When Motherhood Destroys Everything You Are

When she was carrying our first child, my wife looked in the mirror one day and told me the person staring back was a stranger. Not because of physical changes—though those were real—but because something fundamental had shifted. The woman she’d been was gone. The woman she was becoming hadn’t fully formed yet. And in that gap between identities, she didn’t know who she was exactly.

Every mother knows this moment.

For most women, it happens gradually. Pregnancy reshapes not just your body but your priorities, relationships, and sense of self. Then the baby arrives and completes the transformation. You’re no longer just yourself—you’re someone’s mother, and that role consumes everything else you used to be.

In my novel Immortal, I wanted to explore that experience at an impossible scale.

The Woman Who Doesn’t Exist

Sarai izt Kviokhi wakes on a desolate moon with no memory of who she is. Amnesia has erased everything—her training, her relationships, her entire identity. She’s rebuilding herself from fragments when she discovers she’s pregnant.

This alone would be devastating. But the pregnancy is genetically impossible.

Sarai belongs to the Anathema—the slave and serf caste in a rigid galactic empire. The ruling elite, called Scions, are genetically incompatible with her bloodline. They cannot reproduce together. It’s biological fact, the foundation of a three-thousand-year social order that divides humanity into masters and servants based on genetics.

Except Sarai is carrying the child of The Name—the immortal god-tyrant who rules the galaxy. The child growing inside her shouldn’t exist. Her pregnancy is living proof that the entire system is a lie.

An Impossible Impossibility

Amnesia destroyed Sarai’s first identity. She can’t remember being the lethal operative Jafah-Six, can’t explain her skills, doesn’t recognize her former lover when he finds her. That person is gone.

Under normal circumstances, she might rebuild. Piece together a new self from the wreckage. But pregnancy makes that impossible. Every day, the child growing inside her pushes her further from whoever she was and might have become. She’s not recovering her old identity—she’s being forced into an entirely new one, whether she wants it or not.

This is the experience every mother navigates, just compressed and literalized. You don’t get to be who you were. Pregnancy ensures that. And you can’t become who you might have been otherwise, either. Motherhood demands a different person entirely. It’s death and rebirth.

For Sarai, the stakes are even higher. Her body isn’t just changing—it’s become evidence.

The Dominion’s caste system divides humanity into the pale-skinned Scions—the divine ruling elite—and the pigmented Anathema, marked as cursed and condemned to slavery. The genetic incompatibility between them isn’t just biology; it’s presented as cosmic proof of Scion divinity and Anathema damnation. Scions possess an extra chromosomal pair that makes reproduction with Anathema impossible. Not difficult. Not unlikely. Impossible. This is theological bedrock.

Except Sarai’s body is proving otherwise.

As an Immortal operative, she hosts a regenerative nanoculture—microscopic technology flowing through her veins that heals injuries and maintains her enhancements. The nanoculture would terminate ANY pregnancy as a foreign body—standard protocol, regardless of the father. Even a normal Anathema conception wouldn’t survive.

That’s the first impossibility.

The second: Scion and Anathema genetics are fundamentally incompatible. The extra Scion chromosomal pair means conception shouldn’t produce a viable embryo at all, even without the nanoculture’s interference.

But the nanites got creative. They didn’t just allow a pregnancy they should have terminated—they actively engineered an impossible conception, harmonizing incompatible genetic material in real-time, editing DNA sequences to create a viable zygote from chromosomes that shouldn’t be able to pair. The technology did something it was never designed to do, building a bridge across a genetic gulf that was supposed to be unbridgeable.

And if the biological barrier can be overcome technologically—even accidentally, even through unintended consequences—it was almost certainly engineered in the first place. Which means three thousand years of slavery, justified by claims of divine right and genetic destiny, rests on deliberate manipulation.

Her body is the proof. She can’t escape it.

This is where science fiction earns its keep as a genre. By pushing the metaphor to an impossible extreme, it reveals the truth underneath.

Every woman navigates systems that try to define what she can be. Career versus motherhood. The “good mother” myth. Bodily autonomy battles. Biological clocks. Social expectations. Economic realities. The constraints are different for everyone, but they’re always there—structures telling you what you’re allowed to become.

For Sarai, those constraints are literal genetic engineering. The system that enslaved her people did so by making reproduction between castes biologically impossible. Her pregnancy breaks that constraint, but in doing so, it makes her impossible to ignore. She wanted to vanish, to be nobody, to raise her daughter in peace.

The galaxy has other plans.

The Cruelest Irony

All Sarai wants is to be a mother.

That’s it. Disappear. Find some quiet corner of the galaxy. Raise her daughter away from empires and prophecies and politics. Just be a woman with a child, nothing more.

But motherhood itself makes that impossible.

Her pregnancy isn’t just genetic proof of a lie—it’s prophetic confirmation. Ancient texts predicted a warrior-prophetess, the 100th direct matrilineal descendant of the last true queen, who would bear the tyrant’s child and use that daughter to overthrow him. Sarai’s bloodline traces back through an unbroken line of mothers and eldest daughters across three thousand years of slavery—a genealogical impossibility that somehow survived.

I just want Kala and Mikhael. I want us to have a normal life. I know we can’t have one, but that’s all I want. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.

Sarai izt Kviokhi, Godsbane

Her daughter isn’t just a symbol. She’s the True Heir, destined to restore the ancient matrilineal dynasty that The Name destroyed when he seized power. Legitimate succession incarnate.

So abolitionists and revolutionaries hunt Sarai because they need her daughter for their cause. The Name hunts her because her existence threatens his three-thousand-year lie. Religious zealots hunt her because she’s either messiah or blasphemy, depending on who’s asking.

She can’t be just a mother because her motherhood is prophecy. Her daughter isn’t just her child—she’s the future queen of a stolen throne.

Her body won’t let her be nobody, because her womb is political property.

Every woman who’s tried to opt out of the systems that constrain her knows this experience. You can’t just remove yourself. The structures follow you. Your choices have context whether you want them to or not. Even the decision to “just be a mom” is a political statement when someone’s keeping score.

Why the Metaphor Matters

Immortal uses space opera to examine what happens when your body proves the system is lying. When pregnancy destroys not just your personal identity but exposes the lies that structure your entire society. When motherhood should be personal but becomes inescapably political.

Sarai’s amnesia means she’s rebuilding identity from nothing. Her pregnancy means she can’t rebuild who she was—only become who the child demands she be. Her impossible conception means even that private transformation is public property.

It’s every mother’s experience of identity loss, amplified to galactic scale.

The book isn’t about saving the galaxy. It’s about a woman trying to save herself while her body won’t let her hide. About discovering that motherhood—the most intimate transformation possible—can simultaneously destroy everything you are and make you so much more than you ever might have been.

Science fiction lets us examine these experiences at scale, in sharp relief, stripped of the social niceties that usually soften them. Sarai’s story is every mother’s story, unafraid to be honest about what it costs.

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Immortal is currently seeking representation. You can read the first chapter and learn more about the Dark Dominion sequence here.