For days, I begged my neighbor to stop waking my newborn.
Then I begged my husband to believe me when I said the timing wasn’t accidental.
Neither one took me seriously.
My husband thought exhaustion was making me connect things that weren’t connected. My neighbor insisted he was simply enjoying his own apartment.
But my best friend, Maya, saw something neither of them wanted to see.
She took the complaints of one exhausted new mother and turned them into something much harder to dismiss.
And once there was evidence, everything changed.
Life in 45-Minute Pieces
Three weeks after giving birth, I had started measuring my life in 45-minute pieces.
Forty-five minutes was a long shower.
Forty-five minutes was enough time to make something to eat and, if I was lucky, actually finish it while it was still warm.
Forty-five minutes was long enough to close my eyes without immediately waking in a panic because I thought I had somehow forgotten to feed my baby.
My son, Theo, was healthy and beautiful.
He was also completely uninterested in sleeping for more than two hours at a time.
My husband, Daniel, worked 14-hour shifts at a distribution center across town. He left before sunrise and usually didn’t get home until after eight at night.
