05/12/2025
This picture was taken on September 9, 2019. We were along the coast in Asia on a trip when we thought we might be pregnant. This photo felt like it could be a before-and-after moment: new country, new season, maybe a new baby. A few weeks later, we found out that pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage.
That was the day miscarriage stopped being a statistic in Behzad’s physiology lectures and became something happening in our own house.
The second photo—Hannah in the exam room—was taken in November 2020 when we found out we were pregnant again. But then, 16 weeks in, we lost another baby. Two losses in two years. We stopped talking in “one in four” language. We weren’t a data point anymore; we were just us, sitting in waiting rooms, driving home in silence, trying to be kind to each other.
Around then, something shifted. Behzad did what he does as a scientist: he opened PubMed, read everything he could on prenatal nutrition and miscarriage, and lined up every prenatal we could find. So many were under-dosed or basically candy. It was the middle of the pandemic, so we turned to the place that felt most grounding: our tiny kitchen. Behzad started tinkering with a prenatal made from real food—bars packed with protein, choline, iron, omega-3s—all the things we wanted in Hannah’s body if we ever got another chance.
At first it was just a side project. Friends started asking for bars. Hannah kept eating them. Then strangers did. Then, by some miracle, we had our daughter. Messages came in with other people’s stories: IVF cycles, rainbow babies, quiet losses no one knew about. Our inbox became a waiting room of parents and almost-parents who were tired of feeling alone and under-nourished.
That’s how Tend was born. Not from a pitch deck, but from two people who thought they might never be parents, trying to make something small and practical for one another. These years have been humbling and humanizing. We’re not here for perfection or prestige. We’re here for nourished moms, long-prayed-for babies, and anyone still wondering if it will ever be their turn. 💜