14 Days

Hi. It’s me. AB.

It’s night. I’m walking my dog.

I’ve had this story written for a long time. Every one of them.

But I’m going to practice what I preach.

I’m going to say it before I make it make sense.

Before I document it beautifully.

How about I just say it?

They gave me fourteen days.

Fourteen days between the results from the 35-week scan—the scan that found everything the 20-week one missed—and Ernie’s birth.

Fourteen days to prepare for a life that looked nothing like the one I had imagined.

Fourteen days.

It wasn’t enough time.

Not to understand it.

Not to prepare for it.

Not to become the version of myself I thought I needed to be.

Not to build the armor I knew I’d have to wear.

We had just moved from Los Angeles to Vermont. We had a barely two-year-old at home.

My angel, my heart—who I had to emotionally detach from during those fourteen days so I could somehow give her the little brother she was so excited to receive.

We were in the middle of a million-dollar house renovation. I was still managing a demanding corporate job in tech. I was carrying the stress of being the only household income earner at that time.

There were already too many moving parts.

And then this news arrived and shook our already fragile state into something even more fragile.

I had spent my whole life trying to plan, schedule, perfect.

Building scaffolding around every anxiety I knew I was capable of feeling.

And then something hits you so hard.

So completely.

The scaffolding instantly falls away.

It hit me like a train.

And there was nothing left to do but face it.

Even though, in that moment, I could hardly face myself.

I didn’t go to therapy in those fourteen days. I didn’t go to prenatal classes for high-risk deliveries.

I was living in the woods. The coping techniques I had grown used to in the city simply weren’t accessible with the same ease in Vermont.

So instead of getting clinical or therapeutic support, I went deep into Facebook, searching for answers.

I needed to know.

What does this mean?

What would it mean to have a child with all the things showing up at 35 weeks that didn’t show up at 20?

And underneath all of it was the question I could not stop circling:

How did the 20-week scan miss this?

There were multiple physical differences—the kind that, together, should have been caught at the 20-week scan.

All of them.

Cleft lip.

Twelve toes.

Ten and a half fingers.

Macrocephaly.

Protruding forehead.

Enlarged ventricles.

And none of them were.

I kept doing the math.

I kept drawing the Venn diagram—or whatever you call it when there are too many circles.

Too many circles.

Trying to find the one thing at the center.

Trying to make it make sense.

It was always the same answer:

Someone should have looked deeper.

I was questioning everything.

The scan.

The doctor.

My body.

And the worst question of all:

Was I meant to carry this baby?

Later, once we had left the cocoon of the Christmas house and settled into the home we had rebuilt against all odds, I returned to my corporate life.

I was at Snapchat then. There was a big event in New York—Ad Week, maybe. I can’t even remember.

And I ran into people from my old team at Amazon, including the woman who had gotten the job I’d wanted—the role I had been up for before I left.

She had briefly been my manager. Which meant when I resigned, I followed the rules and told her first—even though there were others who had hired me, grown me, and mattered more to me.

One of them had come to the hospital after Milly was born. She held my baby.

And yet, she wasn’t the one I told first.

That moment never quite made sense to me.

And I think it left something unsettled between us.

I won’t pretend my exit was graceful. I think I stung her—the manager who had just taken the role I wanted.

My dad had been put into hospice the day I was planning to quit. I was driving down the PCH on a call with my three siblings and a hospice nurse, talking about my dad’s dying wishes while also preparing to hand in my notice at a company I loved.

I hung up with the hospice nurse as I walked into the elevator.

She was there.

And I just said it.

“I need to resign. My dad is dying. I’m a mess. I need time.”

It wasn’t a lie. But it also wasn’t the whole truth.

All I knew in that moment was that I couldn’t keep going in a place that made me feel stuck.

I never imagined the place that had fueled my growth would be the same place that couldn’t see I needed something different to keep growing.

My dad was dying.

And being stuck felt like I was dying too.

