Heather McLellan
For most of my life, I’ve wanted two things:
to become a mother
and to write a book.
I didn’t know then how deeply those two dreams would become connected.
Some stories take a long time to tell.
I began writing Coming Home to Motherhood nearly twenty years ago.
At the time, I thought I was writing a story about infertility, loss, and the extraordinary things that happened along my way to becoming a mother.
I know now that I was writing about something larger.
About wanting something so deeply that you’re willing to keep going even when there are no guarantees.
About being a daughter, a wife, and a mother—and the complicated ways those identities shape one another.
About faith after certainty.
About the difference between perseverance and control.
And about learning to hear your own voice after a lifetime of being very good at hearing everyone else’s.
It took me nearly twenty years to understand the story.
And, perhaps, to become the woman who could finally tell it.
For thirty years, I’ve helped other people tell their stories.
Now I’m telling my own.
Coming Home to Motherhood
A Memoir
I thought perseverance meant trying harder.
Motherhood taught me otherwise.
After five miscarriages, I searched everywhere for certainty—in doctors and blood tests, prayer and saints, healers and signs.
Each time I thought I’d found something I could trust—a promising number, a heartbeat, even faith itself—I discovered again that hope was not certainty.
Eventually, the question changed.
It was no longer simply:
How do I get the life I want?
It became:
How do I live when I don’t know whether I’ll get it?
I finally became the mother of the daughter I had imagined for years.
Six years later, a blood vessel burst in my brain.
Lying in an ICU, unable to open my eyes, I found myself fighting to return to the little girl I had fought so hard to bring into the world.
Coming Home to Motherhood is the story of the journey between those two moments.
Two Dreams
All my life, I knew two things for certain.
I wanted to become a mother.
And I wanted to write a book.
I couldn’t have known that one dream would eventually give birth to the other.
My road to motherhood included seven rounds of insemination, six fertility doctors, five miscarriages, three surgeries, and years of hoping, grieving, searching, and beginning again.
Along the way came experiences I still don’t entirely know how to explain—dreams, coincidences, prayers, healers, saints, signs, and moments that felt like grace.
I used to think I needed to decide exactly what they meant.
I don’t anymore.
I only know that they became part of the story of how I found my way to my daughter—and eventually, back to myself.