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The end snuck up on me. I had dedicated a decade of my life to parenting, which included my three birth children and a foster son of more than two years. I found myself in the hospital on a snowy February morning giving birth to my fourth child. Labor was quick and he came sooner than I expected. As soon as he was delivered and laying on my chest, tears began

I love babies. When I was dating my husband, we agreed we would have at least six kids. After having four in six years, we were in over our heads and had to reassess that plan. When our youngest was five we had moved across the country to Boston and were living in a very small house, but I began to want another baby. After some prayer and thinking, we decided to have another.

Heather grew up in a large family in the 1970s and 80s in Salt Lake County, Utah. During her childhood, she absorbed messages about motherhood and womanhood that complicated some of the pain and difficulty she faced through her childbearing years.

I vividly remember sitting at my kitchen table pumping after I had my second son. I looked around the room and counted my two children. I counted them again and the number felt wrong. I was confident someone was missing. This happened to me many times over the years. I got pregnant again and then had a miscarriage.

I had three daughters with my first marriage and when that ended, I sort of thought about possibly having more if I remarried. Fast forward eight years as a single mom, I felt that ship had sailed and had no desire for another baby.

When I was a teen I suffered pain every month my period came. I’d miss school, stay home, take medication and wonder why I had ovaries. It wasn’t fun. By 18 I had said more than once that if I’m not married and don’t have a child by 28 I’ll take it out when I’m 30.

After we were married I got pregnant right away. Thirteen months later our first daughter Melissa was born, healthy and fine. Sixteen months after that we had another daughter, Suzie. At seven months we noticed she wasn’t reaching her baby milestones and she was hospitalized for tests.

After my second marriage, when I found myself shepherding both my biological children and my bonus children through life and I realized getting a dog sounded better than having another baby, I knew I was done. There was a compl

In 2017, an MWP reader named Heather reached out to us suggesting we cover the topic of the end of childbearing. Her idea blossomed into our End of Childbearing Years series, in which we published nearly a hundred stories from Mormon women about this important life transition. Meredith Nelson interviews Heather about her own story in this episode, beginning with her childhood in Salt Lake County in the 1970s and 80s where she grew up third in a family of nine children. They d

A couple of years after our fifth baby was born, I began to hope each month that my period wouldn’t come, that our birth control method of choice would fail, and that I would unexpectedly be pregnant. I’m not sure how many months that went on, but it definitely turned into years.

My dance with infertility began as a teenager when we found out I had a blood disorder which could prevent me from carrying a baby to full term. I think it was Heavenly Father’s way of preparing me for what I had to go through to start a family, and for which I am grateful. Fast forward to 2012. My husband and I had been married for just about a year and decided we were ready to try expanding our family. I remember the excitement and elation and now, the naiveté.

I was married at age 30 after a three-year courtship with my husband. I come from a family of 9 children and throughout our relationship I was in a hurry to have children of my own. We tried unsuccessfully until, at the age of 36, I was diagnosed with premature ovarian failure. I had never heard of this condition and spent time researching the term online trying to figure out my new reality.

My husband and I started trying to conceive about two years after we got married, when I was 24 years old. After a year of no results, a fifteen month military deployment, and another nine months of trying, I became pregnant with my little boy.

I have never been baby-hungry or had a desire to have a big family. In fact, for much of my youth and young adulthood, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to have children at all. But twice I felt a calm certainty that it was time. I know it was the spirit speaking to me, and my husband felt the same spiritual prompting at the same time. Both times I became pregnant within a month.

As a convert to the church in 1971, it was difficult for me to even fathom having more than two children, since that was the model I’d grown up in. That was also during the time when the church was, in many ways, discouraging use of birth control. I was so new in the church, I was young, and I was not mature enough at the time to know that some of what I had experienced with ecclesiastical leaders amounted to them overstepping their authority.