We’re living in an interesting time in which women have more freedom than ever to decide what we want our lives to look like, we’re living much longer lives, and many of us are reaching the end of our reproductive years without having children.
For some women, being child-free is a deeply intentional decision, and they go on to invest the time and energy they might otherwise have devoted to motherhood into meaningful careers, education, creative pursuits, relationships, community building, and other forms of contribution and care. For other women, however, remaining childless wasn’t necessarily a clear choice made early in life. It was something that happened slowly, often while they were focused on other things, waiting for circumstances to change, or assuming that the opportunity to become a mother would still be there once the rest of their lives fell into place.
I understand the latter experience because, in many ways, I’m living it myself.
Like so many modern women who do want children but don’t have them yet, I’ve reached the age of 40 without getting all of my ducks in a row—in particular, without finding the right partner to do this with. Choosing a man with whom I could responsibly build a family is something I take very seriously, but it’s also something I have limited control over. I can make intentional choices about whom I date, what I tolerate, the values I prioritize, and whether I continue investing in a relationship that clearly isn’t moving toward the future I want, but what I cannot do is manufacture the right partner according to my preferred timeline.
What I can do, however, is stop treating that missing piece as a reason to postpone every other form of preparation available to me.
And this is where I think a largely unspoken myth has shaped the lives of many women nowadays. It’s the assumption that our fertility is a separate phenomenon from the rest of our health during our reproductive years, and that we don’t need to pay much attention to it, understand it, track it, or care for it distinctly as women unless we’re actively preparing to conceive. If we aren’t in the right relationship yet, or we are partnered but children are still several years away, fertility gets mentally filed under “later.”
Many of us assume we’ll turn our attention toward our fertility when the circumstances finally require us to.
I believe this is backwards. Our reproductive health isn’t a lever we can turn off when it’s inconvenient and expect to turn back on at full strength whenever our lives are finally ready for a baby. It exists on a continuum throughout our reproductive years, and its condition is influenced by the same nutritional, metabolic, hormonal, psychological, relational, and behavioral factors affecting the rest of us. Rather than waiting until conception is imminent, I believe women—especially those who already know they want children—would benefit from building these resources well before motherhood is immediately on the table.
Doing so doesn’t give us complete control over when or whether we become mothers. Nothing does. But it does return a meaningful portion of the process to our own hands — reinstating our agency and anchoring us into the present moment.
How Did We Learn to Treat Fertility as a Future Concern?
I don’t think most women consciously decide that their reproductive health is irrelevant until they meet a partner; it’s more often an implicit assumption created by the culture we grow up in and reinforced through years of behavior.
Modern women are encouraged to prioritize education, careers, financial independence, exploration, and personal development, all of which can be worthwhile things to pursue. At the same time, many of us receive remarkably little education about our female physiology beyond what’s required to prevent an unwanted pregnancy. As a result, we can become extremely educated in the conventional sense while remaining surprisingly illiterate about our own female bodies. We may know how to suppress ovulation with a pill without knowing how to recognize it when we’re actually experiencing it directly.
We may take medication to regulate or eliminate symptoms without understanding what those symptoms could be communicating about our current and future physiology.
We can spend years preventing pregnancy while learning almost nothing about the reproductive system we’re preventing from doing its job, and this can create something of a reductive and transactional relationship with our own bodies. And in this scenario, fertility becomes relevant primarily when it presents a threat to the life we’re currently building or, later, when we suddenly need it to help us build the life we want next.
Birth control has played a significant role in creating this psychological separation many modern women live with.
Whatever an individual woman ultimately decides about contraception, the larger cultural message many of us absorbed was that our reproductive function could essentially be placed on hold while we got on with the rest of our lives. We weren’t necessarily encouraged to think about what nutritional and lifestyle choices foster strong reproductive health, how our cycles relate to our overall metabolic wellbeing, or why understanding ovulation might be useful even when pregnancy is the last thing we want.
Instead, many of us learned to live as though the reproductive timeline happening quietly underneath our education, careers, relationships, breakups, travel, stress, and personal development would patiently wait for us to become interested in it.
This can be especially easy for women in more liberal cultural environments, where there is often less social pressure to follow a traditional timeline around marriage and children. I include myself in this group. The freedom to choose differently is valuable, but freedom without accurate information — and freedom simply for freedom’s sake with no solid end goal — can also leave us assuming we have more time than we do. When nobody is encouraging us to think seriously about family formation in our twenties or early thirties, it becomes remarkably easy to assume that we’ll meet the right person eventually and figure everything out together when we get there.
