I Found Mold in the Apartment and Stopped Writing for My Sanity

I’ve been quiet.

Not because I ran out of words. Not because the stories stopped. But because sometimes survival asks you to put the pen down and pick your life back up with both hands.

The move.

The temporary apartment.

The rotation schedule that has my husband leaving before sunrise and returning when the day is already dead.

The isolation.

The bills.

The news cycle that started to feel like a constant electric current running through my chest. It got to be too much.

So I stepped back.

I stopped writing as consistently as I had been, not out of laziness, but out of self-preservation. I realized I was consuming too much fear, too much outrage, too much noise. It was bleeding into my nervous system. Into my mothering. Into the way I was breathing.

And I didn’t like who I was becoming.

So I chose something else.

I chose my small, delusional, beautiful bubble with my almost-ten-month-old daughter.

And honestly, I don’t regret it.

Everyone told me nine to ten months is one of the cutest stages, and I thought, sure, people say that about every stage. But no. This one is different. This one is magic.

She is cuddly in a way that feels intentional now. She reaches. She leans in. She presses her forehead into my cheek like she’s trying to memorize me. She understands that when a toy disappears under a blanket, it still exists. Watching object permanence form in real time feels like watching a light turn on inside someone you love.

She drops a ball into a hole and looks up like she solved physics.

She grips her sippy cup with both hands like it’s a trophy.

She rocks on all fours, determined to crawl, then collapses dramatically onto her belly and yells at the floor like it personally offended her. The frustration is real. The ambition is louder. She wants to walk so badly she can taste it. And I sit there cheering for crawling while secretly knowing she’s going to skip steps just to prove a point.

Our days have become small and sacred. Playmat mornings. Laundry running in the background. Me packing Poshmark orders during nap windows. Dogs pacing. Bottles drying on the rack. Ordinary life, but closer to the bone.

One of the sweetest additions lately has been the little music box we were gifted, the Toniebox. It’s become part of our background soundtrack. We added a Ms. Rachel character figure, and even though my daughter is technically younger than the recommended age, she lights up when the songs come on.

She sways.

She listens.

She studies the sound like it’s a person in the room.

Tiny figurines.

Soft music.

Her rocking back and forth while trying to coordinate crawling and standing. It’s unbearably tender.

This is the world I’ve been choosing instead of headlines.

That doesn’t mean reality disappeared. It just means I stopped letting it sit at the head of my table.

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We were recently offered the option to move into a second floor unit in this building for one hundred dollars less per month. On paper, that matters. A hundred dollars is groceries. Utilities. Diapers. Breathing room. When you are living on a resident salary plus whatever fragmented income I can assemble from multiple writing jobs, numbers like that are not theoretical.

But then there’s the mold.

We found mold around vents in that unit. The kind that shows up when a previous tenant shuts everything off and moisture sits and grows in the dark. The landlord says it can be remediated. That it’s likely surface level. That it came from stagnation, not structural failure.

Maybe that’s true.

But when you have a baby who isn’t even ten months old yet, “probably fine” is not a medical standard you can emotionally accept. Mold is not cosmetic. It’s respiratory. Neurological. Insidious when mishandled. Saving a hundred dollars to risk chronic exposure is not thrift. It’s gambling with lungs.

So we said no, not until it’s fully addressed. Properly inspected. Properly cleaned. Verified, not guessed.

That’s what this season has been. A constant series of tradeoffs between money and margin, between cost and safety, between what helps now and what harms later.

I’ve been trying to adapt to this temporary apartment, this temporary city rhythm, this six-month disruption that is supposed to be “good for training” and “worth it in the long run.” Some days I believe that easily. Some days I count the hours until we drive back to the place that still feels like home.

But something has shifted in me these past couple of weeks.

I stopped trying to metabolize the entire world. I started metabolizing the day in front of me.

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My daughter on the floor, determined and furious and brilliant.
The dogs in their snow boots.
Music playing softly.
Sunlight when we get it.
Faith routines in the morning.
Small walks. Small wins. Small mercies.

I took a break from writing because I needed to come back to it honestly, not frantically. Not from depletion, but from breath.

I’m here again now.

A little steadier.

A little softer.

Still stretched thin, still figuring it out, still building the net as I walk across it.

Still hoping, quietly, that kindness finds us in practical ways.

And still telling the truth about what it costs to keep going.

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UPDATED BIO:

Hi, I’m Fiona — a writer in the midst of an unexpected chapter.

In April 2024, I lost my job. Since then, my husband and I have been getting by on his modest income as a medical resident. After stepping away from IVF, we were shocked — and overjoyed — to find out we were pregnant naturally. While it was the happiest surprise, it also brought new financial stress as we prepared for our growing family.

Then, our baby arrived early — on April 29th, 2025, instead of the expected due date in late May. With no paid maternity leave and no room in our budget for childcare, I’ve returned to part-time jobs and writing just a week after giving birth to help cover essentials like groceries, bills, and a few things for our 🌈 miracle baby.

If you’d like to support my writing — and by extension, our little family — your kindness would mean the world. Every bit helps: $1, $2, whatever you can give.

💸 Donate here — Venmo

🍼 Baby Registry — Or if you’d prefer to help more directly, we’re also gratefully accepting support through our baby registry — every burp cloth, diaper and/or bottle goes a long way.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.