A few hours later, I went into her office. Another manager was there—the loveliest man, someone I had shared many laughs with over the years. He said he was sorry about my dad.

And I said thank you. Then I told them:

I’m going to Snapchat.

I blindsided her. Unintentionally.

She thought I had quit because of my dad. I quit because I had another job. But that morning, in the elevator, I quit because of my dad.

I stung her accidentally.

But oh man, did she sting me back. I hope hers was an accident too.

At Ad Week, I was talking with my old Amazon boss—a woman I deeply respect—another colleague I admired, and the manager who had taken the role I’d wanted.

I was telling my story. Everyone was leaning in.

Oh my God, what happened? How are you?

And then she said:

“Did you go to Dr. Tabsh?”

I said no.

The second she said his name, I got boulder-sized pits in my stomach.

She not only got the job I wanted. She got the scans I wish I’d had, too.

And she looked at me in a way I will never forget.

Confused.

Righteous.

A shrug. Almost an eye roll. Almost.

An I told you so—

aimed at a mother who didn’t even know there had been a question to answer.

I thought I was in a safe space.

I wasn’t.

It was one of many moments when I felt judged by the outside world.

It happens less now, five years later—but it still happens.

And that’s exactly why so many women bury their stories instead of sharing them.

Because when you do share, you risk being met with confusion. With misdirected certainty. With quiet blame disguised as curiosity.

It pains my heart to even say that out loud.

I hate that it’s true.

These words—

they’re not just poetry.

It’s real life.

We have to change it.

That’s what I’m here to do.

I’m here to change that.

To open up the discourse.

To stop us from sweeping the moments that define us—as mothers, as individuals—under the rug.

To say them out loud, even when they’re messy. Even when they don’t resolve cleanly.

Was I wrong? Was I wrong to trust my OB?

Dr. Blumenfeld was Matthew McConaughey’s OB. He had delivered children I knew—by the dozen.

In fact, I went to him because a leader I trusted deeply—in business, in his values, and as a father—had referred me.

Dr. Blumenfeld had delivered five of his children. Safely. Without issue.

That was enough for me.

If his babies were safe with Dr. Blumenfeld, I believed mine would be too.

Dr. Blumenfeld was the one who told me he could do the 20-week scan himself.

He told me everything was fine.

Why would I have questioned that?

The questions don’t stop once they start.

The Aperol Spritz I had.

The ADD medication I’ve been prescribed since I was fifteen—which, for the record, did nothing to Ernie.

The questions keep spiraling back.

There’s no clean version of this story. There just isn’t.

Was I owed something I wasn’t given at 20 weeks?

More importantly—was Ernie owed something at 20 weeks that he wasn’t given?

We got no response from Women’s Healthcare Associates of Santa Monica.

Multiple inquiries—phone calls, voicemails, written requests, signed releases.

Nothing.

We didn’t have his documented due date.

We didn’t have records from my prenatal visits.

All we had was my body. My baby inside it.

And a scan that told us something needed more attention.

Deep down, I felt it.

Something had been missed. Something that shouldn’t have been.

I didn’t have the language for it then. I just had the feeling.

But I couldn’t stay there.

I didn’t have the capacity to focus on what may or may not have gone wrong.

I only had the capacity to focus on my baby—

and making sure he, and I, made it safely to the other side of labor.

Years later, after we moved to Austin, I began care with a new OB who requested my full medical history.

I was able to get my records from Dartmouth.

And then I searched Dr. Blumenfeld’s name.

What came up confirmed what I had felt in my body for years.

His medical license had been revoked by the Medical Board of California following multiple findings of misconduct.

It cemented something I had carried quietly for nearly five years.

I deserved better.

I deserved more.

I deserved a choice I was never given.

And more than anything—

Ernie was owed more than what he was given.

I’m committed to making sure he receives it.

About five days before the induction, I had a panic attack.

