Mariam Shahab, Fractional CMO at The Surrogacy Foundation, Founder of Chatterbox Consulting, and Mother via Surrogacy

“I always knew I wanted to be a mother, but I felt betrayed by my body and by what society told me was the norm,” Mariam Shahab shared while reflecting on her path to parenthood.

For Mariam Shahab, the desire to become a mother had always felt natural. She grew up helping care for her younger brother and assumed that one day motherhood would come just as easily for her.

But when she and her husband began trying to have a child, the path looked different than expected. After fertility testing, IVF, and further medical evaluations, doctors ultimately delivered a difficult diagnosis: her uterus was unable to safely carry a pregnancy.

The news arrived just as the world shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic. Isolated at home, Mariam watched social media filled with pregnancy announcements while she quietly grieved the future she had imagined.

Determined to find another path forward, she began researching gestational surrogacy, something she had previously only seen in movies or celebrity headlines. As a South Asian American Muslim woman living in Texas, it felt like an unfamiliar and unconventional choice.

Still, she and her husband moved forward. They filled out agency applications, wrote personal profiles, and eventually matched with a gestational carrier living several hours away in Oklahoma. Over the months that followed, they built a relationship that blended the ordinary and the extraordinary — long drives to doctor’s appointments, text messages about cravings, and even recording their voices so their baby could hear them in the womb.

When their son was born in September 2021, Mariam describes crying and smiling at the same time as she finally held him in her arms.

Soon after, while trick-or-treating with her newborn son, a stranger asked a simple question.

“Is he yours?”

For Mariam, that moment revealed how deeply society still assumes that motherhood must look one particular way.

Today she shares her story publicly through writing, speaking, and advocacy to remind others that families are built in many ways. And that sometimes the most powerful stories are the ones that help someone else realize they are not alone.