The problem is that the partner becomes the starting gun for a process that could have begun years earlier, beginning with how we relate to and care for our own bodies.
What We Lose When We Wait
The most obvious thing women lose through this assumption is time, but I think what we lose in agency is just as important.
When motherhood matters to us but we believe there is nothing meaningful to do until a relationship appears, we can end up feeling as though our reproductive future belongs partly to a person we haven’t even met yet. We wait for him to arrive before learning about our cycles, addressing hormonal symptoms, thinking seriously about conception, examining whether our bodies are well nourished, or organizing our lives around the possibility of having a family.
The years continue moving while this entire category of preparation remains contingent upon an external event.
I see the consequences of this in my work with women who have spent years treating their reproductive health as an afterthought and then discover, often under considerable time pressure, how much they wish they had understood sooner. I hear women say they wish they’d had more time to prepare their bodies for pregnancy, more time to plan, and more time to resolve health issues before resorting to IVF, oftentimes out of desperation. I work with women who’ve normalized symptoms and health struggles for years without understanding how those experiences might relate to their hormones or cycles.
And I see how frightening it can be to begin asking these questions for the first time when conception is no longer an abstract future possibility but something they want to happen very soon.
There’s a relational consequence here as well. When a woman hasn’t fully acknowledged that motherhood is important to her, she may spend years dating men without making family compatibility a central criterion. Once she begins organizing her own life around the future she actually wants, her standards for partnership can become much clearer. The question is no longer simply whether she enjoys being with someone or feels attracted to him, but whether this is a man whose character, values, health choices, finances, emotional maturity, and vision for family life are compatible with what she is actively building.
In that sense, preparing for motherhood before meeting a partner isn’t only about improving physiological readiness; it can change the way we choose the person with whom we might eventually conceive. Let that sink in for a minute.
Fertility Is Not Separate From Female Health
The larger truth underneath all of this is that our reproductive system doesn’t exist in a separate compartment from the rest of the body.
From menarche until menopause, female physiology is reproductive physiology, even during the years when we have absolutely no intention of becoming pregnant. In fact, this feels like such an important message for the modern woman that I’ve begun including statements like this in most of my articles and podcasts — a north star I return to, and one that can unfortunately piss off and trigger a lot of women!
What this doesn’t mean is that every health decision should revolve around making a baby.
It means our cycles and reproductive function belong within our understanding of overall wellbeing rather than being treated as an optional system that only becomes relevant when we need something from it. I often think of the prevailing model of this point as being a little like a stove. We imagine fertility sitting there unused until we’re ready to cook something; then we turn the knob, expect everything to light immediately, use it for the purpose we need, and stop thinking about it again.
But a living biological system doesn’t operate according to our social timeline or ideological preferences!
A woman can be the same chronological age as another woman and have a very different reproductive picture depending on her health history, nourishment, stress, cycle function, hormonal patterns, and countless other factors unique to her individual path. This is why learning about your fertility before you need to conceive can be so valuable. Knowing whether and when you ovulate, understanding the rhythm of your cycle, noticing changes rather than automatically suppressing them, addressing symptoms you’ve subconsciously normalized, and becoming curious about what your body’s communicating gives you information about yourself now.
If you later decide to become pregnant, you enter that process with years of bodily literacy behind you rather than suddenly trying to learn a language you were never taught while simultaneously facing the emotional pressure of wanting conception to happen quickly. This is a hard place to be and I caution against it toward younger women with the utmost compassion for the women who, like myself, are already there.
And if you never become a mother, you still spent those years becoming more attentive to your own physiology, which can offer the fortunate side effect of feeling like a Goddess in your female body because you know how to feel good & to care for yourself when you don’t.
What I Recommend We Do Instead of Waiting
I want women to begin learning about their fertility regardless of relationship status, and even before they are completely certain about whether they want children at all.
This is my prayer for women today.
Rather than treating reproductive health as a niche concern belonging exclusively to women who are trying to conceive, I encourage women to approach their overall wellbeing through the lens of female physiology and to become interested in what their monthly patterns are telling them.
That can include learning to track your cycle and identify ovulation, examining hormonal symptoms you may have normalized or suppressed, becoming more intentional about nourishment, and looking at physical struggles within the broader context of your reproductive and metabolic health. For women using hormonal birth control, this may also mean having an informed conversation with an appropriate healthcare professional (who actually knows wtf they’re talking about when it comes to this topic) about whether remaining on it continues to make sense for them, particularly if they want to begin observing their natural cycle.
The point isn’t to follow a rigid fertility protocol or become obsessive about every bodily signal, it’s to stop outsourcing your understanding of yourself to something outside of yourselves.
