ria 
It’s 3 a.m., you’re propped up on hospital pillows that smell like bleach, and your baby has just come off the latch for the fourth time in a row, screaming like you personally wronged her. A nurse walks in, tilts the baby’s chin a half inch, murmurs “there you go,” and thirty seconds later she’s
Okay, real talk. Nobody warns you about the exact moment a nurse hands you your baby, smiles, and says “let’s try feeding” — while you’re still numb from the ribs down and terrified to laugh, cough, or sneeze because it feels like your stitches might pop. That was me, hour six after my second C-section,
I still remember buckling my daughter into her car seat for the ride home from the NICU and thinking, somewhat irrationally, “Wait, they’re just letting us leave?” She was five pounds, two ounces. I’d spent 26 days learning her feeding schedule from nurses who could read her cues better than I could read a stop
3:47 a.m. I know it was exactly that time because I remember glancing at the microwave clock in the kitchen, bottle warming, my son Eli screaming like the world was ending. Twelve minutes earlier he’d been dead asleep. Now I was standing there in a stained t-shirt, doing math in my head — wait, didn’t
There’s a specific kind of quiet that happens in a parking lot after a prenatal appointment when you’ve just seen the ultrasound and there’s no one in the passenger seat to hand the photo to. I sat in mine for a solid ten minutes before I could make myself drive home. Not crying, exactly. Just
I found out I had gestational diabetes at 27 weeks, sitting in my OB’s parking lot with a half-eaten granola bar in the cup holder, feeling like I’d somehow already messed this up. The nurse had called it in — she was kind about it, but “gestational diabetes” still landed like a gut punch. I
The ultrasound tech got quiet for a beat too long, moved the wand around like she was double-checking something, and then said, “Okay, so — there are two in there.” My husband laughed out loud. I just stared at the ceiling tile above the exam table, doing rapid, useless math in my head. Two of
I took the test standing in my bathroom at 6 a.m. because I couldn’t sleep past 5:40, and I remember thinking, before I even looked at it, “please, please.” Two lines. I sat down on the edge of the tub and cried, and I genuinely couldn’t have told you in that moment whether it was
I was thirty-nine, sitting in a paper gown that didn’t quite close in the back, when the nurse looked at my chart and said, “Okay, so you’re one of our advanced maternal age patients.” I remember thinking, advanced? I still had a booster seat in my car and a toddler who called me “Mama-Mama” for
I took my second positive test standing in my room, not even sitting down. With my first pregnancy, I’d been so nauseous by week five that I kept ginger chews in every bag I owned. This time, nothing. I actually texted my sister a picture of the test with the caption “is this thing broken.”