I was still in the Christmas house. I was doing jumping jacks, literally jumping up and down, trying to wake him. Trying to feel him.

His leg.

His arm.

Anything.

Nothing.

I called my sister Lela.

“I think the baby’s gone. I think—I think he’s already gone.”

“Stop. You’re fine.”

“No. I’ve done everything. He’s not wiggling. He’s not moving.”

She came and got me at eight.

We drove two hours, mostly in silence, to Dartmouth.

The greatest blessing of the Christmas house was that my sister, brother-in-law, and two beautiful, kind, empathetic nephews lived only five minutes away.

Having them close kept me feeling safe.

When we arrived at the maternity ward at Dartmouth, there were these really lovely women there. I wish I remembered their names.

They put me on the table. They pressed the doppler to my stomach.

Boom, boom.

Boom, boom.

I said, “Do you hear that?”

And then I answered myself before she could.

“That’s my baby’s heartbeat.”

One of the nurses said:

“Your baby’s alive. You’re fine. Everything is fine. Go home, get rest, and know that everything is fine.”

My time at Dartmouth is the hardest thing for me to write about.

When we moved to Vermont, the plan was one year.

But once we knew the complications we were dealing with—once we knew the haven Dartmouth became—we couldn’t leave.

The doctor who did the most for me wasn’t treating my body.

He was treating something else.

I met Dr. Shin the day after the high-risk radiologist did a deep dive following the 35-week scan—the one that finally revealed the cleft.

He walked in wearing Harry Potter glasses, a tweed coat, a bow tie.

He had trained at Yale, and in Miami under S. Anthony Wolfe—the founding father of craniofacial surgery.

And yet, none of that is what I remember most.

I remember how he made me feel.

In an unexpected way, he reminded me of my English teacher, Mr. Hinman, from Kent School.

My dad was in the final days of his dementia then.

And I remember thinking—

my dad would approve of him.

That gave me comfort.

Dr. Shin is Ernie’s plastic surgeon.

I consider him a godlike figure in my life. No bullshit.

He told me:

“The body wants to work for the body.”

I had to believe that Ernie’s body was here on earth because it wanted to be.

He also told me something about the weight of what I was carrying.

He said a mother’s worry lasts a lifetime. It never fully goes away.

But then he asked me something I have never forgotten:

“What if all the worry you could feel for the rest of Ernie’s life—

what if it was just packed into right now?”

“What if it doesn’t get worse than this?

What if it’s all compacted into this one moment?”

And somehow, Dr. Shin released me.

The blame.

The guilt.

The total, absolute terror for my kid.

What if I was feeling it most intensely right now—and then, for the rest of his life, I got to just live?

The thought of being able to just live—

it felt like transcendence.

It felt like something tangible.

Something I could actually work toward.

The second I heard Ernie’s scream as he exited the womb—the moment he touched my skin—I knew he was mine.

And I knew he was living.

And the second I knew that—

I had hope.

I could live too.

I sobbed when he finally reached my arms.

“You’re here, my boy.

You’re safe.

I have you.

I will never let you go.”

My attachment to him, my commitment to giving this baby everything he could possibly need—love, above all else—never wavered.

To this day, every night, I ask Ernie before he goes to sleep:

“Who loves you?”

You.

“How much?”

A lot.

“For how long?”

Forever.

He smiles.

We have had this conversation every night since the day he was born.

He couldn’t always communicate it back. But he always let me know he could feel it.

I don’t know if it’s true that I’m freed from worry in the future.

But what Dr. Shin said freed me from the pain that was plaguing me twenty-four hours a day for two years.

That’s the next part of this story.

What it actually means to live in the present. To be freed from pain.

And that’s where Ernie’s diagnosis finally comes.

Thank you for being in this circle.

The next story, The Diagnosis, arrives March 26, 2026.

If you’ve been carrying a story quietly—

and you feel ready to share it—

Chief Moms is here to hold it.

Peace be in you,

AB

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