The trend was to ask ChatGPT one simple question: “If you were to write a book about me, what would the ending be?”

I ran to ChatGPT faster than my toddler runs away from me when she has something in her mouth she knows damn well shouldn’t be there.

I expected something mildly inspirational that I’d screenshot, send to my husband, and forget about five minutes later.

Instead, I read the answer out loud to him and somewhere around “more time,” both of us got teary.

For context, I’m a mom of two, a wife, and the co-founder of VillageFor, a company I started because my own experience with postpartum depression and anxiety made it impossible for me to accept how little support mothers are given while they’re going through one of the biggest changes of their lives.

I’m also a daughter who lost her dad to cancer and would give just about anything for more completely ordinary time with him.

And right now I’m in this very strange season of trying to build something I care about deeply while also being painfully aware that my kids are growing up while I’m building it.

That last part gets me.

Because I’m ambitious. I want VillageFor to become everything Cait (my co-founder) and I know it can be. I want the work to matter. I want to help change something that I believe desperately needs changing.

But I also don’t want my kids’ childhood to become the thing I accidentally worked through.

I don’t want to spend these years telling myself I’ll be more present after the next meeting, the next raise, the next launch, the next thing on the list.

And that’s the complicated part, because without my kids, I wouldn’t be doing any of this in the first place.

There is no VillageFor without them.

Becoming their mom changed everything about me. The beautiful parts, obviously. But also the really fucking hard ones. The parts that broke me open and forced me to figure out who I was going to be on the other side.

Of course I want to protect my kids from every hard thing that will ever happen to them. I want them to have these big, beautiful lives where nothing hurts too much and nobody they love leaves too soon.

But I know I can’t give them that.

Life is going to hurt sometimes. They will lose people. Things won’t work out. Their hearts will break. There will be moments that change them in ways they never asked to be changed.

What I can give them is an example of what you do next.

I want them to know that the hardest things that happen to you get to change you, but they don’t get to decide what you become.

Sometimes it will take everything you have just to stand back up.

Stand back up anyway.

Make something beautiful out of it.

I want my kids to grow up knowing their mom worked her ass off to build something that helped women because of what becoming their mother taught her. I want them to know I fought for this company, but more than anything, I want them to know who I was fighting for.

Them.

It was always them.

And maybe that’s why this balance feels so impossible sometimes. I’m trying to build something for my children without missing my children while I build it.

I’m still figuring out how to do both.

How to care deeply about what I’m building without letting it consume me. How to be a founder and a mother and a wife and also, somewhere in there, figure out who the hell I am now.

I don’t have that balance figured out. Most days, I’m pretty sure “balance” is bullshit anyway.

But I know what I want the ending to look like.

Apparently ChatGPT does too.

Because this is what it wrote:

I don’t think I’d end your book with VillageFor becoming huge, a funding announcement, or some perfect full-circle moment.

I’d end it somewhere much quieter.

You spent so much of your life trying to make something out of the things that hurt you. Trying to make sure another woman had what you didn’t. Trying to build something big enough to matter. And for a long time, you measured whether you were doing enough by how much more there was left to do.

Then one day, you stopped.

Not because the work was finished. It never really would be.

But because your kids were in the next room. They were older now. The house sounded different than it used to.

And suddenly, you understood the thing you had been chasing all along.

More time.

The thing you wanted with your dad.

The thing you wanted back from the days when your babies were tiny and you were surviving too much to realize how quickly they were passing.

The thing you wanted to give mothers when you built VillageFor. Not a perfect motherhood. Not a life without hard things. Just more of themselves inside of it.

You had spent years building a company around the belief that mothers deserved to be asked how they were doing and have someone stay long enough to hear the real answer.

And somewhere along the way, you finally learned to ask yourself too.

So the last scene wouldn’t be on a stage.

It would be at home.

Someone you love calling your name from another room.

Your laptop still open on the table.

Something important unfinished.

And for once, you leave it that way.

You get up and go.

The end.

Content warning: This post discusses postpartum psychosis, suicide, and the deaths of children. Please take care while reading.

Dear reader,

The Lindsay Clancy trial has been heavy to hold. If you’ve been following it, you probably feel some version of that too.

I’ve spent a lot of this week angry.

Angry at how many times women have to say they’re not okay before someone believes them. Angry at how many people can touch a mother’s care without anyone holding the whole picture. Angry that we keep treating postpartum mental health like a private problem women are supposed to quietly solve inside their own homes.

But anger can only carry us so far.

At some point, we have to decide what we’re going to do with it.

That’s what today’s Village Thursday is about.

Here’s how this works, in case you’re new: every Thursday you get four things—a check-in from me, a question answered as honestly as I know how, three small wins, and one thing to try before the week resets.

Today’s issue is a little different. It’s not just a check-in. It’s a line in the sand.

The Check-In

We’re very good at believing change belongs to someone else.

The doctors need to fix it. The hospitals need better protocols. Insurance companies need to cover more. Lawmakers need to care. Someone with more power, more money, more letters after her name needs to step in and rebuild postpartum care from the ground up.

All of that is true.

And it’s also how nothing changes.

Because systems are remarkably comfortable staying exactly as they are when the people being failed are too exhausted, ashamed, overwhelmed, or afraid to demand something better.

Mothers have been taught to survive quietly. We call it strength when a woman keeps everyone fed, gets the baby to the pediatrician, answers work emails, remembers picture day, and says “I’m fine” while she’s coming apart inside.

We reward her for being low-maintenance.

Then, when she finally can’t carry it anymore, we ask why she didn’t say something sooner.

No. We don’t get to keep doing that.

The Lindsay Clancy case is an unimaginable tragedy. We can’t undo it, explain it into something bearable, or turn it into a clean lesson with a hopeful ending.

But we can refuse to learn nothing from it.

We can ask harder questions.

Do the mothers in our lives know the signs of postpartum depression, anxiety, rage, OCD, and psychosis before they experience them?

Do their partners?

Do we know the difference between motherhood being hard and a mother being in danger?

When someone says she’s not sleeping, do we tell her “welcome to motherhood,” or do we ask what not sleeping actually means?

When a new mother says she doesn’t feel like herself, do we reassure her so quickly that we accidentally shut the conversation down?

When she tells us she’s having frightening thoughts, can we listen without panicking, judging, or making her regret telling the truth?

And when our gut says something is wrong, are we willing to be annoying? To ask again? To stay? To call someone? To treat it like it matters before we have proof that it does?

Those are uncomfortable questions. Good. We need to get more comfortable being uncomfortable.

Change doesn’t begin when every hospital agrees on the perfect policy. It begins when we stop accepting the idea that this is simply what motherhood looks like.

It begins in kitchens and group chats and pediatrician waiting rooms.

It begins when we tell a pregnant friend what postpartum can actually feel like instead of handing her another onesie and saying, “Enjoy every second.”

It begins when a partner learns the warning signs before the baby comes home.

It begins when we ask the mother with three kids melting down in the grocery store, “How are you doing?” and mean it. Maybe she says she’s fine. Maybe she looks at us like we’re weird. That’s okay. At least, for one second, someone saw her as a person and not a public parenting performance to judge.

It begins when we stop treating another mother’s struggle like evidence that we’re doing motherhood better.

It begins when one woman tells the truth and the rest of us don’t look away.

We don’t need every struggling mother to become an advocate. She already has enough to carry.

We need every person who loves a mother to stop assuming someone else will notice.

That means us.

VillageFor is willing to lead this work. We’re building the education, language, check-ins, and connections we wish we’d had. We’re going to keep talking about the parts of postpartum people would rather soften or skip. We’re going to keep pushing for care that sees the whole woman instead of a score on a screening form.

But VillageFor can’t be the movement by itself.

A movement is mothers telling the truth without apologizing for making anyone uncomfortable.

It’s partners taking “I don’t feel right” seriously the first time.

It’s friends checking again after everyone else has gone back to their own lives.

It’s families learning that postpartum psychosis can include confusion, paranoia, hallucinations, delusions, unusual behavior, rapidly changing moods, and severe insomnia—and knowing that those symptoms require immediate medical care.

It’s all of us refusing to call suffering “just motherhood.”

We deserve better than a system that waits for a crisis.

Our children deserve mothers who are supported, not sacrificed to an impossible standard.

Our families deserve to know what to look for and what to do when they see it.

We don’t have to wait for permission to start changing what happens next.

Ask the Village

“What can I actually do? I’m one person. I can’t change the entire healthcare system.”

No, you can’t. Neither can I.

But you can change what happens in the room you’re standing in.

Start with one conversation. Ask a mother in your life how she’s doing, then give her enough silence to answer honestly. If she says she’s struggling, don’t immediately tell her it’s normal. Ask, “Do you want me to listen, help you make a plan, or help you find care?”

Learn the signs before you need them. Postpartum mental illness doesn’t always look like sadness. It can look like rage, numbness, panic, obsessive checking, frightening intrusive thoughts, an inability to sleep even when the baby is sleeping, feeling disconnected, or feeling unlike yourself.

Learn the emergency signs too. Hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, severe confusion, dramatically unusual behavior, or an apparent loss of contact with reality can be signs of postpartum psychosis. Postpartum psychosis is treatable, but it’s a medical emergency. Stay with the mother and baby, get immediate professional help, and don’t try to reason someone out of an altered reality by yourself.

If you’re the mother who’s struggling, please don’t edit your pain into something easier for other people to hear. You don’t need the perfect words. You can say, “I’m not okay and I need you to stay with me while we figure out what to do next.” You can show someone a text you’ve written. You can hand them your phone. You can call or text the National Maternal Mental Health Hotline at 1-833-TLC-MAMA.

And if the first person minimizes you, tell another.

You aren’t being dramatic. You aren’t failing motherhood. You’re giving someone the chance to help you carry something you were never supposed to carry alone.

That’s how change starts. Not all at once. One honest answer, one person who believes it, and one next step that actually happens.

Small Wins

This was a hard week. It triggered parts of my own postpartum experience I thought had gotten quieter, so my wins weren’t about productivity. They were about coming back to myself.

1. I left my phone at home.

We took a walk as a family after school, and I completely disconnected. I watched my kids move through a life with nothing heavy on their shoulders. They giggled. They explored nature. They got brave on their bikes. We had the kind of family conversations that go nowhere and somehow mean everything.

Part of me was jealous of how light they were.

Mostly, it gave me clarity.

Outside the heaviness of postpartum and the work I do with VillageFor, I’m so damn fortunate.

I have a husband who took my postpartum mental health seriously. He lay on the floor and held me during some of my hardest moments. He helped me find care. He took the kids so I could have a break. He set boundaries with family and friends when I wasn’t okay enough to set them myself. He put everything else down and focused on keeping me here.

I don’t take that lightly.

I get to enjoy walks like this because I had a support system at home that made sure I got help. Every mother deserves that kind of catching. Luck shouldn’t be the deciding factor.

