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Six weeks pregnant, nobody told, standing in the middle of a WOD trying to decide if I should scale the box jumps or just quietly skip them and hope nobody noticed. That was me, staring at a whiteboard full of thrusters and pull-ups, doing math I had no training for. My coach thought I was
You took the test twice. Maybe three times, because the first result felt impossible. You’re sitting on the edge of a bathtub, or standing in a Target parking lot with the AC running, staring at your phone like it might change its mind. Nineteen is supposed to be about figuring out who you are —
I found out I was pregnant with my second kid standing in a Target bathroom at 8:47 a.m., because I’d timed the test around my bladder and not around the fact that I had a 9 a.m. call with a client who did not care that my body was quietly rewriting itself from the inside
Day four. That’s when I finally admitted to myself I was tracking my son’s poops in the Notes app like it was a stock ticker. No bowel movement since Tuesday, grunting like he was trying to move furniture, face going red, knees jackknifed up to his chest — and me on the kitchen floor at
My friend Dana married a guy with two kids — 9 and 12 at the time — and about six weeks in she called me crying, not because anything terrible happened, but because the 9-year-old asked her to pass the ketchup and then said “thank you” in this careful, formal voice, like Dana was a
My friend Priya called me at nine at night, which is how I knew it was bad. Her son had come home from school that day and asked if they could “just do sandwiches” for lunch from now on. Not because he didn’t like dal. He loves dal, has since he was two and used
My son once cried — actual tears — because I turned off the same 90-second clip of a garbage truck for the eleventh time in a row. It was 5:10 p.m. The chicken was still frozen. I remember standing at the counter thinking, I have a graduate degree and I cannot get through the next
My youngest turned six months old on a Tuesday, and by Thursday I had a high chair, a bib shaped like a strawberry, and a container of mashed banana I’d made with entirely too much ceremony. She looked at the spoon, looked at me, and turned her head so fast I nearly got banana on
Somewhere around mile 200 on I-80, my youngest lost it. Not fussy-cry, but the full-body, red-faced, “I have rejected this car seat and everything it stands for” scream. We still had four hours to go. My husband looked at me like what do we do, and I remember thinking, with total clarity, that no blog
My son was eleven days old the first time I cried over a spreadsheet. Not a work spreadsheet — a sleep log, color-coded, because some sadist on a parenting forum told me tracking would “reveal patterns.” It revealed nothing except that he slept for forty-one minutes, then ninety-three minutes, then nineteen minutes, in an order
