursuit, in building something that lives beyond legacy in the traditional sense. But sometimes, when the conversation turns to milestones and maternal worries, I feel like I’ve arrived at a dinner party without the one dish everyone brought.
Still, I know this: we all mother something. Some of us mother ideas, communities, art, or change. Some of us are called to be the village rather than the parent. And those roles matter. They, too, require sacrifice, love, and sleepless nights. I may not be a mother, but I am a fierce celebrant of motherhood. And from this side of the line, I honor the women who walk that path—while I walk my own with equal devotion.
My purpose is not lesser. It is simply different. And while I may feel like an alien in a world that reveres motherhood, I am not lost. I am orbiting something just as sacred.