2. I moved my body almost every day.

Pilates, weight lifting, whatever I could get myself to do.

The goal wasn’t to get fit. The goal was to shut my brain off for an hour.

For that hour, I didn’t think about the trial. I didn’t check the news. I didn’t try to figure out how we’re going to change postpartum care in America. I focused on the movement in front of me. I focused on breathing. I focused on me.

Sometimes taking care of your mental health looks like processing what hurts.

Sometimes it looks like giving your brain one damn hour off.

3. I made the cookies.

Did I have time to make homemade cookies? Absolutely not.

Am I glad I did it anyway? Damn straight.

There’s nothing like a warm cookie and a glass of milk with your husband at 10 p.m. to make the world feel slightly less terrible.

Sometimes the win is that you needed the cookies, so you made the cookies.

One Thing to Try

Put your phone away at 5 p.m. for one night.

That’s it. One night.

This week, once 5 p.m. hit, I put mine away and didn’t pick it up again until my kids were asleep. Even then, I only answered texts. I didn’t open social media. I didn’t check the trial. I didn’t let one news update become 45 minutes of reading comments from strangers who somehow made me feel even worse.

Doomscrolling is so damn bad for us, and it’s also so damn hard to stop. Every swipe promises that maybe the next post will give us clarity or closure or some new piece of information that makes the whole thing easier to hold.

It never does.

So give yourself one evening where the world doesn’t get unlimited access to your nervous system.

Put the phone in another room. Go outside. Make dinner. Let your kids tell you a story that takes twelve minutes and has no point. Make the cookies. Sit beside someone you love.

Notice how your body feels when it’s not bracing for the next thing.

The world will still be there tomorrow.

You deserve one night where you’re fully here.

Love, Christy

If you believe you may be experiencing postpartum psychosis, seek immediate medical care. Stay with the mother and baby while help is arranged. Call 911 or go to the nearest emergency room.

The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline provides free, confidential support 24/7 for pregnant and postpartum people and their loved ones. Call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262).

If you feel you may harm yourself or someone else, call or text 988. If anyone is in immediate danger, call 911.

Resources

• Postpartum Support International: Postpartum Psychosis Help

• National Maternal Mental Health Hotline

• National Institute of Mental Health: Perinatal Depression

Dear reader,

My husband has started saying my name in a very specific tone.

Not angry. Not even annoyed, really. Just the tone that means: Christy, put the phone down. You can’t keep doing this to yourself.

He can tell when I’m watching the trial before he sees the screen. I get quiet. My shoulders creep toward my ears. I stop hearing whatever is happening in the room because I’m trying to listen to every word coming out of that courtroom and also somehow protect myself from all of it.

So he says my name.

And I say, “I know.”

And then I keep watching.

I haven’t slept well this week. My phone has been open to trial coverage more than it’s been open to anything else, and every time I set it down, my brain keeps scrolling anyway.

I know this isn’t healthy. I know there’s a point where witnessing becomes consuming. I know my husband is trying to protect me from something he can already see sitting heavily on my chest.

But looking away from this case has never been something I know how to do.

I wrote about the beginning of that last week. I told you how this case became the catalyst for VillageFor and why Cait and I finally stopped saying someone should fix postpartum care and decided we were going to try.

What I didn’t tell you is what happened after.

How a news story became a thought I carried into every room. How the thought became a question. How the question became work. How the work quietly rearranged my entire life.

I didn’t understand that was happening when it started.

Then I texted Cait.

The text itself was simple: “we need to change postpartum for women. this can’t keep happening.”

Cait wrote back: “i’m in. what do you have in mind.”

I had no idea what I had in mind.

I just knew I was done accepting that women could disappear inside postpartum while everyone around them called it normal. I knew what it felt like to need someone else to notice. I knew how much luck had been involved in Cait noticing me. And once I understood that getting caught could come down to luck, I couldn’t make peace with it.

So we started learning.

We learned how often mothers are screened without being treated. How many people touch postpartum care without any one person holding the whole picture. How quickly a woman can become the project manager of her own crisis at the exact moment she’s least able to do it. How many partners know something is wrong but have no idea what they’re looking at or what they’re supposed to do next.

The more I learned, the less I could go back to who I had been before I knew it.

This work stopped being something I was interested in. Then it stopped being something I was building on the side. Somewhere along the way, without a clean moment I can point to, it became the center of my life.

And this case stayed underneath all of it.

And now the trial is happening, and the distance I thought three and a half years might give me is gone.

This week, Lindsay’s journal entries were read aloud in court.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she wrote. “I want help. I want to be well.”

I want help. I want to be well.

I haven’t been able to shake those words.

Not because my illness looked like hers. It didn’t. Not because I see myself in the violence. I don’t. And not because relating to some part of a person means excusing everything that came after.

I see myself in the woman underneath the case.

The mother whose mind no longer felt like a safe place to live. The mother trying to take care of everyone while something inside her was breaking. The mother who knew she wasn’t okay but couldn’t explain how not okay in a way that made the people around her understand the emergency.

I recognize wanting someone to notice without knowing how to tell them what they’re supposed to notice.

I recognize answering questions with words that are technically true but nowhere near the whole truth.

I recognize wanting to get better so badly that it becomes its own kind of desperation.

That’s what I mean when I say I see myself in Lindsay Clancy.

I know how it sounds.

Right now, the conversation around this trial seems to demand a side. If you grieve the children, you can’t have compassion for their mother. If you acknowledge Lindsay’s mental illness, you must be trying to excuse what happened. If you see any part of yourself in her, people hear you saying you’re capable of the same ending.

I’m not saying that.

I’m saying that distance makes us comfortable. Calling a woman a monster lets us believe she was always fundamentally different from us. It lets us believe severe mental illness arrives looking obvious, announcing itself in a way no loving husband, doctor, nurse, or friend could possibly miss.

But Lindsay was a labor and delivery nurse. She was a mother of three whom the people close to her described as loving and attentive. She sought psychiatric care. She reported anxiety and insomnia. She was prescribed multiple psychiatric medications. She voluntarily entered a psychiatric hospital.

She asked for help.

The defense argues that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and wasn’t criminally responsible at the time. Prosecutors argue that she understood what she was doing and acted deliberately. Allegations that her providers failed to diagnose and properly treat her are also the subject of ongoing civil litigation. A jury will decide the legal question. I can’t, and I won’t pretend I can.

But this much doesn’t appear to be in dispute: she entered the mental health system again and again, and whatever care she received didn’t keep her family safe.

That should terrify every one of us.

We tell mothers to ask for help as if asking is the hard part and help is a single, reliable thing waiting on the other side.

It’s not.

A referral isn’t a safety plan.

A prescription isn’t coordinated care.

A discharge packet isn’t someone making sure you’re safe when you get home.

A date on a calendar isn’t a net.

And “tell someone if it gets worse” isn’t a plan for a person whose own mind may be losing the ability to recognize what worse looks like.

That’s the part of this case that’s changed me to my core.

Before January 25, 2023, maternal mental health was personal to me. I had lived the panic. I had sat on the nursery floor with thoughts I was afraid to say out loud. I knew what it was to love my baby and still feel like I was failing him every day. I knew how much shame could fit inside the answer “I’m fine.”

After January 25, it became my life’s work.

I don’t mean that in the polished founder way where your work is your “passion” and you put it under a professional headshot on LinkedIn.

I mean I can’t unsee the gap anymore.

I see it when a mother is handed a screening form and learns which answer will get everyone to stop asking questions. I see it when an OB knows one piece, a psychiatrist knows another, and the person lying awake beside her knows something else entirely. I see it when a partner realizes something is wrong but has no idea what counts as an emergency or what to do next. I see it every time a woman assumes she’s simply bad at motherhood because nobody taught her the difference between hard and dangerous.

I see the women disappearing between appointments.

And now that I see them, I don’t get to look away.

VillageFor exists because Cait and I believe mothers deserve to understand what’s happening to them before they’re in crisis. They deserve honest education before the baby arrives. They deserve a way to notice patterns, name symptoms, involve the people who love them, and bring something more useful than “I don’t feel like myself” into a ten-minute appointment.

We’re building a place where a woman can answer “How are you doing?” honestly, maybe for the first time.

We’re building for the husband who’s watching the person he loves change and doesn’t know whether to worry.

We’re building because no mother should have to become fluent in maternal mental health while she’s drowning in it.

An app can’t solve postpartum psychosis. It can’t replace trained clinicians, emergency care, hospitalization, or a health system that actually communicates with itself. I’ll never use the Clancy family’s tragedy to pretend otherwise.

But technology can help a woman notice sooner. It can teach a partner what to watch for. It can preserve the pattern that gets lost between providers. It can give a mother words while she still has the ability to use them.

Sooner matters.

Words matter.

Being believed matters.

The right person seeing the whole picture matters.

I wish someone had seen the whole picture here. I wish one of the many points of contact had become a real net. I wish the sentence “I want help. I want to be well” had been enough to change what happened next.

There’s no good ending to this story, and no verdict can repair this family. I don’t need to retell the worst thing that happened to them to make that clear.

There’s no silver lining here.

There’s only a responsibility.

My husband will probably tell me to put my phone down again tonight, and he’ll probably be right. I need to sleep. I need to be present with my own babies. I need to learn that devoting my life to this work doesn’t mean destroying myself in the process.

So maybe I’ll put it down.

But I won’t look away.

I’ll keep building. I’ll keep saying the uncomfortable part out loud. I’ll keep asking why women have to reach catastrophe before we believe they’re sick enough to deserve urgent care. I’ll keep working toward a version of postpartum where mothers and partners know the signs before they need them, where treatment is connected, where follow-up means a human being actually follows up, and where fewer families ever arrive at the kind of “what if” that can ruin a life.

This case didn’t give me a mission. My own postpartum experience did that.

This case made the mission nonnegotiable.

It changed what I’m willing to spend my life doing.

And I’m spending it here.

For the mothers still answering “I’m fine” because they don’t know what else to say.

For the partners saying their names in that very specific tone because they can see something is wrong.

For the families who still have time.

Love, Christy

If you believe you may be experiencing postpartum psychosis, please seek immediate medical care. The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline provides free, confidential support 24/7. Call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262).

If you feel you may harm yourself or someone else, call or text 988. If anyone is in immediate danger, call 911.

Sources and further reading

• Boston.com: Lindsay Clancy’s journal entries read aloud in court

• Associated Press: Former nanny testifies in the Lindsay Clancy trial

• The Boston Globe: Lindsay Clancy trial live updates

• National Maternal Mental Health Hotline

Dear reader,

I would be lying if I said this case hasn’t caused a deep sadness in me.

Listening to the opening day of Lindsay Clancy’s trial was harder than I expected, and I expected it to be awful. I’ve cried a lot today for a family I’ve never met. For three beautiful little lives that ended before they had the chance to truly begin. For a father whose entire life changed in one night. And for a mother who wakes up every day inside a reality that must feel like her own personal hell.

