We tried for three years.
I want to start there because the trying is part of the story, not as background or setup but as the actual beginning of what I need you to understand about who Brandon and I were to each other before the girls were born and what we were supposed to become.
Three years of tracking cycles and temperature charts and the specific calendar-consciousness that turns intimacy into logistics, of the two-week waits that stretched their length in proportion to how much you wanted a particular outcome, of the negative tests that arrived with the particular cruelty of things that should be nothing but are everything in the moment of seeing them. We did three rounds of IUI and one full IVF cycle before the embryo transfer that worked, and between the first negative test and the day I sat in our bathroom at seven in the morning holding a positive one, there had been two early miscarriages that neither of us talked about very much afterward because talking about them required staying in them and staying in them made it impossible to keep trying.
My name is Julie. I am thirty-four years old, and I was the kind of person who had been thinking about motherhood since I was a child playing with baby dolls with a seriousness that made my own mother laugh, the child who offered to hold every baby at every family gathering, who knew at seventeen that whatever else my life was going to contain, it was going to contain children.
Brandon knew this about me when we married. It was not a surprise or a negotiation. It was a shared understanding, or it was something I understood to be shared, which is a distinction I did not examine closely enough until very late.
The girls were born in March.
Clara and Nora. Clara first by four minutes, which I have thought about in the way you think about arbitrary things that feel less arbitrary when you are sleep-deprived, the four minutes that made her older, that will be the four minutes between them for the rest of their lives. Nora was smaller by half a pound and louder from the first moment, which has remained true.
I loved them immediately in the way that new mothers are told they will love their babies but that does not fully prepare you for the specific magnitude of it, the way it reorganizes everything without asking your permission. I loved them and I was also immediately terrified, because loving something that much and being responsible for its survival while operating on no sleep is a specific condition that people do not describe accurately in advance, possibly because language is insufficient for it.
The first month was the impossible month.
They did not sleep at the same time. This sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. It means that the intervals of sleep available to the person managing them are governed by the less cooperative of the two babies, and less cooperative was a moving designation in those early weeks, Clara and Nora trading the role with the unpredictability of two small people who had not yet received the memo that there was another person’s needs to coordinate with.
Brandon went back to work at week three.
He worked in commercial insurance, mid-level management, a job that required being presentable and organized and mentally present, none of which were things I was able to be, and I understood that work was necessary and I did not begrudge him the return to it in any direct way. I only began to notice, as the weeks accumulated, the quality of his return each evening, which was the quality of someone arriving home rather than someone coming to take part.
He would come in and look at the girls and hold whichever one was convenient for a few minutes and then he would need to decompress. He would change out of his work clothes and sit in front of the television or on the back porch with a beer, and he would be pleasant if I came to him but he would not come to me, and the tasks of the evening continued as the tasks of the day had continued, which was to say they were mine.
I want to be fair here because fairness is something I have always tried to practice even in situations where the impulse toward it is not immediate.
He was tired. He had a demanding job. He was adjusting to fatherhood in ways I did not have a complete window into. There are realities about the early months of parenthood for the parent who returns to work that I could not fully access from my position, and I acknowledged this to myself regularly during those months as a check on the resentment that was building alongside the exhaustion.
But resentment builds when the check is always the same direction, when you are always the one extending the benefit of the doubt without receiving the extension in return.
The nights were mine entirely.
The middle-of-the-night feedings, both of them, because the girls had not synced their schedules and the idea of waking Brandon when he had to be up for work at six felt like a cost I could not justify. I would calculate, in the night, how much sleep I would get if they both went down now and stayed down until five, and the number was always smaller than it should have been and often smaller than it was.
I lost weight I did not have to lose.
I developed a tremor in my hands that appeared at the end of the day when the exhaustion was at its full weight, a mild shaking that I told no one about because telling someone would require acknowledging it.
My mother called every week and I told her we were managing.
