Tamiah Brevard-Rodriguez welcomed her son in the passenger seat of her wife’s Maserati, then seamlessly moved on to defend her doctoral dissertation from her hospital bed mere hours later. In the early hours of April 25, Brevard-Rodriguez, 40, was perfecting her PowerPoint presentation of her dissertation in education that afternoon, according to the New York Post.
After two years of dedicated effort, Brevard-Rodriguez, then eight months pregnant, reached the watershed moment she had been striving for. 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.
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“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 almost 6 pounds and measuring 19 inches, defied expectations by arriving four weeks early in perfect health. Once the mom and baby were settled 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 kind of like, I don’t think I should do that,” Brevard-Rodriguez said.
“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.
With the assistance of hospital staff, baby Enzo was cared for in the nursery while Alyza dashed home to retrieve essentials. At 1 p.m., Brevard-Rodriguez conducted her dissertation presentation via Zoom, engaging 56 attendees for an hour. She managed to conceal her maternity ward setting until the conclusion.
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 held a special significance for Brevard-Rodriguez as she did not only celebrate the newest addition to her family, Enzo, but also marked her graduation as a doctor in 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.
