After I hung up on my mother, I lay there staring at the ceiling tiles for a long time. Counting the little holes in them. Listening to the monitor beep.
Then I pressed the call button.
When the nurse came, I said, “Can you please send Ms. Patterson back? And can you hand me my laptop bag? It’s in the closet.”
Ms. Patterson came back twenty minutes later. I told her what my mother said. Her face didn’t change, but her pen stopped moving on the clipboard.
“I’m so sorry, Meredith,” she said quietly.
“I need to hire somebody,” I said. “A professional. Today. Somebody who knows newborns.”
She nodded slowly. “There’s an agency we work with. Little Harbor Newborn Care. They’re licensed. Their nurses are all background-checked and certified. It isn’t cheap.”
“I don’t care what it costs.”
By four o’clock that afternoon, a newborn care specialist named Rosa Delgado was standing beside my hospital bed holding my daughter.
Rosa was 54, from Puerto Rico, with gray-streaked hair pulled back in a tight bun and the calmest hands I’d ever seen. She’d been caring for newborns for thirty years. She’d brought a bag of supplies, a portable bassinet and a little binder for tracking every feeding and every diaper.
Lily stopped crying the second Rosa picked her up.
“Ay, mamita,” Rosa said, rocking her. “You’ve had a long day, haven’t you? So brave. So strong. Just like your mama.”
The agency charged $42 an hour for around-the-clock care, with two specialists trading off in twelve-hour shifts. For the five days I’d be in the hospital and the first week at home, it would come to a little over $10,000.
I signed the contract on my laptop from my hospital bed with my right hand, because my left wrist was bruised.
Ten thousand dollars.
Two months of what I sent my mother.
Rosa brought Lily to me every three hours so I could nurse her, propped up on pillows. In between, she took her to Mrs. Okonkwo’s house across the street from mine, where she’d set up the bassinet in the guest room. Mrs. Okonkwo insisted. She said she wanted to hear a baby in her house again.
That first night, after Rosa left with Lily, I opened my laptop again.
I logged into my Wells Fargo account. I went to Scheduled Transfers.
There it was.
Recurring Transfer. $4,500.00. To: Diane Hale. Next scheduled: the 1st. Frequency: Monthly.
I’d set it up nine years ago in my little apartment on Central Avenue. I remember I was eating ramen noodles that night because I’d just sent her the first $1,500 and didn’t have money for groceries.
My finger hovered over the button for a long time.
Then I clicked it.
Cancel recurring transfer? Yes.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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