The Spot That Started It all.

Next week, I go back to work.
Back to the office. Back to professional clothes and polite hallway chatter and Microsoft Teams meetings.

And I don’t feel ready.

It’s strange—how I can feel confident in the job I used to do, but terrified of stepping back into it now. Like I’m walking into a familiar building on a totally different planet. Everything looks the same, but nothing is.

And I think it’s because I’ve done this before.

Not this—not work, not this exact situation.
But I’ve stood on the edge of something I didn’t understand, carrying a baby and a gut full of fear, and walked straight into the unknown anyway.

I did it the day I took Myles to emergency.

He was just a few weeks old, and I was still trying to figure out how to hold him properly, how to time feeds, how to sleep in broken chunks of two hours. They’d found a “spot” on one of my pregnancy ultrasounds—an echogenic foci, they called it—but the hospital missed the follow-up scan, among so many other things. My family doctor caught it and sent us for one shortly after we got home.

Calcification of the liver.
Scarring.
Something wasn’t right.

He wanted to wait for bloodwork. I had agreed in his office because, what did I know? But, as the day went on I stood firm on what I really wanted to tell him. I didn’t want to wait.

Because Myles was getting more yellow every day. He was losing weight. He was slipping, and I knew it. Not in a clinical, textbook way—but in the quiet, sickening way that mothers know things.

So I wrapped him up, packed a bag I didn’t need, and took him to emergency.

That was the beginning. Of everything.

Of becoming someone I didn’t recognize yet.
Of entering a world of liver function tests and transplant lists and IV pumps and sterile rooms and new language I didn’t speak.
Of being scared. Of being brave. Of learning how to do both at the same time.

And now, here I am again.

Don’t get me wrong - I love my job. More than most people probably do. But here I am, standing at the edge of something I used to know—my job, my old rhythm—but I’m not the same person who left it. I’m tired in a different way. Softer in places I used to be sharp. Sharper in places I used to bend.

This return feels like another kind of emergency room visit. Another moment of “I don’t know what’s ahead, but I know I have to go anyway.”

I’m not just going back to work—I’m walking into a new chapter with old skills, new scars, and a thousand quiet what ifs swirling around me.

But if motherhood, if this journey, if Myles has taught me anything—it’s that I can do hard things.
And I can do them scared.

If you’re standing on the edge of something new, scared but moving forward anyway—
you’re not alone.
You’re braver than you feel.
And you are not walking into it empty-handed.

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”
— Philippians 4:13

Deep breath, mama.
We go anyway.