Interviewed as part of our ongoing exploration of what it means to mother beyond biology, through loss, longing, and radical self-definition.

Tonisha Semple is a 41-year-old emergency doctor who works offshore. She has spent over 14 years navigating medical crises, often being the calm in other people’s storms. But behind her steady hands is a story that is still unfolding—one shaped by heartbreak, by resilience, and by a longing that refuses to let go. She cried during our interview—especially when talking about the month of May. “Every May feels like it comes for me,” she admitted. “Mother’s Day, the loss anniversaries, the reminders. It’s the hardest month of the year.” Her mother passed away in May, a loss that still feels raw and untethered. And years later, her second pregnancy ended in heartbreak—on her mother’s birthday. “It felt cruel,” she whispered.

“Like grief stacked on grief.” The convergence of those dates, those losses, has made May feel like a season she braces for. “I survive it. But I don’t come out the same.”

Diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) seven years ago after a first pregnancy, Tonisha faced what many women silently battle: the tension between reproductive desire and medical barriers. That diagnosis, and a second devastating pregnancy loss, cracked open something deep. “People think grief ends after a few months,” she says. “But two years later, I still feel it like a bruise under the surface.”

And then there is the grief that shaped her before all this—the death of her mother. A promise fulfilled when Tonisha graduated from medical school.

A promise that now lives on in her softness, in her strength, in her refusal to give up on becoming a mother herself.

“I always knew I was born to be a mother,” she says. And though she still holds hope for biological motherhood, she’s also come to recognize that she is already mothering. Through mentorship. Through the compassion she brings to others. Through the way she holds space for grief, her own and others’.

With the support of her partner and a quiet determination shaped by loss, Tonisha is no longer waiting for motherhood to be externally defined. She’s reclaiming it. Living it. Even through the tears. Even when May comes around again.