My name is Amara Richardson, and I’m from San Marcos, Texas. 

I was 24, and my first close friend had started her family and had her first kid. And it was all new to me as no one in my circle had had any babies yet. I really wanted to do something for this new life in the world so I wrote my friend’s baby a lullaby. And I wrote it in a minor key because I still had a little bit of sadness about not having my own children and coming to grips with knowing that I was probably never going to have a child myself. 

Finishing the song, I felt like it was a good exercise, and being able to get closure in my life, I was able to kind of say goodbye to that whole dream of having a family and a child myself.

So fast-forward seven years later and I had just got out of this really awful relationship. I was trying to get myself back into the dating scene and I was using the dating apps, and I went through and saw this girl’s picture and I just liked it. And then she liked it back and I was like, Okay, well, she’s not going to message me. And then she ended up messaging me and we hit it off. 

So we talked for the next six months, like all the time, through text. We fell in love and we moved in together. We got jobs here in Austin, moved to Austin for that and started building our lives very seriously. 

And we started to have more and more serious talks, and we actually met up with a couple of friends at a bar here in Austin. And the topic came up of kids. Heather was totally a hundred percent wanting to have the whole experience of being pregnant and having children, if not just one, multiple children. And everything that I had thought I’d lost, she was ready to pick up and give me.

Everything that I had thought I'd lost, she was ready to pick up and give me.

And we had to think about all of the things that went into the process of doing something like IVF, finding a doctor, the expenses of the IVF whole process, all the hormones that we would have to put into her body. Poor thing. It makes you crazy. And then having to go through the actual physical process, which is super invasive, and then you have to wait. And the waiting is awful.

So we had gone through several IVF rounds and we were on our third round and my wife wanted to go eat at this restaurant, East Side Kings. And she had preemptively ordered several pregnancy tests that you can take at home. The doctors told us and let us know that the blood work would give us a positive for pregnancy and there’s no need to test with home pregnancy tests. And I told her that, but every round she would go and she would test.

And so when we were going on our date, this little turkey snuck one on our date and put it in her purse. And when we ordered, she went to the bathroom and tested. I remember I was taking some photos of us on our date and stuff like that. She came out of the bathroom and had the stick. And I remember taking a picture of her after she looked at the stick. 

Her face was just glowing and she was like, “There’s a line. We have a line.” And I was like, Shut up. It is one of those moments that you never ever forget and 48 hours later, we got the blood work that confirmed it. 

I believe it was about 10 to 12 weeks later, we have been going for sonograms pretty regularly to check on the development of the embryo. And so I was just like, this is run-of-the-mill. We’re just doing a regular sonogram. The doctor came in, the lights are all off, and the doctor flipped on the audio and you just hear the “do-do, do-do, do-do, do-do” of that little bitty bean of a heartbeat beat. And I just lost it. It was a dream realized and it was tangible. It was real. It was on the screen literally talking to me, just, I’m here. I’m alive. This is going to happen.

I have this amazing little nugget now and my dream has come true. I have a family, something I never thought I’d be able to build myself. I just thought it was something I was born into. It’s so amazing now that she’s been born, I am blown away every single day. I have the best kid in the world and everyone says that, but they’re all wrong because mine’s actually the best.

Dreams are totally possible, but don’t ever stop dreaming.