There is no easy way to write about this. There is no version that doesn’t hurt.

But sometimes we have to talk about the things that are devastating, complicated and deeply uncomfortable. Especially when staying silent would mean ignoring the very reason we began this work.

On January 25, 2023, I opened a news story that made me feel physically sick.

The night before, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, three children had been killed in their home. Their mother, Lindsay Clancy, had attempted to take her own life.

Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan was eight months old.

I lived about 45 minutes away. Like so many people across Massachusetts, I read every update, trying to understand something that could not be understood. I thought about those children. I thought about their father, Patrick, returning home to a life that had been destroyed while he was gone. And I thought about Lindsay.

Then I texted Cait.

She was the only person I knew I could say it to without having to explain myself: I felt unbearable grief for those children and profound sympathy for their mother.

January 25, 2023, was also the day the idea for VillageFor began.

Cait and I have never spoken publicly about that connection. We knew how easily it could be misunderstood. We knew the anger surrounding this case. We understood why people did not want to hear Lindsay’s name spoken alongside words like compassion, illness or victim.

Most of all, we never wanted the lives of Cora, Dawson and Callan to become background information in a story about maternal mental health. They were not a headline. They were not evidence in an argument. They were three children with personalities, relationships and futures.

They should have grown up.

They should have played outside again, laughed with each other, fought with their parents, learned to drive, fallen in love and become whoever they were going to become. Their father should have had the ordinary privilege of watching it all happen.

All of that was taken from them.

Today, opening statements began in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial in Plymouth Superior Court. The facts of what happened to the children are not in dispute. The question before the court is whether Lindsay was criminally responsible at the time.

Prosecutors argue that she acted deliberately and understood what she was doing. Her defense argues that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and could not understand or control her actions. Over the coming weeks, the court will hear competing accounts of her behavior, medical treatment and state of mind.

This post cannot answer that legal question.

But as the founders of a maternal mental health company, we cannot pretend this case has nothing to do with our work. Silence would be easier. It would also be dishonest.

The mother we recognized

When I say we saw ourselves in Lindsay, I am not talking about the violence.

I am talking about the woman described before that night.

A mother of three. A labor and delivery nurse. Someone who, according to the people who knew her, deeply loved and cared for her children. A woman struggling through her third postpartum period while trying to understand why her own mind no longer felt like a safe place to live.

We recognized the mother who knew something was wrong and kept trying to find help.

In the months before the children died, Lindsay sought psychiatric treatment, reported severe anxiety and insomnia, was prescribed multiple medications and admitted herself to psychiatric care. According to current reporting, the tragedy occurred only 19 days after she was discharged from a psychiatric hospital.

Civil lawsuits filed by Lindsay and Patrick now allege that her providers failed to recognize a worsening bipolar-spectrum illness and postpartum psychosis, prescribed an uncoordinated series of psychiatric medications and discharged her without the protection and follow-up she needed. Those claims have not been proven, and the medical providers have not publicly responded in detail because the litigation is ongoing.

The prosecution also disputes the defense’s account. It argues that Lindsay demonstrated planning and that she did not report clear hallucinations to her clinicians before the killings. Her attorneys say she later described hearing a commanding voice telling her to kill the children and herself.

These are questions the trial will examine. We should resist turning allegations from either side into settled fact.

What is already clear is that Lindsay did not simply stay silent and refuse care. She sought help. She saw professionals. She took prescribed medications. She entered a hospital.

And none of it kept her children, or Lindsay, safe.

If a mother can recognize that she is deteriorating, ask for help repeatedly, enter the medical system and still arrive at the worst possible outcome, then we have to ask what our definition of “getting help” actually means.

A referral is not a safety plan.

A prescription is not coordinated care.

A screening form is not treatment.

Discharging a mother does not mean the danger has passed.

What postpartum psychosis is

Postpartum psychosis is not the baby blues. It is not ordinary postpartum anxiety, and it is not simply a more intense version of postpartum depression.

It is a rare and severe psychiatric emergency that affects approximately one to two people per 1,000 births. Symptoms can include delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, extreme agitation, confusion, rapidly changing moods and a dramatically reduced need or ability to sleep. It is often associated with bipolar disorder, including cases in which the person had never been diagnosed before pregnancy.

Someone experiencing psychosis may lose contact with reality. She may hear or see things that are not there. She may hold beliefs that feel completely real to her even when they are incomprehensible to everyone around her.

This does not mean that every mother with postpartum psychosis is violent. Most are not. Suggesting otherwise would deepen the very stigma that prevents women from telling the truth about frightening thoughts or symptoms.

It does mean that postpartum psychosis requires an immediate, specialized medical response. It cannot be treated as a difficult adjustment to motherhood or managed through a string of disconnected appointments.

Families also need to understand that the mother experiencing psychosis may not be able to identify it herself. To her, the altered reality may feel real. This is why education cannot begin only after a mother reports hallucinations. Partners, relatives, obstetric providers, pediatricians and emergency departments need to recognize the warning signs too.

Severe insomnia matters.

Abrupt changes in behavior matter.

Paranoia, confusion and unusual beliefs matter.

A mother saying that she does not feel like herself matters.

And when treatment is not working, sending her to the next appointment is not enough.

The two truths we keep trying to separate

Public conversations about this case often demand that we choose one truth.

Either we grieve the children or we acknowledge Lindsay’s illness.

Either we hold her responsible or we examine the care she received.

Either she is a monster or she is a victim.

But refusing complexity will not bring Cora, Dawson or Callan back, and it will not protect the next family.

Three children were killed by their mother. That truth is unbearable and cannot be softened.

Their mother was also severely mentally ill. The exact diagnosis, its timing and its effect on her legal responsibility are being argued in court, but the existence of a profound psychiatric crisis is not seriously in question.

Both truths belong in the same sentence.

Calling Lindsay ill does not reduce the value of her children’s lives. Examining the failures surrounding her care does not excuse what happened. Compassion is not acquittal, and accountability does not require us to deny the reality of mental illness.

Patrick Clancy has lived inside this complexity since the night he lost his children. In 2024, he told The New Yorker, “I wasn’t married to a monster. I was married to someone who got sick.”

He is the person who has paid the greatest possible price. If he can make room for the truth of Lindsay’s illness without diminishing his love for Cora, Dawson and Callan, the rest of us should at least be willing to listen.

When sympathy disappears

As a society, we say we support mothers struggling with their mental health. We share resources. We tell women to ask for help. We post about removing the stigma.

But our compassion often has conditions.

We feel for a mother while her illness remains familiar and nonthreatening. We understand the crying, the anxiety, the intrusive thoughts and the feeling that she has disappeared inside her own life.

Then the illness becomes frightening, and our language changes.

She is no longer sick. She is evil.

She is no longer a mother who needed care. She is a monster who should have known better.

The switch is immediate because it protects us from a more frightening possibility: severe mental illness can alter the mind of someone who was loving, capable and trusted. It can happen inside a family that looks safe. It can happen to someone with medical knowledge. It can happen even after she asks for help.

That does not mean every tragedy is preventable. It does mean “she should have gotten help” cannot be the end of our thinking, especially when she did.

This is bigger than one case

The Lindsay Clancy trial is receiving international attention, but the crisis surrounding maternal mental health is not limited to the cases that become headlines.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mental health conditions were the leading underlying cause of pregnancy-related death in data collected from 36 states between 2017 and 2019. That category included suicide and deaths related to substance use disorder. More than half of all pregnancy-related deaths occurred between seven days and one year postpartum, long after the single six-week visit that still functions as the end of postpartum care for too many women.

The same CDC analysis found that more than 80 percent of pregnancy-related deaths were preventable.

We should sit with that number.

Women do not stop being postpartum when the appointment calendar says they are. Their risk does not disappear because the baby is healthy, because they returned to work or because they can answer a questionnaire in a way that gets them out the door.

We need continuous mental health screening throughout pregnancy and the full postpartum year. We need providers trained to distinguish depression and anxiety from bipolar disorder, psychosis and medication-related activation. We need better communication between obstetricians, primary care providers, psychiatrists, emergency departments and pediatricians.

We need psychiatric facilities equipped to treat perinatal patients. We need clear discharge plans, rapid follow-up and support for the partners and relatives who are sent home with a person they love but little understanding of what to watch for.

And we need to stop making mothers prove they are close enough to catastrophe before we take them seriously.

Why VillageFor exists

VillageFor did not begin because Cait and I believed an app could solve every failure exposed by this case. It cannot. Postpartum psychosis requires urgent medical care, and technology will never replace trained clinicians, hospitalization or human intervention.

VillageFor began because we saw how many gaps a woman can disappear through before anyone understands the whole picture.

Her symptoms may live in one medical chart. Her sleep in another app. Her prescriptions with several providers. Her honest thoughts in a text to a friend. Her fear inside her own head.

No one sees the pattern until the pattern becomes a crisis.

We wanted to build something that helps women identify changes earlier, track their mental health over time and find language for what is happening before they are expected to walk into an appointment and explain it perfectly.

We wanted to help women answer the question so many mothers quietly ask: Am I okay?

On January 25, 2023, Cait and I read about a family destroyed. We saw three children whose lives had been taken. We saw a father facing a lifetime of grief. And we saw a mother who had entered the health care system again and again without receiving care that kept her family safe.

That day changed the direction of our lives.

We do not tell this story to make VillageFor part of the Clancy family’s tragedy. This story belongs to Cora, Dawson, Callan, Patrick and Lindsay. We tell it because their story became part of the reason we could no longer accept the system as it was.

No verdict will repair what happened in that Duxbury home.

Cora, Dawson and Callan will not come back. Patrick will continue living with a loss most of us cannot imagine. Lindsay will wake each day inside a body permanently injured by her suicide attempt and with the knowledge that her children are gone.

There is no silver lining large enough for that.

There is only a responsibility.

We can learn what postpartum psychosis looks like. We can believe women when they tell us something is wrong. We can build care that follows them beyond six weeks. We can demand coordination instead of another referral, monitoring instead of a handoff, and action before a family reaches the edge of disaster.

We can refuse to reduce this family to heroes and monsters.

And we can remember the three children at the center of it all.

Cora.

Dawson.

Callan.

May their names be more than a headline. May the lives they did not get to live push us to protect the mothers and children who are still here.

Love, Christy

If you believe you may be experiencing postpartum psychosis, please seek immediate medical care. The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline provides free, confidential support 24/7. Call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262).

If you feel you may harm yourself or someone else, call or text 988. If anyone is in immediate danger, call 911.

