On 25 March 2010, in a hospital in Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram, Sheeja gave birth to her daughter, Sandra.

Within hours, doctors delivered a diagnosis that would reshape the next sixteen years of her life. Sandra had microcephaly, a rare condition in which the brain does not develop sufficiently. Many children born with it do not survive.

However, survival, Sheeja would learn, was only the beginning. What followed were years that blurred into one another, filled with hospital corridors, ICU rooms, ventilators, and the constant cycle of seizures that sometimes struck twenty times a day.

Medication was non-negotiable, expensive, and tireless. So was care. Somewhere within that cycle of urgency, Sheeja says she stopped recognising the life she had once imagined.

“It is a birth defect. We could not do anything, and we accepted it as fate. But it broke me,” she says simply, as if naming something that had taken years to understand.

At home, the strain intensified at first and then all at once. As medical bills mounted and caregiving became a full-time responsibility, her marriage collapsed. Her husband eventually left. But Sandra stayed, and so did the caregiving.

What Sheeja did not yet have words for was what she was beginning to see everywhere around her. There were other mothers, each carrying similar stories and each learning to disappear into them.

Early life before the diagnosis

Before Sandra’s birth, Sheeja’s life had followed a more ordinary pace. She studied in Thiruvananthapuram, attended Manchadi Government LP School and later St Xavier’s School in Peyad. She was drawn more to sports and social work than textbooks, and married during her degree course with the understanding that she would continue studying afterwards.

Sandra changed that trajectory completely.

The hospital became a second home. Days were framed in admissions and emergencies rather than hours or months. Over time, Sheeja completed her degree and teacher training, but formal employment remained out of reach.

She turned instead to tailoring and other work from home, supported at defining moments by her parents, Babu and Usha, who helped care for Sandra whenever they could.

That support, however, was not something she could assume others had.

“In government hospital wards, I began noticing a pattern that unsettled me more with each visit. Mothers were sitting alone beside children with disabilities. Some spoke of husbands who stopped coming after the diagnosis. Others had already been abandoned entirely,” she tells The Better India.

It was in these waiting rooms that Sheeja first met Vidya.

Slow disappearance of identity

Vidya had once been a mathematics........

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