“The pediatrician was super blunt. ‘No, you are mistaken. You’ve confused us with a different baby.’ Nobody noticed it on the million ultrasounds throughout the pregnancy. I watched my husband and 1-day-old baby taken away from me in an ambulance and all I could do was stare.”
“I hid my pregnancy for 7 months. I should’ve been picking the perfect dress for Winter Ball. Instead, I was writing a birth plan. Once my sobs slowed, I looked at her birth father and said, ‘Those are the people who will raise our baby girl.’ I wavered. I fought. I broke. But in the end, I knew what I needed to do.”
“I begged him, bribed him, and pleaded with him, feeling my absolute lowest of lows as a mother.”
“’Meet your son.’ Weeks later, we brought number 3 home. I noticed I was having mood swings. I joked to my girlfriends on a group text, ‘I‘m probably pregnant.’”
“Just like my mother taught me, I told her to kill them with kindness. But after a particular pair of older girls, who frankly know better, continued to be rude and exclude my daughter, I had to have a difficult talk with her.”
“Little boys don’t need to toughen up, they need to be nurtured.”
“‘All fixed up! You’ll be pregnant in 4 months tops!’ I was taking medicines, arguing with my husband. Our hearts were breaking. Coming off the infertility rollercoaster, God told me it was time to change our plans. ‘The birth mother is also pregnant.'”
“While my friends were dreaming about their future careers, I was dreaming about booze. I’d carve words into my legs just to feel something. And then I got pregnant. The only thing I wanted for this child is to not feel how I felt.”
“But your children, they grow right before your eyes. Their tiny voices change overnight. Their giggles and tears start and end with you…until they don’t. Everything else can wait. Parenting is a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
“I’d sit on the sidelines during PE while my peers played and had the time of their lives. I felt envy toward able-bodied children. I was that awkward girl in a wheelchair who didn’t know anybody. I didn’t fit in. One morning, I awoke to muscle loss in my hands. ‘But how will I create my art?!’ I had to find a way to make life happen.”
