I’m sitting in a quiet hospital room, the lights dimmed low, my newborn twins sleeping peacefully in the bassinets beside my bed. Their tiny chests rise and fall in perfect rhythm, and everyone insists this should be the happiest moment of my life. I nod, I smile when the nurses come in, but inside my chest feels tight. Heavy. As though a stone rests where joy is supposed to be.
For illustrative purposes only

My stepmother, Eva, has been my true mother since I was six years old.

That’s the part that hurts most to admit—especially now.

When I was little, my biological mother remarried. She moved to another state, built a new family, a new life, and somehow I didn’t fit into it. Visits became phone calls, phone calls dwindled into holiday texts, and eventually we spoke maybe once a year—sometimes less. Eva was the one who braided my hair before school, sat through parent-teacher conferences, stayed up with me when I was sick, and cried quietly when I left for college. She never missed a birthday. Not once.