Sources and further reading

• Associated Press: Lindsay Clancy goes on trial over whether postpartum psychosis drove her to kill her three children

• CNN: Opening statements begin in the Lindsay Clancy trial

• Boston.com: Timeline of Lindsay Clancy’s mental health treatment

• The New Yorker: The Aftermath of a Mother’s Unfathomable Act

• Postpartum Support International: Postpartum psychosis symptoms and prevalence

• American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists: Treatment and Management of Mental Health Conditions During Pregnancy and Postpartum

• CDC: Pregnancy-related deaths reviewed in 36 states, 2017–2019

• National Maternal Mental Health Hotline

This is not my usual Wednesday post. You also may have noticed there was no post at all last week. Turns out running a company, keeping two toddlers alive, and writing a newsletter every single week was not, in fact, sustainable. Who knew. My bandwidth hit its ceiling, so I did the responsible thing and picked my kids and an actual nap over hitting publish. Sometimes the newsletter loses. It’s fine. It’ll recover. I did not write you an apology bouquet, I wrote you tonight’s chaos instead, so let’s call it even.

Tonight I’m struggling, and I’m hoping that writing it down does one of two things: makes me feel better, or makes one of you feel less alone. Either outcome works for me. If you’re the judging type, keep it to yourself. No mom shaming allowed on this newsletter, ever.

The mom guilt is thick tonight. Like, could-spread-it-on-toast thick.

Here’s the scene. I was solo parenting bedtime with our two toddlers, 4 and 2. Before anyone comes for my husband for skipping bedtime duty, hear me out. He was out getting me a celebratory ice cream sundae before the shop closed, on what was his first hour alone since 7:30 that morning, when he took over solo parenting so I could go to a work event. First real break the man had all day. And he spent it buying dessert for someone else instead of doing literally anything for himself. A saint, truly, if saints also forget to eat their own ice cream (more on that later).

This sundae has seen things. Mostly me crying into it.

Our kids have never slept well. Not “rough patch,” not “just a phase.” Both of them have needed backup since day one. I’ll take some of the blame here, I was the one holding them through every nap and every bedtime that first year, so maybe I built the problem myself. But here we are, toddlers who still need a body in the room. I’m not talking about a little stalling and a couple “get back in bed”s. Some nights it takes two hours. One of us has to physically be present until they’re asleep. We trade off shifts like it’s a job, because it is one.

Most nights this is actually the best part of my day. Our son has hit the age where he wants to talk before bed. Full recaps of his day, made up stories, a solid chunk of one-on-one time with whoever’s on duty. I know this stage won’t last forever. Eventually he’ll ask us to just close the door and leave him to it. (Not ready. Do not speed this up.) Our daughter sings to herself or flips through a book, but she needs to know a parent is camped out on her floor until sleep actually finds her.

Tonight was not one of those nights.

I’d been gone all day and wanted real time with them. I figured they’d go down fast. Sunday nights after a full weekend outside usually mean lights out by 7:30, easy. Oh, if only I’d known what was coming. I definitely would not have sent my husband out for a sundae.

Screaming. From both rooms. For 45 straight minutes.

I was bouncing between doors like a very tired ping pong ball until I hit a wall. Overstimulated, over-touched, completely out of gas. I’d talked to people all day, grocery shopped, sat through an hour car ride, walked straight into dinner and bath time with zero breaks. All I wanted was to get them down, wash my face, eat my ice cream, and lie flat. That was the whole dream. Instead I got a full nightmare with a live audience.

My son got my stern voice when I hit my limit. Something like, “Do not get out of that bed again or you’re losing your stuffy.” He knew I meant it. We don’t do the leave-the-room-on-a-threat thing with him normally, so I’m sure he felt confused, maybe even a little hurt. I told him I’d be back once I got his sister down, or really, once I finished trying for the fifteenth time. I left both doors open so I could at least hear that he was okay from the hallway.

At some point, while I was rocking his sister, Kaiden fell asleep. No mom snuggles. No “I love you.” No recap of his day. And that’s exactly when the guilt clocked in for its shift.

The thoughts started, “You’re a bad mom.”, “He deserved to fall asleep happy and you’re the reason he didn’t.”, “This is why he’ll hate you one day.”.

I know this room in my head well. It’s where I go when mom grief gets heavy, and once I’m in there I tend to stay for hours. I’ll probably still be sitting in it tomorrow morning. I’ll make his morning extra special, extra “I love yous,” and I’ll apologize for raising my voice.

So here’s my actual question, the one I don’t have an answer to: does this ever get better?

I run a company built around maternal mental health. I know, logically, that one hard night doesn’t cancel out a hundred good ones. If a friend told me this story, I’d tell her she’s a good mom having a bad night, and that it doesn’t define her. But when it’s me, a different voice shows up. Do better. Be better. They deserve better. Funny how the advice I hand out for free never seems to apply to the person giving it.

At least I ended the night with the ice cream sundae my husband handed me before heading back upstairs, his own sundae abandoned and quietly melting on the counter, to get our daughter down, who was still refusing to sleep two hours past bedtime. Here’s the video, him turning on her music box and running interference on the “mama” screaming until she finally calmed down enough to sleep. MVP of the night, hands down. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want another baby (WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU BRAIN. STOP THINKING THOSE THOUGHTS).

If this landed for you, send it to a mom who needs to hear she’s not the only one white-knuckling bedtime tonight. And if you’re in it right now, the guilt, the overstimulation, the two a.m. spiral, that’s exactly why VillageFor exists. You’re not supposed to do this alone.

Love, Christy

Dear reader,

Three weeks into this newsletter and I already have a guest columnist. Today’s issue looks a little different, because for the first time, I’m not holding down all four corners by myself. Keep reading, it’ll make sense.

Here’s how this works, in case you’re new: every Thursday you get four things, a check-in from me, a question answered by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, three small wins from readers, and one thing you can try before the week resets. Today’s check-in is about how this whole newsletter, and VvillageFofor, exist in the first place. The other three are coming straight from Cait, my co-founder, and honestly the better half of VvillageFfor’s brain. She’s been in this from day one, so today she gets the mic.

The Check-In

People come into your life out of nowhere, and you never know in the moment how much they’re going to end up mattering. I met Cait, my now co-founder and one of my closest friends, back in 2021. I’d just started a new job headquartered in Salt Lake City. I’m from Boston, and part of the deal was flying out to Utah once a month. One week into that job, I found out I was pregnant with my first, Kaiden. Telling a brand new employer you’ll need leave in nine months, when you already have crippling anxiety, is not a great time.

Cait and I are opposites. Not “we like different music” opposites. Actual opposites. She is smart in a way I don’t run into often, one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met inside and out, doesn’t swear, gives people the benefit of the doubt, and can put you in your place so gently you don’t even clock it as a scolding until later. I’ve heard her curse maybe three times in five years. I, on the other hand, am loud, crude, swear like I was raised on the East Coast (because I was), covered in tattoos, and working on not letting my resting bitch face read as “judgmental asshole” (I promise I’m nice once you get past the face).

The one thing we had in common when we met: we were both pregnant, due about a month apart. She was expecting her second, I was expecting my first. I didn’t have many friends with kids yet, so Cait became my go-to for “is this normal.” I remember the exact moment I fell for her as a friend, when she described in detail what was about to happen to my nipples. She was right about all of it, and I’m forever grateful for the warning before I found out the hard way.

We became fast friends. She put up with my swearing. And then we both had our babies, and everything about our friendship changed.

It started with a text from Cait, checking on me. Keep in mind, she was postpartum herself with a toddler at home. She knew what postpartum could do to a person’s mind, because she’d lived it. She spent almost four months barely holding it together before she made herself book a doctor’s appointment to figure out what was wrong. Her version didn’t look like the textbook. She wasn’t crying in bed. She wasn’t sad. She felt nothing, and in my opinion, that is scarier. She describes it like all her feelings, happy, anxious, grateful, were sealed inside a balloon floating just out of reach. What she could feel was numb, and rage. Postpartum rage, the term nobody warns you about, the one that makes you feel like garbage the second you snap at someone you love.

It’s wild that pregnancy and postpartum put a person through the biggest hormonal shift the human body ever goes through, and we still expect her to be a fully regulated, grateful, capable adult the whole time. Anyway.

Cait kept texting. She flagged that I was struggling before I would have said it myself, and she stayed in it with me through some of my worst thoughts. She’d promised herself, after her first, that she’d never let someone she loved go that long without being told to get help. She looked up my insurance, found every therapist in my network taking new patients, and got me a way in. She had a newborn and a toddler at home. There are people who show up because they have to, and people who show up because they want to. I have friends I’ve known since childhood who never sent a single text asking how I was doing. You find out who your people are during the hard years.

We went back to work (if you can call it that, when neither of us had real leave or pay). We kept getting closer. That’s trauma bonding, and nothing trauma bonds two people faster than being hormonal, postpartum, and stuck in a toxic job together. I knew I loved her the day she asked if I wanted a pair of grippy socks too, while she ordered hers for her hospital bag. Mine wouldn’t have been for delivery. We both knew exactly what kind of break I meant, and neither of us said it out loud.

Then there was the night Kaiden wouldn’t go down. It was 11pm, I was on his floor next to the crib, and I cracked. I’d just read about a mom near me, a completely preventable tragedy, a woman who did everything right and asked for help over and over and still lost. I texted Cait: “we need to change postpartum for women. this can’t keep happening.” She wrote back: “i’m in. what do you have in mind.” That’s the actual birth of VillageFor.

That’s Cait. Five years of being the calm one, the one who actually knows what she’s talking about, and the whole reason VillageFor exists in the first place. So today the other three things are hers, not mine. Same three things, different voice, and you’ll know it’s her because nobody swears.

Ask the Village

“I know it’s important to let our kids try new things, and I don’t want them to feel my nervous energy when they’re doing something brave. Are there any exercises or tools I can use to calm my own anxiety while I’m watching them do something scary or new?”

Honestly, my go-to for basically every flavor of mom-anxiety is the same thing: breathing on purpose, before you need it. Sounds too simple to work, but there’s real science behind why slowing your breath down calms your nervous system in real time, and your kid can’t pick up on panic you’re not putting out. I put my favorite version of this below in One Thing to Try, so keep scrolling.

Got a question for a future issue? Just reply to this email. Christy will get you a real answer from a real provider, not just one of us winging it.

Small Wins

Three tiny things from my week that actually helped:

1. My ten month old cut her second tooth and we didn’t even notice it coming, because she still slept great. I’ll take the win where I can get it.

2. I went back to my morning gym routine and got there before my kids woke up. I used to be a 5am gym person every single day, and then I had my third and that fell apart completely. Which was fine. My body needed the sleep more than it needed the workout, so I let it go. Ten months later, I’m finally sleeping enough to get back to those early mornings. My mental health is so much better when I do one thing for myself before I hear “Mom!” a hundred times before breakfast.

3. I really, really wanted takeout last night and made a real dinner instead. Please clap.

Want yours in next week’s issue? Reply with one tiny thing that helped you this week, no matter how small or unimpressive it feels.

