If you remember the nurse who stood by you during your child’s birth—you’re not alone. For one Gen Z labor and delivery nurse, remembering every baby isn’t just a feeling. It’s a ritual.
It started with a jar.
A simple glass container, the kind you might find on a shelf in your grandma’s kitchen. But for this TikTok creator and labor-and-delivery Gen Z nurse @jayuanna.lenee, that jar holds more than beads—it holds memories. It holds names and heartbeats, beginnings and endings. It holds stories.
In a now-viral TikTok viewed more than 5.6 million times, she reveals the emotional tribute she’s built over time: her baby bead jar. Each bead represents a baby she’s helped deliver during her shifts as a night nurse.
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There are 211 beads so far:
117 blue and 90 pink
For the boys and girls who entered the world under her care.
8 yellow
For the “angel babies” who didn’t get to stay.
1 purple
For the time she delivered a baby entirely alone—no doctor in the room, just her hands, her heart, and the training she trusted.
2 green
For two deliveries she calls “special,” babies and families she’ll never forget.
It’s simple. It’s quiet. It’s heartbreakingly human.
Preserving humanity in a high-pressure field
Labor and delivery is often romanticized—the new life, the joy, the tears. But ask any L&D nurse and they’ll tell you: it’s also unpredictable, exhausting, and emotionally intense. In the span of one shift, a nurse might hold a mother’s hand through a first breath… and another through a last.
What @jayuanna.lenee’s jar captures is the emotional labor that rarely makes it into textbooks or even into words. The kind that stays with nurses long after the scrubs are off and the shifts are over.
Because for every parent who remembers their nurse forever, there’s a nurse carrying the memory of every baby.
Gen Z and the rewriting of emotional legacy
Gen Z is often praised—and sometimes critiqued—for their emotional transparency and their unwillingness to separate heart from hustle. But maybe that’s exactly what healthcare needs.
Instead of compartmentalizing or “toughening up,” this young nurse leaned in. She found a way to honor her patients, her role, and the gravity of birth without numbing herself to its impact.
The jar is tangible. It’s personal. It’s an archive of humanity in a system that often prioritizes speed, stats, and survival.
What if more hospitals made space for these moments? What if remembrance was part of the routine, not just the exception?
What if we all made space for this kind of remembrance? What if we saw every birth—not just the dramatic or traumatic ones—as worthy of pause and reverence?
What if we honored every angel baby with a moment, a marker, a bead?
What if we gave our nurses room to grieve, to remember, to feel?
What @jayuanna.lenee has done with her beads isn’t just touching—it’s revolutionary in its gentleness. It challenges a system that asks caretakers to constantly give without always giving them a way to hold on.
And maybe, just maybe, her jar is more than a keepsake. Maybe it’s a reminder that care isn’t just clinical—it’s deeply human.
Because every baby matters. And so does every nurse who remembers.
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