I dragged myself to the laundromat after a night shift, my seven-month-old daughter asleep in my arms. Exhaustion hit me like a wall, and I dozed off while the washer ran. When I woke up, my laundry was folded.
But what I found inside the washer made my hands shake.
I work at a pharmacy, and the schedule board says I’m on day shift. That’s the version I tell myself to get through each week, anyway. The truth is messier than that.
When another tech calls out sick or the store runs short on staff, I grab whatever shifts they’ll give me because overtime is the only thing keeping formula and diapers from sliding into the “maybe next week” pile.
My baby girl, Mia, is seven and a half months old.
She’s at that perfect age where she smells like warm milk and sunshine, and the smallest smile from her can make me forget about the stack of bills sitting on top of the microwave.
Her father left the minute I told him I was pregnant.
“I’m not ready for this life,” he said, like fatherhood was a shirt that didn’t fit right. I stopped checking my phone for his texts somewhere around my second trimester.
Now it’s just me, my mom, and Mia against the world.
Mom watches her whenever I’m at work, and I tell myself that the tight feeling in my chest is gratitude instead of guilt. Because the truth is, my mother already raised her babies.
She didn’t sign up for late-night bottles and diaper changes at 61 years old, but she does it anyway without a single complaint.
We live in a small rented apartment on the second floor of an old building.
The rent is manageable, but there’s no washing machine. When laundry piles up, I have to haul everything down the street to the laundromat on the corner, the one with the flickering neon sign and the permanently sticky floor.
That particular morning, I came home after pulling a long night shift. My eyes felt like they were full of sand, my body ached in places I didn’t know could ache, and I could barely string two thoughts together.
But the second I walked through the apartment door, I noticed the laundry basket was overflowing.
I let out a long, tired sigh.
“Guess we’re going to the laundromat, sweetheart,” I whispered to Mia, who was dozing in my arms.
Mom was still asleep in her room after staying up most of the night with Mia while I worked. I didn’t want to wake her. She needed rest as much as I did.
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