My friend Dessa texted and I responded with fine and holding emojis because fine and holding was the compressed version of the truth and the full version would have taken more energy than I had to offer.
Brandon told his friends we were killing it.
I heard him say this on the phone one evening while I was in the nursery with Clara, who had been awake for two hours, and the words landed in a way I did not immediately process but that I filed somewhere, the way you file things you are not yet ready to look at directly.
The night of the bottles was in June.
Clara and Nora were six months old. The particular edge of exhaustion I had been managing for six months had become less like a condition and more like a climate, the air I moved through rather than something that happened to me. I had asked for help before and received it in partial forms, Brandon taking over for an hour here or there, handling one morning on a weekend, things that were real help in the moment and that I received as such, which I mention because I want to be honest about the range of what happened and not flatten it into a simpler narrative.
But the help was never sustained and it was never assumed and it was never something I could count on without asking, and asking had its own cost, the cost of being told he was tired, of being reminded about his work week, of receiving help that was given in the way of favors rather than participation.
On the night of the bottles, both girls had finally gone down after a forty-minute process that involved everything I knew about settling them and several things I invented in the moment, and I came into the kitchen and the bottles from the evening feedings were on the counter, and I was so tired that even the act of washing them felt like being asked to move something too heavy.
I asked Brandon to wash them.
Not to manage the rest of the night. Not to take over any of the larger things. Specifically the bottles, which were in front of him on the counter, which would take eight minutes.
He sighed.
He looked around the kitchen and the living room and he told me he was tired of coming home to crying babies and dirty dishes and a wife who always looked stressed.
I did not say what I wanted to say.
I sat down on the kitchen stool and I looked at him.
He told me he had planned a four-day fishing trip. That he needed a break. That his friends were going up to the lake and he was going with them and he was leaving the next morning.
The word break rang in me in a specific way.
A break from what, I thought, and did not say. A break from what, specifically, when what I had been doing for six months was the thing that could not be broken from because it was present at all hours and did not recognize weekends and had not, since March, permitted me a single uninterrupted night of sleep.
I asked how he expected me to manage two infants alone when I had not slept properly in months.
He kept packing.
He shrugged.
“You wanted to be a mother,” he said. “So act like one.”
I remember looking at him very clearly in that moment.
The IVF. The injections I had given myself. The two miscarriages. The embryo transfer and the ten days before the test and the way I had learned to hold myself very still during those ten days so that hope did not become a thing I carried in any way that made falling heavier. The moment in the bathroom at seven in the morning.
You wanted to be a mother. So act like one.
I did not argue.
I did not ask him to stay.
I watched him walk out the door the following morning with his fishing gear and his weekend bag and the easy confidence of someone who has not examined whether their exit is permissible.
And I stood in the kitchen with two six-month-olds and I thought: all right.
The first day was survival.
I will not pretend it was anything else. Clara had a difficult morning and Nora was fine and then they traded and the afternoon was a specific version of hard that I managed by moving through it in fifteen-minute increments, addressing the immediate thing and then the next immediate thing and not looking past the next fifteen minutes because looking further was too large.
I did not call anyone.
This was a decision I made consciously and not without cost, because my mother would have come, because Dessa would have come, because I had people who would have driven to my house and taken a shift and made it manageable in a practical sense. But I did not call anyone because I was doing something I had not yet fully named for myself, something that required the four days to be only me.
The first night I did not sleep more than ninety minutes in sequence.
The second day was different.
I cannot explain exactly what changed, but something in the quality of the alone shifted. The anxiety of it gave way to something quieter, more functional. I found rhythms I had not found when Brandon was there, not because his presence had made things harder exactly, but because his presence had been a constant background negotiation, the question of whether and when to ask for help, the management of his mood and his comfort alongside the management of the girls, the specific effort of being a person in a marriage while also being the person who was doing all of this.
Without him there, I was only the person doing this.
And I found, in the second and third days, that I was more capable than I had known.
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