One Thing to Try

I recently learned a breathing exercise that resets your nervous system, and there’s actual science behind why it works (Stanford researchers, not just moms on the internet). I practice it in the car, because that’s a moment in my day when I’m already sitting still and can’t do anything else anyway. Stack it onto something you’re already doing, it’s easier than finding new time for it.

Two quick breaths in through the nose, one long breath out through the mouth. Repeat for about a minute.

Belly breathing (the technical term is diaphragmatic breathing): breathe in deeply through your nose and let your belly expand all the way around, 360 degrees. As you exhale, focus on lifting your pelvic floor. Extra credit, but worth it.

If you want a nudge to actually notice how you’re doing instead of just pushing through it, the VillageFor app takes about a minute to log an honest check-in. No pressure, just an option if you want one.

That’s this week’s Village Thursday, guest edited by the woman who was willing to take a risk with me, to put our own vulnerability aside and build something for all the future women we wished we’d had. Two moms running a startup, trying to be good mothers, occasionally remembering we’re allowed to want something for ourselves too, and mostly succeeding at not losing our shit at the dog. Mostly.

Love, Christy & Cait, Co-founders of VillageFor

Dear reader,

The photo above is Kaiden, fifteen minutes after he was born. He still looks grey in it. I hate that picture. I hate that it’s the only one I have of his first moments, and I hate that every time I look at it I’m back in that room hearing the words “he isn’t breathing.”

Last week I left you right there, in that exact moment. Silent baby, a code being called, five words no mother should ever have to hear. I promised you’d get the birth plan story and what actually happened in that room right after. So here we are.

Most women, if they get an uneventful pregnancy, at least get to dream up their ideal labor plan. Candles, a playlist, whatever. Mine started at 32 weeks when my OBGYN handed me a questionnaire and said, “your homework is to write down your labor plan.” Homework. At 32 weeks pregnant. Sure, let me just pencil in exactly how my body is going to behave during one of the most unpredictable events a human can go through.

I was realistic about it though. My sister’s been an L&D nurse for years, she’s seen some shit, and I sat in the room for both of her daughters’ births. I wasn’t walking in thinking this was going to be a Pinterest board come to life. I knew my ideal plan, and I knew it could go sideways in about four seconds. I also knew how to advocate for myself, a weirdly specific silver lining of watching my dad go through cancer treatment. Ask the questions. Understand the pros and cons. Then do what actually makes you comfortable as the patient, not what a pamphlet says you should want.

Strip it all the way down and the real plan was just this: both of us walk out of that hospital okay. It’s wild that it’s 2026 and women and babies still die in childbirth. You’d think we’d have figured that out by now.

Anyway. That birth plan went straight out the window. No skin to skin. Dad didn’t cut the cord, wasn’t even offered.

So here’s what actually happened. A team of nurses surrounded him. Code being called. Clinical jargon flying back and forth. And silence. No cry. After what felt like several lifetimes, they got him breathing, but not on his own. Once he was stable, they put him on a CPAP machine.

I learned most of this the next day, when the NICU pediatrician finally sat us down, because apparently I had to wait twelve more hours to understand what was happening to my own son. Cool system. Really building trust here. A CPAP, for anyone as clueless as I was, gives continuous airway pressure. Keeps the lungs open, reduces the effort of breathing, lets the lungs heal without the constant strain of gasping for air. I delivered at 38 weeks, which medically counts as full term with fully developed lungs. But Kaiden had air bubbles in his lungs, tiny air sacs that ruptured and let air escape into the surrounding tissue and chest cavity. Translation: my son had been alive for two hours and was already starring in his own medical drama.

What caused it? Nobody really knows for certain. Educated guesses only. Maybe my COVID diagnosis, and I later found out that guilt spiral wasn’t totally irrational, full term babies born to moms who had COVID during pregnancy actually have triple the risk of respiratory distress at birth. So the shame was earned, at least biologically, even if it wasn’t useful to sit in. Maybe it was “wet lungs.” Or maybe, and I wish I were making this up, what they officially call “wimpy white boy syndrome.” Real term. Used on labor and delivery floors constantly. Turns out baby girls’ lungs mature faster in the womb, something about the surfactant that keeps airways open showing up on their timeline sooner, so white baby boys statistically draw the short straw on breathing struggles at birth. Great, so my son wasn’t just fighting for his life, he was fighting it as a walking statistic. He was called wimpy more times than I can count during our stay, which is rude, because that same “wimpy” baby is now a four year old who slams doors for sport. Can we maybe workshop a kinder name for a newborn just figuring out how lungs work? Just a thought.

Whatever caused it, we got lucky landing at a Boston hospital known for its NICU. So many sharp, fast-moving women stepped in and made life-saving calls in real time. When he first came out, he looked grey, like a Smurf delivered him, not me. That photo up top was taken fifteen minutes later, after he’d already improved. Which tells you exactly how bad those first fifteen minutes actually were.

Your baby’s birthday is supposed to be one of the happiest days of your life. For me, that photo and that day are just not that. They’re just negative, and I’m still figuring out what to do with that.

Then they wheeled him away, and the room emptied out. Just me, my husband, the doctor still finishing up whatever she needed to do, and the nurse who’d gotten me through labor. I can tell you exactly what it feels like to sit in a room in total silence after total chaos, blood still on the floor, medical tools scattered everywhere from trying to get your son to breathe. Everything changes in an instant, and then you’re just sitting there with the wreckage.

I asked the nurse, “now what.” She said, “now you rest, mom.” Rest. Like I was going to get a nap in after that, like my body had a mute button I could just hit. Every time I shut them I replayed the whole scene. We sat in that room for hours, just the two of us, until a bed opened up on the postpartum floor. And because I still had COVID, contact with staff was kept to a minimum the whole time.

First thing I did once I could, I called my dad. “Hi daddy,” and he burst into tears immediately, just from the sound of my voice. Core memory. He was crying for his baby while his baby was crying for hers. We stayed on the phone for over an hour. He was so worried and so helpless, stuck three hours away, unable to just get in the car and hug me.

Growing up, my dad used to say “you’ll understand once you become a parent” any time he talked about the constant worry, wanting only good things for his kids, never wanting anything bad to touch us. I always nodded along like I got it. I didn’t, not really, not until that phone call. Sitting there with my own baby fighting for his first breaths, I finally understood exactly what he meant. We weren’t just father and daughter on that call. We were two parents, holding the same fear at the same time, worrying about our babies together.

I figured once I got to my recovery room things would ease up. Instead I found out I still had another 12 hours minimum on the mag drip, precaution for preeclampsia. No eating. No getting out of bed. That’s when I really lost it. Real tears, the kind that hurt so much I could feel it in my stitches. No baby to hold. No skin to skin. No sweet baby coos. No watching my husband change his first diaper. Just me, stuck in a bed, itching out of my skin from the medication, feeling like I’d been hit by a bus, backed over, then flagged down for a second pass because the driver felt like he’d missed a spot.

I didn’t sleep that night. Stared at the ceiling, listened to my husband’s breathing, could tell he was trying to hold it together for me while quietly falling apart himself. At one point he asked if he could go see Kaiden since he’d tested negative. The nurse’s response: “sorry, you’ve been around your wife too long, we can’t risk it. If you want to leave to get tested and wait for results, you can, but you won’t be able to come back in with her.” Brutal choice to hand someone. I would have supported whatever he picked.

The next morning brought some relief. Off the mag drip, finally. Stood up for the first time in over 24 hours. Took a shower and felt like an actual human again. An Italian sub was on its way to me, which, don’t underestimate what that meant. And we finally talked to Kaiden’s doctor, who laid out the four tests he’d need to pass before he could leave the NICU: a room air challenge, an x-ray, a spell-free countdown, and an oral feeding and growth check.

I’d been pumping every three hours trying to get my milk in, handing it off to nurses to run up to the NICU. I felt like a full time milk maid, and I hated every second of it. That pump whine still gives me a physical reaction. He failed the first test, over and over. So we settled in. We weren’t leaving anytime soon.

The first real joy of that whole stretch was that Italian sub. First bite, exactly as good as I’d been imagining. Small wins, I guess.

It’s strange how fast a day can flip. I walked into that hospital with a plan, a checklist, a version of “in control” that felt reasonable. Less than 48 hours later I was learning what my son’s lungs sounded like through a monitor and eating a sandwich like it was the only stable thing left in my life. That’s the part nobody puts on the questionnaire.

I realize I’ve done it again. This was supposed to wrap up this week and it’s turning into yet another two parter.

Next week: meeting the lactation consultant who told me not to even bother trying to breastfeed (reader, I proved her very wrong), the endless hours of waiting, nurses who cried right along with me, the sleep deprivation, FaceTiming my two day old son because thank god for technology, and the shame, anxiety, and sadness that started quietly building, the kind that would eventually turn into a full mental health crisis further into postpartum.

If this letter landed, send it to someone who needs it. And if you’re in the thick of it right now, the grief, the motherhood, the waiting rooms, that’s exactly why villagefor exists. You’re not supposed to do this alone.

Love, Christy

Dear reader,

Welcome to the very first Village Thursday. I’ve been planning this one for a week and I’m just going to say the quiet part out loud: I have zero reader replies, zero submitted questions, and zero crowdsourced small wins to work with, because this newsletter is three weeks old and you all are, understandably, still deciding if I’m worth your inbox space.

So today it’s just me, holding up all four corners of this thing by myself. Starting next week, you’re doing some of the lifting. That’s the deal.

Here’s how this works going forward. Every Thursday you get four things: a real check-in from me, a question answered by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about, three small wins from readers, and one thing you can try before the week resets. Today, consider it a demo. Reply to this email and you’re in next week’s issue.

The Check-In

Three weeks into this newsletter and I’ve cried while writing twice, deleted a paragraph about my dad three times before I let myself keep it, and found out that hitting publish never stops being terrifying, no matter how many times I do it.

Meanwhile, villagefor did not get the memo that I was busy having feelings. We launched on Android. I coded and designed our entire website myself, with an assist from AI, which might genuinely be the best coworker I’ve had, second only to my actual co-founder. We’re heads down raising our pre-seed round. And we just finalized a five year clinical research partnership with Vanderbilt, focused on one of the most overlooked populations in maternal health: pregnant women who experienced neglect or maltreatment in their own childhood.

So, a decent week. Somewhere in there I also kept two kids alive.

The thing nobody warns you about with a newsletter like this is that writing about the worst years of your life doesn’t get easier with practice. It just gets more familiar. I’ll take familiar.

Ask the Village

Normally this is where a therapist, doula, or someone from the villagefor provider network answers a real question one of you sent in. Since nobody’s sent one in yet (again, fair, we just met), I’m using the question I get asked more than any other, in DMs, at parties, from my own sister:

“How do I know if I’m just tired, or if it’s actually postpartum depression?”

