Chapter 1 — Running on Empty

My husband, Julian, and I had dreamed of becoming parents for years, and when we found out we were expecting twins, we were overjoyed.

But after our twin daughters were born, our lives changed in ways that neither of us, I think, had truly imagined they would.

The girls were only six months old, and I was barely sleeping.

Between feedings every few hours, endless diaper changes, mountains of laundry, and the daily impossibility of calming two crying babies at once, I felt, most days, as though I were running on empty and had been for a very long time.

I never complained.

I want to be honest about that, because it matters to what came after.

I handled the feedings, and the laundry, and the sleepless nights, and every other invisible task that fills the hours of a mother of newborns, and I did it without complaint, because I told myself that we were both adjusting, that Julian was tired too, that this was the hard season every new family passes through, and that my job was to endure it gracefully.

I had absorbed, somewhere along the way, the idea that a good mother suffers quietly, that to ask for help was to fail, that the measure of my devotion was how much I could carry without letting anyone see the strain.

So I carried it.

All of it.

Silently.

And in my silence, Julian learned a lesson I did not know I was teaching him: that there was no limit to what I would bear, and therefore no reason for him to share the load.

I have thought a great deal, since, about the invisible curriculum of an unequal marriage, the way that two people teach each other, without a word, what each will accept and what each may expect.

I did not decide, one day, to carry the entire weight of our newborns alone.

It came by increments, each one small, each one seemingly reasonable, the way these things always happen.

In the first weeks, when I was recovering from surgery and Julian was, in fairness, genuinely helpful, we did things together.

But then his paternity leave ended, and he went back to work, and a logic installed itself that neither of us examined: that because he now spent his days at the office, the days at home were mine.