For nine months, motherhood gave me a kind of mercy.
Not peace. Mercy.
My world shrank in the way new mothers’ worlds do.
Feedings.
Nap windows.
Tummy time.
Survival.
Days stitched together by tiny milestones and the quiet relief of making it through another night. I lived inside my daughter’s rhythms. I stayed close to home. I stayed inside a bubble I did not realize I would someday grieve.
She gave me that bubble.
And I accepted it without question.
But the news has a way of finding you, no matter how small your world becomes.
At first, the headlines felt distant. Something I registered while warming a bottle or rocking a baby back to sleep.
Detentions.
Families separated.
Children left behind.
Stories I had heard before, always at arm’s length. Then something shifted. The bubble cracked. And suddenly I could not stop seeing myself inside those stories.
Not as a reader.
As the subject.
My fear is not theoretical. It lives in my body.
It is the fear of being stopped. Questioned. Profiled. It is the understanding that citizenship does not always protect you when perception gets there first. When how you look, how your name reads, or how easily someone decides who you are overrides documents, facts, and truth.
I know how quickly someone can decide I do not belong.
I have read these headlines out loud to my husband at night, after the house settles. Each time, he listens in disbelief. He is white. That alone is another kind of privilege. These fears did not grow up inside his body the way they did mine. His world is residency, the hospital, the discipline of training, whatever comes through the emergency room doors. Outside of that, these stories once felt abstract.
His fear now is not about himself. It is about realizing that the woman he loves carries this fear every day, and that it is real. That it is reasonable. That it has shaped how she moves through the world long before motherhood ever entered the picture.
If something happened to me, he would not know right away.
That is the part that undoes me.
He would come home from a long shift to a house that does not make sense. Dogs not fed. Silence where there should be noise. A baby who should be in my arms, but is not. Hours could pass before anyone realized something was wrong. And by then, anything could already have happened.
Many people understand what it means to be racially profiled. But motherhood sharpens that fear into something else entirely. Because this is no longer just about me.
It is about my child.
I am often mistaken for my daughter’s caregiver instead of her mother.
A nanny.
Help.
Someone temporary.
People mean no harm when they say it. They smile. They move on. But when the world already questions your belonging, those moments do not disappear.
They stack.
They become proof of how easily someone can misplace you.
I imagine being taken while my husband is at work. I imagine no one noticing right away. I imagine my daughter waiting for someone who never walks back through the door. The thought of her alone, or worse, not there at all, is the kind of fear that settles deep in your chest and refuses to leave.
It changes how you live.
A walk is no longer just a walk. Errands are no longer routine. I carry my passport everywhere. I have written my daughter’s name and her father’s phone number inside her coats and snowsuits, just in case. These are not dramatic gestures.
They are quiet calculations.
The kind you make when you understand how quickly the ordinary can become irreversible.
For some people, these stories stay on the screen.
For others, they move into your body and live there.
This goes beyond politics. Beyond debate. Beyond headlines. It is about fear, erasure, and the devastating power of perception. How being seen incorrectly can be enough to put lives at risk.
Some will say I am overthinking it.
That I am letting fear win.
That I should relax.
But motherhood teaches you this. You do not get to unsee danger once you know where it lives.
And once you understand how fragile safety really is, the bubble never fully closes again.
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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.
🍼 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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Read also: Two Days After Bringing Our Baby Home, I Asked for a Divorce
Read also: Our Marriage Ended Before It Began: The Pregnancy That Shattered Everything
Read also: I’m Pregnant And Broke — My Cry For Help
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Keenan Davidson on Unsplash
