For five years, this story lived only in my body. Not in words. Not shared. Just carried — the way mothers learn to carry things that have no clean place to be put down.
This is where I finally set it.
Chief Moms exists because I learned how many mothers carry stories like this one quietly.
This is mine.
My doctor was calling.
I looked down as I sat in an uncomfortable wooden chair—plaid, half-filled pillows slumped behind my back, a worn footrest propping up my feet. It was barely enough to support a body growing another human.
It was a few days after my 35-week scan, and since I'd been through this once before, I felt no fear. I let the call go to voicemail—confident I'd get the usual everything looks good transcribed into a neat, reassuring preview on my screen.
Milly and Jonny were playing in the living room of the house we were renting while we restored a 1930s farmhouse in the village nearby where I grew up.
We called the rental the Christmas house because there was no escaping Santa Claus—not in December, not ever. He was everywhere—plates, cloth napkins, the bath mat.
At first, it felt like a warm hug from the guy we all secretly want a warm hug from come the holiday season.
By month two, it already felt like a fever dream I couldn't wake from. A drastic departure from how we'd built our recent homes—mid-century, Scandinavian, quiet.
But I pushed myself up from the chair, slipped into the bathroom, and sat on the toilet, my eight-month belly resting heavy on my thighs.
I picked up the phone and read the voicemail transcription from Dr. Payne.
And just like that, Dr. Payne delivered the worst pain of my life.
Not just the news itself—but words strung together in a way that cracked open the floorboards and poured thirty years of buried grief through the gaps.
Pain that drags every ache you thought you'd outrun into the light.
Even my subconscious was spiraling—memories I'd never fully processed flashing behind my eyes like a reel rewinding in fast-forward speed.
I'm sitting in the school counselor's office, a five-year-old with legs too short to reach the floor, holding a book about divorce that someone thought might help.
It didn't.
That morning had already set something in motion in our family. Voices raised. Adults carrying pain I didn't yet have the language to understand.
At five years old, you don't know the details of what's breaking.
You only know the feeling of the ground shifting beneath you.
I remember the road outside, the yellow line stretching forward, and the quiet terror that the people holding my world together might not be able to hold it much longer.
That was only the beginning.
My reel was crowded—every unresolved moment trying to shoulder its way into the present.
Some from a week ago.
Some from thirty years ago.
One in particular was the most vivid—the day I got a call from my friend's dad saying one of my best friends was shot dead by another friend who believed the gun was only a BB gun.
Then came flooding the memories from Los Angeles, the city we'd just left behind.
I'm now seeing myself in our home on Topanga Canyon.
Where Jonny, ever the strategist, said the layoffs would come.
He was right.
He always is.
I admired how strong his instincts guided him—except when being right cost him the job that had defined him.
Idiots, I thought.
The self-help world had a whole permission structure built around releasing what you can't control. I'd read it. I believed parts of it.
But Jonny?
I would never let him go.
Not after seeing what my parents went through.
Not after living through what it means to grow up in a 'broken home.'
The reel kept spinning through Topanga—past the layoff, past the imminent loss of work—now focusing on the house we thought would be forever but never was.
Every detail of it arrived at once—from Halloween parties to Thanksgiving dinners, decorating Milly's nursery to look like my Pinterest board (still one of my favorite rooms I've ever decorated).
Then the flaws.
The warnings.
Like the house itself was trying to prove it had always been temporary.
We carried a million-dollar mortgage that felt like a three-million-dollar load of anxiety.
Evacuations from wildfires.
Chandeliers swaying with earthquakes.
Our pool rippling with waves from the trembling earth.
Then the uprisings, the curfews, the pandemic, the city on edge.
So we sold.
Six days after listing we got an offer that landed like a miracle—way over asking, way more than we expected.
Instant relief.
A gift.
And with that gift, we ran—to Vermont.
Jonny called us environmental refugees.
I called us lottery winners.
The reel wasn't chronological.
It didn't care about before or after—it only cared about the fault lines.
But the reel finally paused.
Snapped me back to the bathroom—to the half-pulled pants, a glowing screen with voicemail, the bath mat with Santa staring up from the corner of my eye.
I looked again at the transcription.
The words didn't make sense.
The system must be glitching, I thought.
I hit play.
I listened—but I didn't hear all of it.
Just one sentence:
“We want to take a closer look.”
It made me feel the truth before my brain could process it.
I felt it like a crack in the spine.
Like something sacred shattering inside me.
And instead of screaming—my usual response to panic, to pain—I stood up and walked to the edge of the living room.
My voice low and distorted.
Coded almost to protect Milly but clear enough for Jonny to know.
"Jonny, come here. Now. Please. The doctor just called. I'm okay. But I need you. Just you."
In my world of tell-all emotions, okay is the most dishonest word I know.
Jonny heard it and stood upright immediately, running toward the weight I had just released in the room.
The baby.
The diagnosis I could feel in my bones was coming.
The fear.
It wasn't catastrophizing.
It was grounded.
After years of therapy, I knew the difference.
Then the story I would carry for five years before I told anyone the truth.
Immediately my mind went to everything I might have done wrong.
It was COVID.
I was living in a cocoon.
I didn't know I was pregnant until seven weeks.
I have PCOS, and my cycle has been wildly irregular my whole life—one month 28 days, another 45.
In those seven weeks I didn't know I was pregnant:
I had an Aperol spritz.
I ate at Sugarfish.
I drank caffeine.
I took my ADD medication.
The first thought that hit me was simple.
Fuck.
Is this my fault?
Did I cause this?
The mother of all mom guilt.
Nothing I did caused it.
But the events that followed—the diagnosis, and the depths of darkness I walked through for the next two years while blaming myself—still make me weep.
Today they make me weep because I'm proud I got through it.
When I look back at the woman I was then, I want to hug her.
I want to whisper in her ear that she's capable, and loved, and loving—and that's all she, her babies, and her husband need her to be.
She had innate strength.
And somewhere beneath the blame and the darkness were three things she'd been taught so young they'd become instinct:
Simplicity of life.
Directness of purpose.
Self-reliance.
She'd forgotten she had them.
They hadn't forgotten her.
After two years of that blame, I decided I needed answers.
What I eventually learned was that my baby didn't just have physical differences.
He had a constellation of features and a syndrome so rare that the probability of all of them occurring together by chance was astronomically small.
Fewer than a handful of documented cases worldwide.
No exact match in the medical literature.
I now understand the true meaning of special—a privilege not everyone gets to experience.
And through that privilege, I found something unexpected.
I found awakening.
I found duty.
I found mission.
I found Chief Moms.
Welcome to my circle.
If there's a story you've been carrying quietly, you are not the only one.
When you're ready, Chief Moms is here to hold it.
With love,
I've shared mine.
Now I pass it to you.
