How many times have we heard that giving birth means performing “the miracle of life”? Well, try saying that to a woman in labor at nine months, and you’ll earn yourself a one-way ticket to a slap in the face. Doulas know this all too well—caring professionals hired specifically to guide their clients through every stage of pregnancy. While they lack medical training, their expertise covers an incredibly wide and practical range: making you crawl to ease contractions, massaging your neck with essential oils before labor, and helping you squeeze milk out of your breasts are just a few of their services. These are intimate and delicate tasks, requiring a doula to be empathetic, nurturing, and attentive. Too bad Adele, the doula protagonist of this story, is none of these things.

Between daily hangovers, accumulated parking tickets, and a sharp tongue always at the ready, Adele is a 35-year-old who acts like a high schooler—and in fact, she shares an apartment with a 23-year-old student. A true champion of irresponsibility, she drifts through a life of week-long temp jobs and Tinder dates that barely last an hour. But she’s not worried: like any good teenager, she’s convinced that she’ll soon stumble upon the entrepreneurial idea of the century—the kind of Jeff Bezos-style stroke of genius that will finally change her life for good. And change it does—but not in the way she expects. After yet another “brilliant” idea leaves her broke, Adele is forced to repay her debt by working as a doula at the agency run by seventy-year-old Gemma. But how can someone who can’t even take care of her own dirty socks handle pregnant women? The truth is, Gemma didn’t offer her the job purely out of charity: this scatterbrained young woman is the daughter of her best friend Teresa, who died years earlier in a car accident caused by Adele herself. It’s a trauma Adele has never recovered from, so much so that she still drives the same dented Panda she was in that night. But Gemma is convinced that beneath the layers of sarcasm Adele uses to shield herself, she’s still capable of great empathy, generosity, and responsibility. And what better way to bring out these qualities than by dealing with the whims, pains, and complaints of a herd of women in the throes of hormonal storms? Adele, on the other hand, thinks Gemma has lost her mind. But what choice does she have? And so, with a solemn promise to get her life together and her trusty Panda racing through the streets of Milan, she prepares to face the unfortunate expectant mothers assigned to her. Little does she know that among influencer moms devoted to placenta encapsulation, control-freak couples on the brink of collapse, and gentle parenting methods gone awry, disaster is always just around the corner. But maybe, so is healing.