At 3 a.m., I woke up to 18 missed calls from my daughter and a text saying, “Mom, help me!” She lives alone and is seven months pregnant, so I raced to her apartment in panic.
When I got there, she looked confused. “I was asleep,” she said. “I didn’t call.”
Then we checked my phone together.
There was another message: “My baby’s fever isn’t coming down. What should I do?”
Attached was a photo of a crying baby.
The number wasn’t my daughter’s.
I called it back, and a terrified young woman answered. She was a new mother, alone in the middle of the night, desperately trying to reach her own mom. In her panic, she’d dialed the wrong number—and found me instead.
I stayed on the phone, helped calm her down, and talked her through what to do while waiting for the doctor.
I never heard from her again. But with my own daughter expecting, that night stayed with me.
I still hope she and her baby are okay.