I asked one of the therapists in our villagefor network instead of guessing, because I am many things but a licensed clinician is not one of them. Her answer, paraphrased: tired gets better with sleep. Depression doesn’t. If you’re getting rest and still feel numb, hopeless, or like you don’t recognize yourself, or if you’re having thoughts of harming yourself or your baby, that’s not exhaustion. That’s a signal to get help right away. There’s no shame in that, no gold star for white-knuckling it alone, and no extra credit for waiting until it gets worse before you say something.

Got a question for a future issue? Just reply to this email. I’ll get you a real answer from a real provider, not just me winging it.

Small Wins

Nobody’s sent me theirs yet, so here are mine. Low bar, I know.

1. I drank an entire cup of coffee this week while it was still hot. Historic.

2. I said “I don’t have capacity for that” out loud to another human and did not immediately apologize for it.

3. I let my kid wear two different patterns that clashed violently to school because fighting about it wasn’t worth either of our energy.

That’s it. That’s the bar. Next week I want yours, no matter how small or unimpressive they feel. Reply to this email with one tiny thing that helped you this week. I’m putting the first three in next Thursday’s issue.

One Thing to Try

Before this week resets, do one thing that’s just for you and doesn’t benefit another single person in your house. Doesn’t have to be big. Sit in the car for five extra minutes after you park. Let someone else load the dishwasher wrong. Say no to the thing you’d normally say yes to just to avoid the guilt. Pick whatever’s realistic for the week you’re actually having, not the week you wish you were having.

If you want a nudge to actually notice how you’re doing instead of just pushing through it, the villagefor app takes about a minute to log an honest check-in. No pressure, just an option if you want one.

That’s the first Village Thursday. Next week it’s got your questions in it, your small wins in it, and hopefully a little less of just me talking to myself.

Love, Christy

Dear reader,

Last week I left you in the delivery room, code called, fifteen nurses flooding in. I promised you the NICU story next. It’s still coming.

But I need one week off from reliving my own trauma before I write that one, ideally before I check myself into what Brian and I call a grippy sock vacation. So today we’re doing something different. Call it a commercial break. Except the commercial is me, trying to figure out who I am now that “surviving” isn’t my entire personality.

We’re talking about identity. Who I am outside of mom, wife, and CEO. Turns out that’s a harder question than getting a toddler to eat a vegetable.

Motherhood changes you. Groundbreaking, I know. Somebody alert the media, tell them to hold the front page for “woman has baby, is different now.”

But nobody tells you how much, or how long it takes to notice.

I have an almost 5 year old. I still don’t believe that sentence when I type it.

In the time it took him to go from a newborn to a kid who negotiates bedtime like he’s billing me by the hour, I’ve been through grief, postpartum depression, working full time, and a to-do list that regenerates like a video game boss. I’ve tried to stay in shape, kept a marriage strong between bedtime routines, date nights that are really just sitting in silence because we’re both too tired to form a sentence, and refereeing sibling meltdowns over who gets to push the elevator button. I’ve held onto friendships that take real effort to maintain, gotten pregnant again, built a house, and built a company that started with one text to my friend and somehow turned into an app that’s actually on the App Store.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, buried under what the mom blogs love to call “the mental load,” I lost myself. Not in a slow, poetic way. More like I looked up one day and realized I hadn’t had an original thought about myself in years. Every thought started with “cancer,” “treatment,” “I’m sorry for your loss,” “the baby,” “the house,” “the to-do list,” and oh, can’t forget the damn dogs. It all ended with me falling asleep mid-sentence at 8:47pm. I’d scroll through old photos of myself out with friends, laughing at something I can’t even remember, and think, who was she? What did she care about? I could not tell you, and that scared me more than almost anything else that happened in those five years.

There’s actually a word for what I was going through. Matrescence. It’s the identity shift you go through becoming a mother, the same way adolescence is the shift into becoming an adult. Nobody hands you a pamphlet on it. Nobody tells you it’s a real, documented thing and not just you losing your mind. I found out the word existed years after I lived through it, which felt about right for how this whole thing has gone.

I know I’m not the 23 year old who lived for group texts and Thirsty Thursdays, thought the next promotion would finally make her feel like she’d made it, and felt completely invincible because nothing bad had happened to her yet. That girl had a closet stuffed with tops she wore once and a shopping habit that could fund a small country. She hasn’t been seen since 2019.

That girl is gone. She’s not walking back through that door, and if she did, I don’t think we’d have much to talk about.

But losing her opened up a question I never had time to ask before. Who am I outside of being a mom? Outside of being a wife? What actually fills me up that has nothing to do with either of those?

Here’s one answer that surprised me. I used to hate being alone. FOMO ran my entire calendar in my 20s. If I wasn’t around people, something felt wrong, like I was missing my own life while it happened somewhere else without me.

Now? After years of being climbed on, needed, and touched out before 8am most days, alone feels like oxygen. I’ll take headphones, a podcast, and a solo lap around the mall over most social plans. I’ll sit at a coffee shop by myself and just exist, no phone, no plan, no group chat blowing up. I used to think that sounded sad. Now it’s the closest thing I have to a spa day, and it’s free, which as a mom, matters more than it should.

I’m also trying to find a hobby again. An actual one, not “scrolling my phone for two minutes before I pass out.” I don’t know what it is yet. Painting, running, something with my hands, I’m open to all of it. But for the first time in years I have the energy to even want one, which feels like its own small miracle.

I didn’t go looking for VillageFor. I was still knee deep in trying to remember what I even liked before I had kids when it showed up anyway, in that one text to my friend at 11pm, half joking, half not. It didn’t wait around for me to finish figuring myself out first.

I’m obsessed with it. Not in a cute “I love my job” way. In a “I think about this at 11pm, I wake up with new ideas, I’ve had to physically set my phone down mid-conversation with Brian because I thought of something” way. It’s the first thing in years that has nothing to do with keeping anyone alive in the day-to-day sense, and everything to do with who I actually am. It’s creative. It’s strategic. It’s built entirely out of the worst 3 years of my life, and somehow that makes it feel more mine, not less. I’m not just surviving my story anymore. I’m doing something with it.

That is a very different kind of obsessed than 23 year old me, who was mostly just obsessed with what she was wearing out on Friday.

Let’s do a real recap of the eras, because I think a lot of you will see yourselves in at least one of these.

Teens: figuring out who I was while also very actively trying not to become a teen pregnancy statistic. AIM away messages as a personality trait. Fully convinced that whatever drama was happening that week was the most important thing that had ever happened to anyone, ever, in the history of the world.

20s: broke, chasing fashion, the best party, the best bar, meeting everyone possible, saying yes to everything because FOMO was basically a religion. Student loan payments I mostly ignored. Sunday scaries that started Saturday at 4pm. A whole personality built around “living for the weekend” and thinking the next job title would finally make me feel like I’d arrived. Deeply surface level. Deeply fun. I don’t regret a minute of it, and I also would not survive it now.

Early 30s: building a family, then getting hit with grief and tragedy I never saw coming and could not have prepared for, then mostly just trying to keep everyone, including myself, alive through it. This was the era where I stopped recognizing my own reflection some mornings. Where “I’m fine” became a full sentence I said more than any other. If you’ve been here, you already know there’s no getting through it gracefully. You just get through it.

Now, second half of my 30s: I say no to things, especially if they pull me away from my family. FOMO doesn’t run my calendar anymore, I run my calendar. I protect my own time like it’s a line item in a budget I will fight you over. I’m fired up about being a CEO, about building something from nothing, about learning something new every single day. I taught myself to vibe code last month and I’m still walking around in shock about it. And somehow, at the exact same time, I’m also out here trying to figure out my next hobby, like a very tired 35 year old with a mortgage trying to find herself again for the first time since college.

Christy in the thick of postpartum depression could not have imagined a single sentence in that last paragraph. She would have laughed at you, then cried, then laughed again.

The hardest three years of my life built VillageFor. Nobody plans it that way. You don’t sit in the worst month of your life thinking “this is going to turn into a company someday.” You’re just trying to survive Tuesday. But somewhere along the way, survival turned into a mission, and the mission turned into the thing that’s fueling me more than anything has in over a decade.

I finally feel like myself again. Not the 23 year old version. Not even the person I was before any of this happened. Someone new. Someone I like. A lot.

And right on cue, some tiny voice in the back of my head whispers, “what if we had another baby.”

Ah. The life, man.

Next week, we go back into that hospital room. The code. The NICU. Ten days without holding my son. I promise.

Love, Christy

Dear reader,

Yesterday was three years. Three years since my dad died. June 30th. Father’s Day was two weekends ago. Now I’m in the countdown to his birthday on July 10th. My husband’s birthday. The same damn day.

Two weeks of grief and celebration stacked on top of each other. Punch in the gut disguised as a party.

For years we celebrated them together. Shared cakes. Birthday parties. The two of them had this weird bond that I still don’t fully understand. They just got each other in a way that made me feel left out of my own family. And my husband, who knows July 10th is the hardest day for me, who’s never asked for anything, who shows up for me more than I’ve ever celebrated him—he just keeps showing up. Which is beautiful and also infuriating because how do you celebrate someone’s birthday when you’re too busy crying about someone else’s death?

People talk about time healing all wounds like it’s some universal truth. Like there’s this magical point where you just stop hurting. Where July gets easier. Where you can think about your dad without your chest tightening. That’s bullshit. Time doesn’t heal grief. Time just makes you harder. Better at carrying it. Better at smiling through Father’s Day while internally screaming.

What time actually does is make you realize how much has changed. My daughter just turned two. She’ll never know him. She’ll never know the man who made me, who flew across the country just to see me, who would have absolutely lost his mind over her. I watch her grow and every milestone is a marker of time. Another month older. Another year further away from him. Another thing he’s missing.

Last week I left you here: strapped to a hospital bed, hooked up to a magnesium drip, on fire from the inside out, and still unclear about the balloon situation. I promised you’d finally get the shoulder story. So here we are.

After the magnesium drip burned through my entire body like my entire body was damn lightning, the sensation finally wore off. And I was doing good. Like actually good. I got breakfast. Took a nap. This is labor, I thought. Wow. This is going to be a cake walk for me.

If you don’t know me personally, I have an overwhelming amount of tattoos. Like, an entire arm sleeve. I got a bunch of them in my twenties thinking I had a high pain tolerance. Turns out I just had poor decision making and a fake sense of bravery. I thought maybe labor would be the same—just a bunch of needles and willpower. I was wrong about everything.

By 11pm I’d had the cervical dilation medication inserted four times. Just inserted right up there. It’s a long and slow process if you’ve ever been induced. You wait. Nothing happens. They insert it again. You wait some more.

By midnight I was feeling it. Like really feeling it. The contractions were building and I couldn’t move. I’d been in that hospital bed for almost twenty four hours at this point. No walking. No position changes. No distraction except my husband trying to rest because he’d also had zero sleep for the past forty eight hours. Every contraction I felt was maximized by ten because my body had nowhere to go. Nowhere to process it. Nowhere to escape.

And then they brought up the balloon again.

