They say that the people who love you will stand beside you when life gets hard, but I learned that sometimes the person who sees your pain most clearly isn’t the one who promised to love you forever.

A year ago, I brought home three babies in one afternoon named Clara, Jonah, and Wyatt, leaving three car seats lined up on the living room floor like a small and impossible miracle. Nobody warned me what carrying triplets would do to my body, and after a grueling delivery at St. Vincent Medical Center, the doctors used careful medical phrasing like a compromised pelvic floor and a lengthy postpartum recovery timeline.