“He must have felt like they swapped out his daughter for a new model (“Now with baby inside!”), a Grace 2.0. Grace knew this because she felt the same way.”

Pregnancy is widely believed to be a life-changing time in a person’s life. For Grace, becoming pregnant at 16 causes her to feel like she is a completely different person. Although she jokes about being a newer model of herself, her hurt in this moment is evident. Grace always had a good relationship with her parents, and her father’s change in attitude toward her causes Grace to feel like she let him down and damaged a vital part of their relationship.

“It wasn’t okay, not really, but she didn’t entirely trust her parents to be strong for her anymore. They could barely keep it together around each other—what sort of energy did they have left over for her?”

Maya’s parents have been arguing for so long that Maya spent many of her formative years watching them fight, and it has affected her own emotional development. Children are supposed to be able to trust their parents with their feelings, and instead, Maya feels like her parents are unable to be there for her because of their fighting. As a result, she has become emotionally closed off and refuses to communicate her wants and needs without sarcasm.

“Sometimes Joaquin wondered if he had been the worst baby in the world if his own mother didn’t even want to come see him.”

When it comes to his mom, Joaquin knows only enough to be confused and hurt by the conditions of her disappearance from his life. Unlike his sisters, who were adopted immediately, Joaquin spent the first year of his life with his bio mom, and he wonders if there was something he did wrong as a baby to drive his mother away.