This is also the kind of work I help women do in my practice. Depending on the individual, I use tools including HTMA, hormone testing, broader nutritional guidance, and fertility tracking to help us develop a clearer picture of what’s happening physiologically. We can look at ovulation, progesterone patterns, mineral status, nourishment, and other markers while also paying attention to the experience of actually living inside the body those numbers describe.
That latter piece is especially important to me because information by itself doesn’t necessarily create change in our health nor does it always foster more bodily attunement in the women seeking the information.
My work also includes helping women understand and trust their bodies’ signals, make peace with experiences they may have spent years fighting against, work with limiting beliefs about what it means to be female, process emotions somatically, and address patterns that make consistent self-care more difficult. I’m a women’s nutrition consultant and trauma-informed somatic health coach because I don’t see physiology and psycho-emotional health as two separate and unrelated projects.
The woman preparing her body for possible conception and overall better health is the same woman navigating intimate relationships, carrying old experiences, making important decisions, managing daily stressors, and trying to determine who she is in the modern world and what she wants her future to become.
Modern women often carry a lot, have a lot of decisions they have to make on their own, and more often than not, are over-informed and under-integrated.
When these different pieces of our personal experience begin moving in the same direction, preparing for a family can become something much more tangible than hoping the right circumstances eventually appear before us. We’re creating the home our future baby would need to grow within, while simultaneously becoming clearer about what kind of life and partnership could support that home. We’re essentially, lining up our ducks ourselves with the agency we only ever have access to in the present moment.
What This Looked Like for One of My Clients
One of my recent clients, whom I’ll call M, came to me at 38 knowing that she wanted to become a mother in the near future while also recognizing that several unresolved parts of her life were making it difficult to move confidently toward that goal.
Childhood trauma had contributed to a sense of internal disorganization that influenced many of her earlier choices, including her relationships with men, and she was still trying to understand and change those patterns in her late thirties. Having a similar story arc myself, M chose to work with me after hearing me share about my story and seeing herself in my advocacy. M had previously spent years in an abusive relationship with a man struggling with addiction. During that relationship she became pregnant and had an abortion because she knew the environment was not safe or stable enough to bring a child into.
She understood why she’d made that decision and knew she couldn’t go back and choose differently now, but by the time we began working together she was also carrying significant grief around this decision and lost opportunity.
Part of that grief came from the fear that the pregnancy she ended might’ve been her only opportunity to become a mother, leaving her caught between accepting a decision that had been necessary at the time and mourning what might’ve been. We didn’t approach those concerns as though she had to resolve her emotional history first and then earn the right to work on her physical health afterward; we worked with the different pieces simultaneously. We ran her mineral testing, worked on improving her nutrient status, began tracking her monthly cycle, and paid attention to when and how strongly she appeared to be ovulating.
Alongside that physiological work, our somatic sessions gave her room to process grief and work with the internal disorganization that continued to affect her relationships and her deeper sense of self.
Between sessions, our work continued through messaging, accountability, communication work around her ex when he resurfaced, and the everyday practices required to care for herself more consistently. We only worked together for roughly four or five months, and by our last session M still couldn’t know whether she would ultimately have another child. She hadn’t yet met the partner with whom she wanted to go through that process, but what had changed was her relationship to the uncertainty.
Rather than interpreting the absence of a partner as evidence that there was nothing for her to do, she was taking the actions available to her and creating a relationship with her body that would serve her regardless of what happened next.
If she did become pregnant, she felt far more prepared to keep the baby and care for herself through the physical and emotional demands that followed. She couldn’t control the outcome, but she was no longer confusing uncertainty with powerlessness.
“But What If I Prepare for Motherhood and It Never Happens?”
I think this is one of the most reasonable objections a woman could have to everything I’m suggesting.
If you don’t have a partner yet—or you do, but you aren’t in a place where having children makes sense—would taking your fertility seriously now simply make the longing more painful? What if you invest all of this attention into preparing yourself and then never meet the person you hoped to meet?
My answer is that the preparation itself still has value because the reproductive system we’re tending to belongs to the same body carrying us through the rest of our lives.
Improving nourishment, understanding our cycles, addressing imbalances, becoming more aware of stress, building a healthier relationship with our female physiology, and developing greater bodily literacy aren’t useful only if they eventually result in a baby. They change the way we care for ourselves now, and that matters independently of the final outcome. We’re learning how to be a woman who takes care of a woman based on a woman’s physiology and a woman’s needs — not what the culture lures us into or what a man expects of us.