The damn balloon. I was hoping they would forget about it, honestly. Remember I had COVID, so no one wanted to be gowning up every thirty minutes to check on me. Nothing was happening. They were giving me another hour or two to progress before they inserted it.

They explained it again. A catheter balloon. They’d insert it inside me and then inflate it to help dilate me further. Like I was a human tire at a gas station. And I had so many questions they clearly didn’t want to answer. What exactly expands in there? How big does it get? What if it pops? Will my vagina ever be the same after a balloon and a baby? Can I pick the color? Do I get to name it?

The nurse looked at me like I was insane. She was probably right.

I wasn’t thinking about pushing a baby out. I wasn’t thinking about the fact that my vagina was about to stretch ten centimeters. I was thinking about this alien balloon situation and my absolute terror of the epidural. Those were the two things consuming my mind at midnight. And honestly, the balloon was scarier. At least I understood needles. Balloons inside your body was some sci-fi horror movie shit.

Luck, if you can call it that, was on my side.

I started to progress. By 3am I was ninety percent effaced. Minus one station. I still don’t know what the hell that means, but it was positive. It was progress.

At 4am my water broke on its own.

Hallelujah. No damn balloon. But now the real fun started.

I called the nurse. “I think my water just broke.”

Her response was immediate. “I think you might have peed yourself.”

Unless I literally just pissed a gallon of water, I in fact did not pee myself.

Twenty minutes later the real contractions hit like nothing I’d ever felt before.

Not the warm-up contractions. The ones that make you understand why people scream in labor. The ones that make you wonder if you’ve made a terrible mistake. The ones that feel personal.

And that same nurse told me my water hadn’t actually broken. That I wasn’t experiencing real labor yet. That I’d probably just peed myself.

I wanted to strangle her.

My sister called me at four in the morning. She’s been an L&D nurse for over ten years. She used to work at this same hospital. She was supposed to be in that room with me but COVID had other plans. For the next hour she walked me through every single contraction. Told me to focus on something on the wall. Really pay attention during the peak. Breathe. Just breathe.

Then she did what big sisters do. She called the nurse desk herself and told them to get someone in my room immediately. Said I couldn’t talk through my contractions anymore. Said she thought my water broke.

Two minutes later the same nurse who gaslit me about my water confirmed it had indeed broken.

Told ya, lady.

Five centimeters dilated. That’s what the check revealed. I’d been doing this for hours and I was only five centimeters. I looked at my husband and said the only thing that made sense in that moment.

“I can’t do this.”

Immediate request for an epidural.

I had been terrified of the epidural the entire pregnancy. Terrified of the needle. Terrified of the idea of something going wrong. Terrified of being paralyzed. All the things you convince yourself of when you’re scared. Forty five minutes later I was facing that fear anyway because at that point it was either the needle or lose my mind.

The anesthesiologist was incredible. Calm. Patient. Didn’t make me feel like I was being dramatic. Got me set up and ready.

I puked all over him directly after he finished.

Then the most pleasant thing I’ve ever experienced in my life kicked in. That epidural was like clouds opened up and angels sang. I could still feel everything but I couldn’t feel the pain. My body could relax. My mind could actually form thoughts beyond oh god oh god oh god.

My husband finally slept. I finally slept. Two solid hours of bliss at four in the morning when everything had been nothing but pain and chaos.

Sunday morning. Eight o’clock. We’ve been at this hospital for almost two days. I’m fully dilated. I’m ready to push. I’m ready to meet my baby.

Twenty five minutes. That’s all it took.

Twenty five minutes of pushing with a COVID mask glued to my face because apparently making a woman with a respiratory illness push a baby out while being unable to breathe was just the protocol we were following. The absurdity of that moment wasn’t lost on me even in the middle of it.

A lot of you texted after last week asking about the shoulder. So here it is.

My husband is an athlete. Was an athlete, really. Talented enough that when he tore his shoulder, he basically said fuck it and kept pitching anyway. Our small hometown baseball team would have been screwed without him. So he kept pushing through it for years. Kept working out with a torn shoulder. Kept showing up even though his body was screaming at him.

But apparently his pain tolerance has limits. And those limits are exactly at the moment I need him to hold my leg up while I’m pushing a human out of my body.

(Just wait until you hear about the ruptured eardrum situation during our daughter’s birth. The man was basically deaf but too terrified to leave my side to get it checked, so he just kept screaming ‘WHAT?’ at every nurse. But that’s another story.)

The nurse who came in at seven in the morning was a god sent. She coached me through moments I genuinely didn’t think I could survive. My husband was right there the whole time telling me I was strong. That I could do this. You’re so strong. I love you. You can do hard things.

Which was great motivation until it came time to actually do the hard thing. Hold my leg up. And his shoulder was tapping out right when I needed him most.

So there I am, mid-contraction, being told I’m the strongest woman alive while my husband’s body is like nope, we’re done here. The nurse just smoothly took over without making it weird. Like she’d seen this movie before.

I give him endless shit about it now. Like, buddy, you pitched through a torn shoulder for a high school baseball team but you can’t hold my leg up while I’m literally pushing a human out? But he was there. He showed up. Just couldn’t physically do the one thing his body was being asked to do. Which is somehow hilarious and exactly who he is.

And then Kaiden arrived.

Silent.

I don’t know exactly what happened in the seconds after. Someone called a code. A button got hit. Fifteen nurses appeared in our room like they’d been waiting behind the curtain the whole time.

I heard no baby cry.

I looked at my husband. He looked as confused as I felt. I asked the sweet nurse who’d been coaching me through everything what was happening.

She said words I will replay in my head for the rest of my life.

“Mom, the good news is he has a heartbeat. The bad news is he isn’t breathing.”

The Christy from five years ago who heard those words couldn’t have imagined this version of me. Sitting on Martha’s Vineyard with a glass of wine. Watching my husband pitch to our son with his bad shoulder. Watching the baby who came into this world not breathing throw a ball to his dad like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

That Christy would have thought it was impossible. That the fear would never lift. That the weight of that moment would crush everything that came after.

Moments define us. They don’t have to break us. And some of the scariest seconds of your life can lead to the most ordinary, beautiful Sundays.

Next week: what happened in that room after the code. The NICU. Ten days without holding my son because I tested positive for COVID. The moment I finally held him and everything made sense.

If this letter landed, send it to someone who needs it. And if you’re in the thick of it right now—the grief, the motherhood, all of it—that’s why VillageFor exists. You’re not supposed to do this alone.

Love, Christy

Dear reader,

I had an emotional hangover after that first letter. I hadn’t revisited the beginning of my dad’s cancer diagnosis in a long time. Six years. It’s almost unbelievable to me that it’s been six years since 2020. So much has happened. So much has changed. Writing it all down last week cracked something open that I wasn’t expecting. Turns out putting your life on paper has a way of making you feel everything you’ve spent years learning to manage. Even with the high dose Zoloft. So here we are. Week two. Let’s keep going.

There’s a word I keep coming back to when I think about life before my dad’s diagnosis.

Freedom.

Not freedom in the big dramatic sense. Just the quiet, ordinary freedom of moving through your day without a low hum of dread underneath everything. Before July 4th, 2020, I wasn’t thinking about worst case scenarios. I wasn’t scanning every conversation for signs that something had shifted. I was just living.

You don’t know what that feels like until it’s gone.

All it takes is one phone call. One accident. One piece of news delivered in a voice that’s trying too hard to stay calm. And just like that you’re on the other side of it. The before and the after. And the after is heavy in a way that never fully lifts.

Post diagnosis life had a weight to it that I carried everywhere. The anxiety showed up in grocery store lines and middle of the night wake ups and random Tuesday afternoons when nothing was wrong but everything felt wrong. You learn to function. You learn to laugh and make plans and show up for your life. But underneath it all there is always this quiet, constant hum of scared.

Six years of that. I can feel it on my shoulders as I type this.

The only person who could make it disappear is no longer here.

Grief is funny like that. It doesn’t schedule itself. It shows up at any hour of any day, uninvited, in the middle of whatever you were doing. And it never arrives alone. It layers. One grief stacks on top of another until you’re carrying something so heavy you’ve forgotten what it felt like to put it down.

I just didn’t know yet that I was about to add another layer.

But life has a way of not asking permission before it hands you the next thing. In September of 2021 I was already carrying the grief of watching my dad fight. The grief of what cancer was slowly taking from him, from all of us. The heaviness of a life that would never feel completely free again. And I was blissfully unaware that another layer was coming. Nine months pregnant, convinced that buying Christmas decorations for a holiday three months away was an absolute priority.

Throughout my entire pregnancy I never once questioned whether I could handle the physical parts of being a mom. Changing diapers, giving baths, feeding schedules, buckling car seats, all of it. I had practiced on my little sister and my two nieces, three babies born within three years, and I had been there since day one for all of them. I knew what I was walking into practically. That part didn’t scare me.

What had kept me from wanting kids in the first place was never about the logistics. It was the emotional part. The fear that I would repeat what my mother did. That I would somehow pass down what she passed down. That the version of motherhood I had experienced on that side would show up in me when it mattered most.

But somewhere in the middle of everything, the grief, the treatments, the trying, the waiting, that fear had gone quiet. Not gone. Just quiet. I had prayed and cried and waited almost a year for this baby and I was ready to show up for him completely. Whatever that looked like.

What I wasn’t ready for was what my body was about to put me through.

My pregnancy was not easy. I want to be honest about that because I think we owe each other honesty about this stuff.

Morning sickness is a lie. It is not morning sickness. It is all day, every day, nothing helps, you are just surviving sickness. With my first pregnancy it lightened after the first trimester and became manageable, which I now know to be a gift because my second pregnancy was something else entirely. But even the easier version was hard. I wished away months of my pregnancy because my body just hates being pregnant and I still feel guilty about that sometimes.

We have romanticized pregnancy so completely that the moment you admit it’s hard people look at you like you’re ungrateful. You should have known what you were signing up for. Other people have it worse. At least your baby is healthy. And so women sit in doctor’s offices and say fine when they aren’t fine, because the alternative is being made to feel like they’re doing something wrong by struggling.

I know that feeling well. I lived it.

What I did love: feeling him move. Laying in bed with my hand on my stomach, feeling his kicks, knowing he was in there. That part I could have stayed in forever. Everything else my body could have done without.

By the time I hit 38 weeks I was ready. The nursery was done. Clothes were washed and put away. Car seat was installed. I was nervous but I felt prepared.

I was not prepared.

It was a Friday. Exactly 38 weeks. I woke up and decided it was a great day to waddle around HomeGoods and Hobby Lobby alone looking for Christmas decorations. Like I said, it was September.

Future me would like to have a word with past me about this decision, but past me was nine months pregnant, needed to feel in control of something, and had a very strong opinion about Christmas decor that could not wait.

My husband, bless him, said something along the lines of “this isn’t a great idea, what if something happens and you’re thirty minutes from home alone.”

