How far would you go to protect a newborn baby?
The Hospital Betrayal
My friend’s husband helped his mom sell photos of their newborn baby online, so I exposed everything and much more. Three years later, he’s trying to convince the internet he’s the victim.
Me and my best friend, Alice, always joked about raising a child together. We were like fire boy and water girl.
Obviously, as we got older, the dream started to fade, but we never stopped being close. So, when she finally got pregnant, I was ecstatic.
I did everything I could to make sure I’d be a good aunt. The type to secretly slip her baby girl $5 and whisper, “Don’t tell your mom.”
And her boyfriend’s mom, Vanessa, was just as excited as me. We were all at Alice’s house one day when Vanessa started taking videos of us sitting by the fire.
“Gh, I can’t wait for baby Isidora to be born. I’m going to plaster her all over social media,” Vanessa exclaimed. I giggled, but Alice’s face stayed completely straight.
“That’s not happening,” she said, her voice assertive and cold. And to be honest, at first, I thought she was being a little overdramatic until she gave her explanation.
She told us that she had watched a lot of cop shows with sting operations where officers go undercover and catch kitty fiddlers, and that she had seen men praying on children’s photos online. I thought about all the creepy comments under TikTok videos of newborn babies. Yep, made sense to me.
But Vanessa disagreed. She told Alice she was being paranoid and allowing her life to be ruled by fear.
You see, Vanessa was really big into vlogging everything. She only had 1,000 followers, but she couldn’t even get through an hour without updating her page about what she was up to. I expected Alice’s husband to intervene and at least try to discourage his mother.
But no, “I think the pregnancy hormones are making you crazy,” he said with a straight face. If that was my husband, I would have gone off on him.
But Alice is a better person than me, so she just said, “My word is final,” before rubbing her stomach and lying down on the couch.
Fast forward to November when her water broke. I was in the middle of work, so I rushed to the bathroom to make vomiting sounds for an hour straight just so I could rush to the hospital without getting fired.
But somehow I was still the first one there because her husband was in the middle of getting a haircut while her mother-in-law sat and waited for the haircut to be finished. Like, what?
Anyway, the whole thing just made me glad that I was there to hold her hand during the contractions. It wasn’t until baby Isidora’s head started crowning that they finally strolled in, walking at a slow, reasonable pace.
It took everything in me not to grab the IV drip and strangle them until they were apologizing over and over. Because this was about Alice and Isidora, not them.
And after almost 20 hours, I was cuta’s umbilical cord. She had Alice’s soft tan skin, and she had her husband’s bright green eyes, stunning.
And when I noticed her mother-in-law take her phone out to snap a photo, I slapped her hand and glared at her until she put it away. Meanwhile, Alice was on the brink of death.
She had a severe postpartum hemorrhage and lost so much blood that they had to rush her into emergency surgery. I figured Alice would be in the ICU for a while.
So, I called in sick to work again and started making small talk with her husband and mother-in-law while holding Isidora in my arms. By that point, I had been awake for such a long time that when Isidora fell asleep, I fell asleep, too.
And when I woke up 3 hours later, she was gone. I started panicking, but that’s when Alice’s husband told me that his mother-in-law was lying beside her in the hospital bed.
So, I peeped through the curtain to check on them. Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. There’s no way there was any funny business going on.
She would surely respect the mother’s wishes. Well, folks, I hate to be the one to say it, but I caught her mother-in-law with her phone out taking dozens of photos of Isidora. I grabbed it from her and she was like a deer in headlights.
I told her that if she tried to come near me to get it back, I would throw it into the toilet. When Alice got the okay from the nurses, I waited until she was a little more rested to tell her what had happened.
I hadn’t opened the phone since then, so that was the first time I was looking at the evidence. So, there we were going through her mother-in-law’s camera roll when we were faced with dozens of photos of newborn baby Isidora in a tiny bikini, a tutu, lace, barely clothed.
Alice almost threw up. We kept searching through her apps, and that’s when everything finally made sense because these weren’t just for her followers.
She was selling them on Twitter for five bucks a pop. But that wasn’t even the worst part because in some of the photos, her mother-in-law was literally posing in red undergarments, which meant her husband was the one behind the camera.
I stared at the phone screen, my hands shaking. Alice grabbed my arm and squeezed hard. Her face had gone completely pale except for two bright red spots on her cheeks.
“I need to talk to him,” she whispered. “Right now.”
I helped her sit up straighter in the hospital bed. She winced and pressed a hand to her stomach where they’d done the emergency surgery.
The monitors beside her bed started beeping faster. “Maybe we should wait until you’re stronger,” I suggested.
But Alice was already pressing the call button for the nurse. When the nurse came in, Alice asked her to get her husband from the waiting room.
The nurse looked concerned about Alice’s heart rate on the monitor, but agreed. 5 minutes later, he walked in carrying a coffee and looking annoyed.
“What’s wrong now?” “Mom said, ‘You were making a scene about some photos.'” Alice held up Vanessa’s phone. Her hand trembled, but her voice stayed steady.
“Explain this.” He glanced at the screen and shrugged. “Mom takes pictures, so what?”
“Look closer,” Alice said. She swiped through the photos slowly. “The tiny bikini, the lace, the poses.”
His face changed from annoyed to defensive. “Mom’s just trying to build her following. You’re overreacting.”
“She’s selling them,” I cut in. “$5 each on Twitter.”
He sat down his coffee and crossed his arms. “Mom’s on a fixed income. She needs the money.”
Alice made a choking sound. “She’s selling pictures of our newborn daughter in lingerie.”
“It’s not lingerie, it’s just cute outfits,” he said. “You’re being dramatic.”
I pulled up the photos where Vanessa was posing in red undergarments. “Who took these?”
His face went red. He looked at the floor, then the wall. “Anywhere but at us.”
“You did,” Alice said. “It wasn’t a question. You took pictures of your mother in her underwear with our baby.”
“It’s not like that,” he muttered. “She needed help with the angles.”
Alice tried to swing her legs out of bed, but gasped in pain. I pushed her back gently.
The monitors started going crazy. “You need to leave,” I told him.
“Now you can’t kick me out. She’s my wife, and I’m her medical proxy while she’s recovering. I lied.”
“Get out, or I’m calling security.” He grabbed his coffee and stormed toward the door. “This is ridiculous. When you calm down and stop being crazy, we’ll talk.”
After he left, Alice broke down sobbing. I held her while she cried, careful not to disturb her IV lines.