I cannot think of a more empowering path to advocate for than this.
At the same time, if you already know that you want a child, acknowledging that desire gives you the opportunity to work with the forms of agency you do have instead of focusing exclusively on the enormous variable you don’t control. You cannot guarantee when you’ll meet your partner, but you can prepare yourself so that if you do meet him later in your reproductive years, you aren’t beginning every aspect of conception preparation on the day the relationship finally becomes ready for it.
You can know your cycle long before you know your future baby’s daddy.
You can have a clearer picture of your nutritional and hormonal health while you’re still single. You can have spent time addressing patterns that interfere with your ability to care for yourself, and you can also know much more clearly what you require from the man who wants to build a family with you before you’ve even gone on your first date with him. I understand that this messaging won’t apply to every woman because many of us have a lot of growth and healing to do before we’re even able to prioritize fertility over survival in the first place, regardless of an unknown future. This was me in my twenties, so I get it.
But I’m writing this article with my younger self in mind because I never received any messages like this that might’ve inspired a new perspective in me, despite the survival states I was oftten functioning within.
In my younger years, I only received words of caution from concerned older adults who saw how much I struggled (with my body, relationship patterns, future uncertainty) and knew that I wasn’t making decisions with my older self in mind. Of course, none of this guarantees natural conception, nor can preparation eliminate every circumstance in which assisted reproductive technology (IVF) may become appropriate, but what it does do is it gives women in their reproductive years a more accurate sense of their real biological limitations and the ways that our priorities as women change over time, and oftentimes quite quickly.
What it can do is help you arrive at that stage of life having participated actively in your own reproductive wellbeing rather than discovering under pressure how little you were ever taught about it. And as a sex, we need more understanding about what we often start wanting in our thirties and forties instead of being left assuming that our desires and priorities remain the same.
Painful life lesson: for most women, they don’t.
Taking Our Female Physiology Seriously Earlier
This lack of bodily literacy women grow up with in the educated modern world is, in my opinion, a tragedy that serves none of us.
We can become sophisticated, accomplished adults while remaining disconnected from some of the most basic functions of our own bodies, and then wonder why we feel frightened and dependent when those systems suddenly become important to us “all of a sudden” or are giving us horrible symptoms along the way.
I don’t think the answer is to frighten young women about a ticking biological clock or tell them that education, careers, independence, or exploration were mistakes, nor do I think every woman should organize her life around becoming a mother early in life. I know women who did this too early out of social pressure, and ended up divorced and struggling with motherhood. I’m not interested in black and white stances on delicate and complex topics that carry as much weight as family planning. I believe the answer is to give women a more complete picture so that the choices we make are actually informed ones.
Freedom is far more useful when we understand the body through which we’re exercising it.
If we begin taking our reproductive health seriously earlier in life—before we meet a partner, before we’re actively trying to conceive, and perhaps even before we know with certainty that we even want to—we can become better equipped to make decisions about our health, relationships, and future from a place of knowledge rather than avoidance or ignorance. For women who eventually become mothers, that may mean entering conception, pregnancy, and postpartum with greater physical preparation and a stronger relationship with themselves and their bodies. For those whose lives ultimately take another direction, the years spent learning to nourish, understand, and inhabit their female bodies were hardly wasted; they’ve essentially inoculated themselves from pathologizing their own bodily signals and the aging process itself.
The myth I’m speaking to in this article is that fertility belongs to some future version of us: the married woman, the woman trying to conceive, the woman whose circumstances have finally become perfect enough to justify paying attention.
But this isn’t a separate woman; she’s the woman you’re becoming through the choices you’re making now.
If You’re Ready to Begin
If you’re desiring to dial in your fertility and begin catering to it now for the sake of your future family, your conception goals, or simply because you want to become more attuned to your own female body, I’m here to help you with this!
This is what my work is all about.
I offer a coaching container specifically geared toward helping women understand and support their physiology while also working with the emotional, behavioral, and relational patterns that influence how they care for themselves along the way — regardless of where in their reproductive years they are or how traditional or nontraditional their paths have been. For women who aren’t ready for that level of financial or time commitment, I also offer individual HTMA consultations, which can be a great place to begin getting a clearer picture of what your body may need to be well.
You can check out my HTMA consultations here, or you can set up a free video chat with me here to discuss the possibility of working together in one of my coaching containers. I’d love to meet you and get a sense of how I might be able to help you at this time!
You don’t have to wait for someone else to arrive in your life before taking your future seriously, before taking your fertility into your own hands. There’s already a part of that future here for you to care for now, within your own unique female body.