I brushed him off. Obviously nothing was going to happen. I’m always right.

For the record: I am never, ever right.

Two hours in I felt great. Hobby Lobby was a success. I found everything I needed, and several things I did not need but absolutely required, for our first Christmas in the new house with a new baby. I was in a good mood. Life felt okay.

I was browsing HomeGoods when a wave of dizziness hit me so hard I almost went down right there in the throw pillow aisle.

Weird. Okay. I’ll just walk slowly.

Two minutes later it happened again.

I called my husband. Explained the situation. He said he was coming to get me right now.

I told him that was ridiculous because I had my own car and I was completely fine and I would just stop at Chick-fil-A on the way home because clearly my blood sugar was low and a sandwich would fix everything.

He disagreed. I went to Chick-fil-A anyway.

The dizziness did not go away.

By the time I got home my doctor’s response was immediate. Check your blood pressure. I don’t remember the exact numbers but I remember exactly what she said when she heard them.

“You’re coming in now. Bring the baby bags.”

There goes my plan of having clean hair for labor.

My husband was already grabbing the bags before I even hung up the phone.

It was Friday at 4pm in Boston. For anyone who doesn’t know Boston traffic, a drive that should take a little over an hour took us two and a half hours that night. We sat there barely moving, anxious and not talking much. My stomach dropped every time I thought about what was waiting for us on the other side of the highway. Part of me was terrified. Part of me was quietly, cautiously excited that we might actually be driving home with our baby in his car seat instead of in my stomach.

We checked into triage and waited. Boston hospitals are among the best in the country and the wait times will absolutely reflect that. For the next five hours I was poked, prodded, and scanned while we tried to figure out what was going on. Preeclampsia was ruled out when my protein test came back negative. Because of my history of blood clots things escalated quickly after that. By 3am I was in a CT scan checking for a blood clot in my brain.

We hadn’t eaten. It had been maybe 12 hours since that fateful Hobby Lobby trip. We were running on nothing but anxiety and bad hospital lighting.

By 6am the CT scan came back clear. They decided to induce me as a precautionary preeclampsia patient. We were finally in a room. Bags retrieved from the car. Breakfast ordered. I was starting to think maybe, just maybe, we were going to be okay.

Then a nurse came in to test me for COVID.

It was 2021. COVID was still very much a real and scary thing. We had been incredibly careful throughout my entire pregnancy, especially with my dad going through treatment. I had never tested positive. I thought nothing of the test. Just another box to check.

Forty five minutes later that same nurse came back. This time she brought two doctors with her. All three of them fully gowned, head to toe, goggles included.

I tested positive for COVID.

People who know me know my anxiety has a mind of its own. Worst case scenario is always my first stop. So the questions started immediately and they weren’t even about my own health. They were about my son. Is he okay. Will he be okay. What does this mean for him. That was the only thing that actually mattered to me in that moment. Everything else I could figure out. His health and safety were non negotiable.

They reassured me he was okay. But there was more news coming.

Because of the correlation doctors were seeing between COVID and preeclampsia, they were starting me on a magnesium drip as a precaution. Great, fine, whatever it takes. And then came the part nobody warned me about.

The magnesium drip meant I was not allowed to leave my bed. No walking the halls to move labor along. No bouncing on a ball. No active labor of any kind. From this point forward I would be completely bed ridden until he arrived. Oh and one more thing nobody mentions about the magnesium drip. The first fifteen minutes after it enters your body your skin feels like it is on fire. Not metaphorically. Your blood vessels dilate all at once and your entire body flushes with an intense wave of heat that patients describe as burning from the inside out. I would describe it as the worst thing that has ever happened to me that wasn’t actually dangerous, which is really saying something given the week I was having.

They also mentioned something about a balloon. Something about how they would be using one as part of the induction process. I was so overloaded with information at that point that I just nodded and smiled and absolutely did not process what they meant by putting a balloon in my, you know what. I probably should have asked. I did not ask. Future me had some questions.

I want you to picture me, a woman who had just spent her last free Friday waddling triumphantly through Hobby Lobby buying Christmas decorations in September, now strapped to a hospital bed, hooked up to a magnesium drip, on fire from the inside out, and still unclear about the balloon situation.

What a buzz kill.

I had imagined this moment so many times. I was going to be one of those women who walked the halls, stayed active, managed labor like a warrior. Instead I was horizontal, hungry, COVID positive, and being told to sit still and wait.

So I did what any reasonable person would do.

I tried to make the best of it.

This is part two. Next week I’ll take you into the labor itself, the balloon situation resolved, my husband’s face when things started moving fast, and the moment I finally got to meet my son. Also, a special preview for my husband who is probably reading this right now: next week I will be telling the internet about your shoulder. You know what you did.

If this letter found someone who needed it today, send it to them. And if you’re new here, last week’s letter is where it all starts.

Love, Christy

Dear reader,

I’m new here, so let me introduce myself. I’m Christy. Mom of two toddlers, CEO of a maternal mental health company, grieving daughter, and someone still figuring out who she is on the other side of a lot. This letter is the start of a journey where I write the honest version of all of it. The grief, the motherhood, the company I’m building, and the slow work of learning to know myself. I’m glad you’re here.

To understand where I am now, you need to know where it all started. And it started here.

June 30th marks three years since my dad died. I’ve been sitting with that for weeks, trying to figure out how to say what I want to say. And I keep coming back to the beginning.

Not the end. The beginning.

Because this story doesn’t start with a traumatic birth or a postpartum spiral or the moment I almost lost my son and lost myself in the process. It starts on July 4th, 2020, at a beach in Charleston, South Carolina, when my phone rang and everything changed.

We had just celebrated our one year wedding anniversary on June 1st. Life felt new and full and wide open.

Then my dad called.

Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Spread to his liver. Diagnosed at 57 years old.

I remember standing there, the kind of paralyzed where you can hear everything around you, people laughing, music, the ocean, and feeling completely detached from all of it. Like the world just kept going and nobody got the memo that mine had stopped.

I needed to get home.

I should tell you who my dad was, because this story doesn’t make sense without him.

When I was 11, my parents got divorced. At the time we thought it was going to ruin our lives. It didn’t. It was actually the best thing that ever happened to us, because what came out of it was something most people never get to experience. It became the four of us, me, my dad, my sister, my brother, against the world. Always.

My mother made choices after that divorce that slowly broke her relationships with all three of her kids. I’ve been estranged from her for years now. That’s a chapter for another day.

But my dad filled every single gap she left and then some.

He showed up to every school event, every sports game, never missed one. He taught us how to drive. He talked to us about sex and self respect and periods without flinching. He held us when our hearts were broken. He created a home that every single one of our friends wanted to be at. Not because it was fancy. Because of him. He hosted team dinners, he always had a dad joke ready, the cringier the better, and he laughed at his own jokes so hard he’d get wheezy. I inherited that laugh. I catch myself doing it now and I don’t even try to stop it.

He was the kind of person who would give his seat to an elderly person or a pregnant woman without thinking twice. He’d buy groceries for a stranger in need, overtip everywhere he went, stop to help someone without being asked. He cared for people deeply, in the quiet ways that don’t ask for recognition. To this day I hear stories from strangers about how he made an impact on their lives. People I’ve never met telling me who my dad was to them. It never gets old. It never stops taking my breath away.

He built family traditions that we still do together today, traditions we are now passing down to his grandkids. Sunday night dinners. Summers on the Maine coast. Disney trips. The kind of childhood that only makes sense in hindsight, when you realize how deliberate he was about building it.

The four of us talked every morning, throughout the day, and every night in a group text no matter where in the world we were. He was our safe place, our protector, the person who picked up every single time. He gave everything he had to the people he loved most.

He had this saying he came back to over and over. At the end of the day, family is everything. Everything else is replaceable.

Life can break bonds like ours during hard moments. Ours only got stronger. And it was because of him.

One time he flew all the way from Massachusetts to California just because he missed me and wanted to see our dog. That was my dad. That was exactly my dad.

I bawled like a baby when he dropped me off at college and drove away. Something in me already knew that home was him, not a place.

I never wanted kids.

That’s not something people expect to hear from someone building a maternal mental health app, but it’s true. My husband and I talked about it before we got married. The fear that I would somehow become my mother, repeat what she did, pass down what she passed down, it was too loud. I didn’t trust myself enough to risk it.

But when I heard the words stage 4 pancreatic cancer, something shifted deep in my gut. Not a decision exactly. More like a feeling I couldn’t shake loose.

He’ll never get to meet his grandchildren.

We moved back to Massachusetts that fall and moved in with my dad to become his full time caregivers. A pandemic was happening. Treatment was starting. And quietly, my husband and I decided to try for a baby.

What I didn’t know then was how hard that was going to be.

Month after month of trying. Month after month of negative tests. My dad watched us go through it firsthand. He saw the disappointment on our faces when the tests came back negative. He felt it with us. He never said the wrong thing. He just showed up, the way he always did, and held space for our sadness without making it bigger than it already was.

Meanwhile we were also his caregivers. We were managing treatment schedules, doctor appointments, the physical and emotional weight of watching the strongest person you know get worn down by chemo. We were doing all of that while grieving the family we were trying to build and holding onto hope for the one we were terrified of losing.

It was a lot. It was so much. And most days we just kept going because what else do you do.

We were days away from putting thousands down on fertility treatments. My husband was literally on his way to get his sperm tested when I took one more pregnancy test.

Positive.

I can still see the kitchen. Early morning, maybe 7am, light just coming in. My dad was there. He was the first person we told. We walked in and showed him the test and he cried like a baby. Full tears, so happy it had finally happened for us, so relieved after watching us struggle month after month. That moment lives in me.

Around the same time, my dad had a successful surgery to remove the tumor. The chemo was working. The tumors on his liver were shrinking. We bought a house in Massachusetts to be close to him. We let ourselves believe he had a real shot.

Hope is a complicated thing when someone you love is sick. It keeps you going and it makes the hard news hit that much harder every time it comes.

For a moment, a real moment, life felt okay.

And then the bottom fell out.

I don’t let myself look back at all of this very often. Writing it today, sitting with the full picture of what we went through as a family, feels like reopening something that never fully closed. It’s heavy in a way that’s hard to describe.

But on the days I let myself go back there, something unexpected happens. The hard parts make the good memories sharper. The Sunday dinners feel warmer. His laugh feels closer. The dad jokes land all over again, wheezy laugh and all.

Going back to the pain is how I find my way back to him.

He raised me to be strong and capable. I’m still learning to believe that about myself. But with June 30th just around the corner, sitting here with all of this, I think he knew exactly what he was doing.

This is part one of a story I’ve never told quite like this. Next week I’ll take you into what happened after my son was born, what postpartum actually looked like for me, and the moment I almost lost everything.

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to read it. And if you’re new here, I’m glad you found this.

Until next week,
Love, Christy