I struggled through my pregnancy.

Multiple ER visits. Constant vomiting for nine straight months. I lost weight instead of gaining it. My body felt like it belonged to survival mode instead of me.

Still, I kept working because life is expensive.

At the time, I worked in a café as a barista. Honestly, I loved most of it. I liked learning about coffee, the rhythm of making drinks, and meeting all kinds of people.

The only customers I couldn’t stand were the coffee snobs.

This interaction happened about a month before I went into labor too early. Stress was already eating me alive thanks to a terrible boss and a body that felt permanently exhausted.

Then he walked in.

A middle-aged man with the confidence of someone who mistakes condescension for intelligence.

His wife went to use the restroom, and instead of ordering like a normal person, he decided to quiz me on coffee.

Not casually either. Not curious conversation. A test.

I was visibly pregnant. Miserably pregnant. The kind of pregnant where your brain feels like it’s buffering every other sentence. So before answering, I laughed a little and told him:

“Forgive me if I have pregnancy brain for a second.”

I started listing different coffees and explaining them. Traditional drinks, café drinks, the usual stuff.

Apparently that wasn’t enough.

Then he asked me the difference between a traditional macchiato, a cortado, and espresso.

I explained the macchiato. Explained espresso. But when I got to cortado, my mind went blank.

Not because I didn’t know how to make it.

Not because I was unqualified.

But because pregnancy brain is real, exhaustion is real, and sometimes words disappear even when your hands still remember exactly what to do.

So I told him honestly:“I can make one for you — it’s muscle memory at this point — but the words just aren’t coming to me.”

And this man laughed.

Not kindly. Not sympathetically.

A smug little chuckle.

His wife came back out, and neither of them even ordered anything. As they walked toward the door, he loudly told her:

“The barista here doesn’t even know what a cortado is.”

I had only cried once before at a job.

That was the second time.

I know now that the moment hurt so much because I was already stretched thin in every possible way.

Pregnancy humbled me. Exhaustion humbled me. Financial uncertainty humbled me.

Life can change quickly, even when you think you’ve prepared carefully.

Things are better now, thankfully. But that interaction stayed with me because it reminded me how easy it is to be careless with another person’s dignity.

Sometimes kindness is as simple as deciding not to make someone’s hard day harder.