Cheri Bergeron never set out to become a legal precedent or a fertility‐rights crusader. “This book chose me,” she admitted in a recent conversation with Scribe CEO Eric Jorgensen. “For ten years I struggled to become a mother … I went through loss, I went through surrendering my body in all ways … and I ultimately went through a custody battle that was very public and precedent-setting” (Cheri, early interview). That cascade of setbacks might have broken someone else, but for Cheri it forged the raw material that would become Mission Motherhood, a candid guide for women whose path to parenthood refuses to follow the fairy tale route.
The first splinter in her story, she explains, was realizing that traditional timelines—meet soulmate, marry, conceive effortlessly—are often fiction. “My mantra is, ‘If the glass slipper doesn’t fit, screw the fairytale.’” Career ambitions, a marriage that eventually dissolved, and repeated medical disappointments stretched her dream of motherhood across a full decade. Yet the real shock arrived after she conceived her son with an anonymous donor. Because she was still legally married—though long separated—the state automatically listed the estranged husband on the birth certificate. Four years later he switched legal positions and sued her for custody. “I was in the middle of the lawsuit thinking there was a good chance I was going to lose custody of my son to someone who wasn’t his father … and I thought, this is crazy. Other women could fall into the same traps.”
That “this can’t be happening” moment sparked her determination to turn private pain into public service. She began pouring scenes onto the page during COVID lockdowns, but her first draft read like a case file. “I had written a lot … but it was boring as hell,” she laughs. Determined to create a book that felt “like you’re sitting across from a great girlfriend … sharing the deepest parts of yourself over a bottle of wine,” she searched for professional help.
Enter Scribe Media—and sticker shock. Fresh off a $250,000 custody bill, Cheri balked at the investment. Friends urged her toward cheaper freelancers and she tried that route for 18 frustrating months. Quality lagged, deadlines slipped, and the manuscript still wasn’t the immersive experience she envisioned. At her lowest point she remembered a line Eric eventually quotes back to her: “The bitterness of low quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.” Cheri returned to Scribe, hired senior scribe Amanda, and restarted almost from scratch.
The difference was immediate. Amanda conducted deep-dive interviews, mined Cheri’s journals, and insisted on cinematic detail. When Cheri read the new introduction she blurted, “Holy , this is really good!” That moment—seeing her own story rendered with the intensity it deserved—became her creative high point. “It felt like … the most significant thing I’ve done in my life,” she says of finally unboxing the hard-cover proof after five years of toil and fifteen years of lived experience.
Now, Cheri’s focus has shifted from manuscript to mission. She is building a nonprofit, Cheri’s Choice, to bring fertility education and legal literacy to campuses nationwide. “I’m measuring my success in babies,” she tells Eric with a grin, vowing to post a running counter of children conceived because readers finally understood their options.
The through-line of Cheri Bergeron’s journey is grit in service of others. She refuses to let hard-won wisdom “die with her,” as she puts it, and her book stands as living proof that a single voice—honest, well-crafted, and unafraid—can shorten the struggle for thousands more. If your own roadmap to family looks anything but conventional, Mission Motherhood offers both cautionary tales and concrete hope.
Before signing off, Cheri leaves listeners with two pieces of counsel.
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