Born into Chaos: A Story of Unexpected Motherhood and Healing

I called her Ling Ling; it was an inside joke with the root long forgotten, and we just accepted its cultural appropriation and leaned into it, as most offensive New Englanders do. I was sitting at work, the same desk I occupied from 2009–2014. The year was 2012 when the call came through. Ling Ling was in labor—the baby that had sparked so much debate: can we afford her, do we want to be together, is this right? Left behind months ago, and the baby was coming. I was confused. What do you mean you are in labor and they told you to go home? In fact, Ling Ling went to the MGH ER in Boston upon having contractions and was told the process would be many hours; to go home, take Tylenol PM, and try to rest through it. After our friend, the live-in roommate, went to get the pills, she gave birth over the toilet while her partner was on the phone with 911. And here was the child in the world—and me on the other end of the call, saying, how did they fuck this up too?

When I arrived at the hospital, my mother in tow, I found the aunt—the one I looked up to. The one who never let anyone talk down to her, a general authority in the community but cool and well liked. Her archetype was strong and outspoken. But now she walked off with ease, no reaction to the nurses or the situation at all. She wasn’t mad. Not even frustrated. Just... fine with it.

I searched her face for outrage and found calm detachment. Her quiet acceptance made me feel painfully alone, like I was carrying the weight of outrage no one else could bear. Was that my cue? Was I overreacting? Why was everyone so accepting and passive of what I viewed and felt as an atrocity? I felt the heat in my chest, my fists tight in my sleeves, and suddenly stupid—like I was the only one still expecting someone to care out loud. If she wasn’t going to do anything, then why should I? I looked to her, hoping to follow her lead.

The dad came out, overflooded with emotion and poor fashion—a tuxedo T-shirt, filthy as usual. He was pretty quiet, leaving the room—I wasn’t sure to where. It was always hard to tell with him. He never played an active role. He looked at me like I was supposed to do something—like I held the answers, the control, the permission. Her silence on the situation made me want to ask questions: Has anyone talked to the nurses? Has anyone demanded accountability? But the silent acceptance of what happened shut me down inside, and I submitted to knowing that what I was feeling would never be addressed—that the hospital would get away with the mishandling and the suffering was unavoidable.

I remember thinking: This is what you allowed?

You let them send her home without even a physical exam. You didn’t even have your own car to drive her. You let her climb three sets of stairs, feel that panic and fear, the confusion of emergency—the blood, her thinking her child was dying, not being born.

And yet he didn’t seem to be processing any of that.

At the entry of the door, Ling Ling was in a quiet room, in the bed holding the baby on her lap, her arms limp, her face sunken, the corners of her mouth caked in white residue from the benzodiazepines they medicated her with. It isn’t usually a mother’s instinct to hand over her newborn child. The burden was too much for her. Her confusion had sunk her so deep within herself that the baby sat atop her lap like something she didn’t yet have the space for. She was so alone inside her thoughts. All I could do was lay beside her, hold her, and be with her—allow my body to share some of the burden she was trying to navigate alone. She looked up and handed the baby to my mother and sobbed, reaching for me. She exclaimed, “I only wanted you,” and I laid myself with my friend—my friend who had just birthed in trauma and disbelief, a friend who was scared and needed her mom, and that mom was me.

That’s how it was with us—like somehow everyone else had a set of information we didn’t, and we clung to one another for various reasons: myself more productive in the outside world, able to help her navigate finances and transportation; her being my constant counterpart for the inner ramblings inside my mind. We formed a team, trying to build each other up—strength covering weakness—but sometimes that left little room for others.

Now we had a new member of our team, a little girl who was already teaching and leading us. Don’t wait for someone else’s timeline—choose your own. She wanted to be born at home. She was paving her own path in a body with nothing more than a sucking reflex—now fearless, vocal, and strong, lifting her head from that first week. She came in paving a way forward for us—show up in your time, in your way, strong and purposeful.

For that moment, we were four women from different generations and bloodlines, pulled together into one room, one shared experience, and no one’s role fit due to circumstances. My mother jumped into the orchestrator role, her holding the baby, while I found myself stepping in to mother Ling Ling. I’m not sure what lived in my mother then—a superficial feeling of egoic nature, perhaps—that she got to hold the baby. And there I was, left looking at all our parts and wondering how much that little girl knew none of us really knew what we were doing.