Content warning: infant loss

Emma Mitchell is Evie's mom. She's also a pickleball obsessive, a Canadian music lover, a former open mic host, and one of the most honest and open humans I've had the pleasure of sitting across from. We start the conversation talking about pickleball outfits (because of course we do) and then we go somewhere really deep and really real.

Emma never let herself think about motherhood. Between her brother, Gord, her PCOS diagnosis, and just never really going there in her mind, she'd quietly made peace with a different kind of life. And then a chest x-ray waiting room moment sent her home to take a pregnancy test. The rest, as they say.

We talk about everything - the pregnancy she didn't see coming, the bleed that terrified them at eight weeks, a missing referral, a cervix that was nearly gone, an infection, and a baby girl named Evie who arrived at 23 weeks and 6 days weighing 660 grams. We also talk about what it means to become a mom the moment you find out you're going to be one, even when everything that follows is the hardest thing you've ever done.

This is part 1 of 2, which will be released next week x

@the_otherside_pod