And then he made sure it wasn’t.
He blocked her number, deleted their photos, and left Maya alone with a baby she had never planned for and a loneliness she had no idea how to survive.
The people around her all kept saying the same thing.
“You’ll feel different once the baby is born.”
“You’ll become a mother the moment you see him.”
“Everything will make sense when you hold him in your arms.”
But when the nurse placed the tiny baby against her chest, Maya felt something far colder than joy.
She felt trapped.
He was warm and helpless, wrapped in a white hospital blanket, his tiny mouth searching for comfort. Everyone in the room smiled as though a miracle had taken place. Maya looked down at him and waited for the magical feeling she had been promised.
It never came.
Instead, fear came.
Then anger at herself for being afraid.
Then shame for wishing, even for one terrible second, that she could go back to the life she had before him.
At home, that shame grew heavier.
The baby cried at night, and Maya began to hate the sound before she even hated herself for hating it. She fed him with one hand while scrolling through photos of her friends under colorful lights on her phone. She changed him while messages appeared on the screen asking where she had gone, why she never went out anymore, why she had become so boring.
Sometimes she looked at the baby and whispered:
“You took everything away from me.”
He would only look back at her, blinking.
He had taken nothing from her.
He had simply arrived.
Mrs. Linda, the elderly woman who lived across the hall, noticed the changes before anyone else did. She noticed that the baby cried for too long. She noticed Maya leaving with her hair perfectly styled and returning hours later with her heels in her hands. She noticed the empty look in Maya’s eyes every time someone called her “mother.”
One evening, Mrs. Linda stopped her in the hallway.
Maya was wearing a black dress and holding a small purse. Her lipstick was bright. Her perfume filled the narrow corridor.
“Maya,” Mrs. Linda said cautiously, “who is with the baby?”
Maya gave a small, tired laugh, as if the question had offended her.
“He’s sleeping.”
“That’s not what I asked you.”
Maya’s face hardened.
“I’m only going out for a little while. He’ll be fine.”
Mrs. Linda looked past her, toward the closed apartment door.
“He’s not a puppy you can leave with a bowl of water. He’s a newborn.”
Maya rolled her eyes, but the elderly woman did not move.
“You’re not a bad girl because you’re tired,” Mrs. Linda said. “But you will become a bad mother if you keep pretending that he can survive without you.”
For a moment, Maya looked as though she was about to cry.
