One blog post at a time.
Holding Space for Myself in Family and Culture From a young age, my father had me living in two different worlds that often contradicted each…
Monday afternoons used to feel heavy, but lately they’ve turned into something I actually look forward to. During baseball season, the Capital One Café gives…
Motherhood feels like stepping into a role I’ve been preparing for my whole life — though not in the ways I expected. Caring for my…
The Lived Experience of Pregnancy For most of my career, I’ve been a planner. In government and international development, you learn to thrive on spreadsheets,…
I am a displaced federal worker and the creator behind this blog.
In my first post, Part 1: Birth — The Six Week Postpartum Journey, I wrote about the intensity of those first weeks after giving birth — the physical recovery, the emotional shifts, and the reality that postpartum doesn’t magically resolve at six weeks. What I didn’t fully talk about then was this:I didn’t go through…
Survival Mode and Invisible Labor Birth is immediate. It is visceral and consuming and unmistakably human. In my case, it was also carefully planned—and then suddenly not. I went into the hospital for a scheduled induction because of gestational diabetes, prepared for a long but controlled process. We expected a large baby, close to nine…
Becoming pregnant — especially at 40 — has changed almost every part of my life. My routines, my priorities, and even my sense of identity have shifted. But the hardest change, the one that keeps catching me off guard, is how much it has limited my ability to show up for my mom during this…
Bureaucrat to Baby Steps 