1. Haomin

A 38-year-old mother of a two-year-old son and an Australian Shepard named Beau

Welcome to Momtages, a long-form interview series where I ask women of all different ages and backgrounds on their decision to become a mother—or not.

Meet Haomin and Beau, a strikingly handsome Aussie who can polish off an entire box of doughnuts if left to his own devices.

Kicking off the series is my best friend, Haomin. We met during our first semester of college and became inseparable when we discovered that we were both night owls who enjoyed making things. (In our case, it was videos of us doing random skits, dances, raps and vlogs, which we filmed in our shared dorm room. “I’m pretty sure we would have become content creators if TikTok were around then,” she often says, adding, “I think we would have blown up before the pressure eventually got to us.”) *We also share a healthy dose of delulu.

Given our collaborative history, it made sense that she would be the first person I’d interview for this series. Haomin was also newly pregnant with her first child and I wanted to capture her thoughts during this time.

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I'm going to dive right in. What was your earliest memory of thinking that you wanted to become a mom someday?

Actually, I don’t have a specific memory of deciding I wanted to become a mom someday. Growing up, I just always knew it’s something I wanted to do. Like here are things that will happen in my life: I will go to college, I will get a job, at some point I will settle down, and then, I will have a family.

I never questioned it, but the more I talk to friends, I'm realizing it’s not this way for everyone. My friends in their 30s are thinking deeply about things like: What's my life going to be like with kids? What's my life going to be like without kids? It's a conversation or a debate they have with themselves or with their partners, and they arrive at a conclusion based on pros and cons that they've carefully thought through.

The only thing I questioned about motherhood was when it was going to happen, and I would say that it happened when the pieces of my life came to place where I felt like would be a good environment for a child to come into.

Being a friend of yours, I have some more context than a stranger would about this, but I remember even years ago, when you said that 35 would be the age you’d feel ready to have a kid. What was it about that age?

What's so weird is when I think about 35 now, I'm like, that's the age where they consider your pregnancy to be geriatric?! Really? By the way, it's not like your body realizes, oh, you're 35 now and your body is significantly different. It's just a baseline for when the number of eggs you have will start declining.

Anyway, I’ve always felt like I matured a bit slower than everyone else. I know people who had their 401 set up by the age of 25 and were investing and they knew where they were going to move after we graduated. And my focus at that age was always about how I can have fun this weekend and what do I want to eat right now? I didn't think too far into the future. It wasn't until I was 27 that I really started to grow up. I had just moved from the East Coast to the West Coast and was living on my own for the first time.

For once, I wasn't surrounded by people who had known me since I was a kid. My family was on the other side of the country, and I had to grow up so much. From the ages of 27 to 30, it felt like I went on this super-charged ride of maturing. By the time I was around 30, I felt like, okay, 35 still feels like a good time to have a kid because I have several years to do my own things before then. I still have a few years to be free. And the person I was in a relationship with at the time, who I'm married to now, we were still figuring each other out. Five years felt like a significant enough amount of time for us to figure out what this relationship could become, too.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. If you were single now, at your current age of 35, do you think that you'd still have that certainty of wanting to be a mom? Do you think you’d want to become a mom even if you had to do it on your own?