A moment during bath time made one mom pause—and she didn’t shake it
Vacations have a way of softening everything. The schedule loosens. The days blur. Familiar routines happen in unfamiliar places, often without much thought. For Nicole Schonlau, that was the rhythm of a summer trip to San Francisco with her husband, Andrew, and their two kids, Christopher, 7, and Aiyla, 5, staying at her aunt’s house in the Richmond District.
It was August. They were tired in the normal, end-of-day way families get tired on vacation. Nicole was giving Aiyla a bath, an ordinary task in an ordinary moment, when something small interrupted that autopilot feeling.
The moment that didn’t quite make sense
“I noticed her right eye suddenly drifting upward toward the ceiling,” Schonlau told Newsweek. “I had a wandering eye as a child, so at first I thought maybe it was genetic, but something did not feel right.”
Nothing about the moment screamed emergency. There was no pain. No panic. Just a detail that didn’t line up with what Nicole knew to be normal for her daughter. Like so many parents, she ran through the mental checklist we all do: comparing, rationalizing, talking herself through possible explanations.
That space between noticing and knowing is familiar to parents. You clock a change, then immediately wonder if you’re reading too much into it.
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When other voices enter the moment
Nicole’s father was also staying with the family during the trip. When she mentioned what she’d seen, he suggested calling a local eye doctor for advice. The doctor couldn’t see Aiyla because of her age, but as a fellow parent, he encouraged them to take the concern seriously.
He “strongly recommended” they go to urgent care.
“I kept asking if it could wait until we got back home to Denver, but he urged me several times to go right away,” Schonlau said.
That push-and-pull, the instinct to wait paired with the nudge to act, is often how these decisions unfold. Rarely is there clarity. More often, there’s collaboration, uncertainty, and a quiet weighing of options.
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Acting without knowing what comes next
Even at urgent care, nothing seemed obviously wrong. Nicole worried they might be “overreacting.” The doctor examined Aiyla and told them she looked fine, but still felt it was best to refer her to the emergency room at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.
It wasn’t urgency driven by fear. It was a step taken without fully understanding why, something parents do all the time when something doesn’t quite add up.
At UCSF, Aiyla underwent a CT scan.
“I honestly thought they were about to send us home, but instead a doctor came in with a very serious look on her face and asked us to step into another room,” Schonlau said.
The emotional whiplash of unexpected news
What followed was a moment Nicole says she still remembers in pieces. The doctor explained “with so much compassion” that the scan had revealed a mass in Aiyla’s brainstem.
“The doctor was herself a mother to small children, and she had tears in her eyes as she delivered the news,” Schonlau told Newsweek.
Aiyla needed to be admitted immediately.
The next morning, waking up in the hospital, Nicole struggled to reconcile what had happened so quickly.
“It felt like we were living our worst nightmare, and I still had not fully accepted that this was happening,” she said.
An MRI later showed the tumor was located in the brainstem medulla. “Because of its location in the brainstem medulla, they explained that it was not operable, and a traditional biopsy would be especially difficult,” Schonlau said.
How this moment lives on
Earlier this year, Schonlau had started posting on Instagram after losing her job in January, originally planning to document her own process of unpacking a difficult childhood. After Aiyla’s diagnosis, the account became something else entirely.
Posting under the handle @thebravestbean, she shares openly about what her family has been navigating, and how a moment that felt almost unremarkable at the time became a turning point they still look back on.
Many parenting choices only make sense in hindsight. They often begin quietly, in the middle of routine, long before a diagnosis or explanation arrives.
source https://www.mother.ly/parenting/bath-time-moment-made-one-mom-pause/
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