Richelle Carey is like most ambitious young women driven to succeed in their careers. She didn’t think much about starting a family but instead wanted to make a splash in the journalism industry, a field she had a passion for as long as she could remember. Through hard work, perseverance and passion, her dreams came true: first as a news anchor in Waco, Las Vegas and Atlanta, then scoring in the big leagues at CNN’s Headline News, where she worked for seven years. She would later become a presenter in Doha, Qatar, working for Al Jazeera.
But as she continued to make strides in her career, she found that something was missing – particularly in her personal life. At 43, she decided to freeze her eggs. And three years later, she would undergo in-vitro fertilization (IVF) using a sperm donor, although the process was unsuccessful.
But rather than quit on motherhood, she decided to adopt. Carey would eventually quit her job and move into her parents’ garage in Houston. While back home in Texas, she met a mom to a newborn who was interested in meeting her. The rest is history.
She would eventually meet the 6-week-old baby and fall in love. Four days after meeting the baby, her new son, Avery, was living with her.
“If you told me that at 50 years old, I would be a single mom living in my parents’ guest house, I would think that I had screwed up my life,” Carey told Essence in an interview. “But actually, everything turned out perfectly, so it’s the exact opposite.”
According to figures from the Department of Health and Human Services, “On any given day, over 391,000 children are living in the U.S. foster care system and the number has been rising. Over 113,000 of these children are eligible for adoption and they will wait, on average, almost three years for an adoptive family.”
Watch Carey’s journey to motherhood here.
