Tamiah Brevard-Rodriguez welcomed her son in the passenger seat of her wife’s Maserati before smoothly defending her doctoral dissertation from her hospital bed just hours later. According to the New York Post, Brevard-Rodriguez, 40, was working on a PowerPoint presentation for her education dissertation on April 25.
Brevard-Rodriguez, who was eight months pregnant at the time, finally achieved her goal after two years of hard work. But out of nowhere, and a month early, “I had that popping sensation that I experienced with my daughter . . . and instantly, I just knew my water had just broken,” Brevard-Rodriguez recalled.
“I’m like, of all days, why today?” Brevard-Rodriguez’s wife contacted Brevard-Rodriguez’s academic mentor at Rutgers University to reschedule her presentation and rallied family members to care for their four-year-old daughter, Aubriel.
“I sorta just locked in, like now the mission is on,” Alyza Brevard-Rodriguez told The Post. They moved into their Maserati truck and sped towards a birthing center around 5 a.m. However, their plans shifted when their doula redirected them to Hackensack Meridian Hospital.
But, while the wife accelerated to 120 mph on the Garden State Parkway, Bervard-Rodriguez took “one big grunt” and shouted, “he’s coming”.
“I look over, and I see her with this baby in her left hand, and her umbilical cord in the right,” Alyza said with a laugh.
Baby Enzo, weighing nearly 6 pounds and measuring 19 inches, arrived four weeks early in great health. Once the mother and child were ensconced in a labor delivery room at the hospital, “I could hear [Alyza] talking to my mentor on the phone about rescheduling the [dissertation] defense.” “And I was just like, I don’t think I should do that,” Brevard-Rodriguez explained.
“Mommy had to get it done. So that’s what I did.
“I took a nap, ate some food, came back, and was ready to rock and roll,” she continued.
Baby Enzo was cared for in the nursery by hospital staff as Alyza ran home to get some essentials. At 1 p.m., Brevard-Rodriguez gave her dissertation presentation via Zoom, which lasted an hour and had 56 attendees. She was able to disguise her maternity ward environment till the end.
In that moment and several since, “it’s been a transition from mommy brain to scholar brain,” Brevard-Rodriguez said.
“But just having him, he’s been such a joy. We are in love with him. His sister is in love with him,” she gushed.
This year’s Mother’s Day was especially meaningful for Brevard-Rodriguez since she celebrated not only the newest addition to her family, Enzo, but also her graduation as a doctor of education from Rutgers University.
“I’m really excited [to graduate] because I know that I don’t have to worry about anything else – no more homework, no more papers, no more revisions. But I’m also really excited because I’ll be celebrating with my family. And we’ll have a nice big dinner afterwards,” she said.