The Mom Who Lost Her Home the Day Before She Gave Birth

In October 2020, Melissa*, then 21, felt burned out from working as a home health aide in Raleigh, North Carolina. The early months of the pandemic had been full of grueling 24-hour shifts, so she decided to take a month off to visit her cousin in Georgia. Soon Melissa struck up a casual romance with a childhood friend named John. Melissa had known John since she was 15, and their relationship was flirty and relaxed. Neither of them was interested in dating the other seriously.

Then one day, out of the blue, John mentioned he’d been sleeping more than usual and he had heard a funny superstition — that when a man starts to sleep more, it means his partner is pregnant. John bought Melissa a pack of cheap pregnancy tests, and to humor him, she took one. “I thought there was no way I could be pregnant,” she says. But the test (and the two she took after it, plus an expensive digital test purchased a few hours later) came back positive.

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