Before the babies came, Ethan was the kind of husband other women told me they envied. He remembered anniversaries without being reminded. He left notes in my lunch bag. When we started talking seriously about a future together, he was the one who wanted the big family, not me. He would get this dreamy look on his face and talk about a house full of noise and chaos and little feet, and he swore, over and over, that we would do it all as equals. Fifty fifty. A real team. I believed him because I loved him and because he said it with such conviction that it never occurred to me a person could mean something so completely in the moment and abandon it so totally the instant it was tested.
We tried for a long time. There were months of hope and disappointment, the quiet grief of a negative test, and then finally a positive one, and then the ultrasound where the technician went very quiet and then very excited and turned the screen toward us and said, “Well, there’s one. And there’s two. And, okay, there’s three.” Triplets. Ethan cried in the parking lot afterward, happy tears, holding my hands and saying it was everything he had ever wanted, that he was going to be the best father, that I would never have to do any of it alone.
I want you to remember that he said that. I would never have to do any of it alone. I have replayed those words more times than I can count.
The pregnancy was brutal in the way that carrying three babies at once is always brutal. I was on modified bed rest by the second trimester and full bed rest by the third. Ethan was attentive enough during that time, in the way that a man can be attentive when the work is mostly a matter of bringing you things and feeling good about himself for it. He brought me water. He set up the nursery, or rather he supervised while his brother set up the nursery. He posted about it online, the impending arrival of our three miracles, and collected the admiration of everyone we knew, and I did not yet understand that for Ethan the performance of fatherhood and the fact of it were two entirely different things, and that he was only ever interested in the first.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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