How to Be Married

by Jo Piazza

  “It was a really personal thing for me at first as I tried to figure out how to be a dad,” Johan continued. “But at the end of it I wanted it to inspire other men to think about what it really means to get to spend that extra time with your baby at home,” he said. “I wanted my son to come to me as easily as my wife. I want to be there for him, and I think it’s important that he knew that from the very beginning.”

  The photos in Johan’s resulting book are raw and mesmerizing, and not just because Swedish men are so damn photogenic. In one, Urban Nordh, a thirty-three-year-old infrastructure consultant sporting a hipster brown Adidas track jacket, holds his recalcitrant toddler over a toilet with little success. In another forty-one-year-old Ola Larsson carries his son Gustav in a pack on his back while gracefully vacuuming the living room floor. Loui Kuhlau, a twenty-eight-year-old artist who took a full year of leave with his son Eiling, said he had a hard time understanding why anyone would not want to be at home with their kid. “I think I’ve learned a lot about myself during my time at home with Eiling, including how much I’m capable of—despite the sleep deprivation. But the biggest benefit is experiencing the joy of being at home with my child.”

  One of the ancillary benefits of Sweden’s dad leave is helping to open up the nation to the idea that men can do all of the things women do.

  “I’m hoping I can change how people perceive masculinity,” Johan said. “I’m hoping that I can show this can be the norm, men taking care of children and showing their emotions.”

  The other thing that being a stay-at-home dad taught Johan was that staying at home is a real job.

  “It’s not just about raising the children. It’s about learning how to do all of the unpaid work in the home. It’s about getting a better understanding of what women have traditionally been doing for the last several thousand years, all of that work that has been taken for granted.” I wanted to grab Johan’s hand and stand up on the table in the middle of the café and have a Sally Field–in–Norma Rae moment. “We each share the work of the house and of the children, and it isn’t about asking for credit. She doesn’t have to tell me how good I am and I don’t have to tell her how good she is. We both know it.”

  “And you would never call what you do babysitting?” I asked, just to drive the point home.

  Johan burst out laughing and stood to excuse himself.

  “I have to pick my son up from day care.”

  “Do you have kids yet?” Leffe Lindh, the owner of a Swedish moose farm, asked us.

  “Soon. Someday. We’re working on it.” Nick let out a low, deep chuckle and gave a sideways glance in my direction to make sure it was the right thing to say to a stranger. I gave a slight nod.

  “It’s a lot of fun to work on it.” I plastered a smile on my face. That was what people wanted to hear. It was easier than talking about how un-fun making a baby can actually be. From the day we got engaged, the occupancy of my uterus became fair game for discussion among friends, family, and complete strangers.

  “When, when, when will you have a baby?” asked my aunts, our dog sitter, and the checkout clerk at Trader Joe’s. No one wants to hear “Well, it’s complicated for us….”

  Leffe clapped his hands and pulled a plush gray moose toy off the shelf and handed it to me. “For when you’re done working on it.” He laughed with a jovial snort. We’d driven two hours outside of Stockholm to visit this farm, a place where humans can get up close and personal with Sweden’s most famous animal. Since we’d arrived in the country we’d been eating at restaurants with names like the Flying Elk (a Swedish term for moose) and the Moosehead. We’d eaten moose meatballs (which were delicious), moose burgers (which were pretty mediocre), moose milk (better than camel milk), and moose jerky (too salty). All I wanted to do was see a moose.

  “It’s like Minnesota out here,” Nick observed during our drive to Leffe’s moose farm as we passed bright red barns and tall evergreen forests, winding our way through towns with names like Skogstibble.

  “Now, that’s how you name a town,” Nick remarked. “Skogstibble. That’s a town begging for a drink to be named after it.”

  Just twenty minutes past Skogstibble we came upon the farm and Leffe, who greeted us with a boisterous hug, a coffee, and a waffle over which he told us his own life story. Leffe Lindh’s path to owning a moose park involved the breakup of his first marriage. Nearly twenty years ago he was given his first moose to take care of, a baby whose mother had been killed by a car. Leffe, who was then a hunter, worked day and night to nurse her back to health, but in the end the baby moose didn’t make it.

  “I cried when she died,” he told me. “But from then I got it in my head that I would start a moose park. I said that to all of my friends. They told me I was crazy. My wife called me crazy.”

  And so he divorced his wife. A couple of years later he began dating a new woman, Ilona. Two weeks into their courtship he grabbed her hands and looked into her eyes and told her: “I want to marry you and start a moose park with you.”

  Some women wouldn’t know what to say to that. Ilona said yes.

  The couple bought two moose babies in 2006 and built a twenty-five-acre farm. Ilona and Leffe had two of their own human children and now take care of thirty moose. They run two businesses together, the moose park and an apartment rental company, as equal partners. The year before we visited, when one of the female moose rejected her baby, Leffe convinced Ilona to let the calf live in the house with them, like a pet. Olivia, the moose, ate with the family at the breakfast table, and to this day she remains fond of buttered toast.

  Leffe rose to a moderate level of Internet fame as the man who kisses the moose on the lips. He shows off by doing this in front of all of the visitors to the farm with a large male moose named Holger.

  I tentatively approached Holger to pet his massive antlers. I leaned over and smelled him, expecting something horsey, but he smelled sweet, like oats.

  “She wants to kiss your moose,” Nick laughed to Leffe. “Trust me. I can tell.”

  Leffe held his head while I gave Holger a peck on the snout. In return he licked my cheek.

  “Sometimes I say he kisses better than my wife,” Leffe laughed. But he got serious when I asked him about why his second marriage has thrived and his first one didn’t. It was more than the fact that Ilona agreed to open the moose park.

  “We share everything. You have to share everything. It’s hard, but you figure it out. Everyone chips in. Work, pain, stress, joy, happiness, you share all of the things,” Leffe said. “Together. We’re partners. We split it, but it’s not always equal. Sometimes I’m there 90 percent and sometimes she does 90 percent. My best advice is don’t keep track.”

  Nick and I stayed quiet most of the drive back to Stockholm, but I could see Nick working something out in his head, talking silently to himself, his hands moving, like a mild schizophrenic.

  “You’re really nervous about having kids, aren’t you?” I liked playing voodoo mind reader when he talked to himself. I was usually right.

  “I’m just thinking, Squeak.”

  “About what?” I nibbled on a gummy moose candy Leffe had given me before we left. (“Like Swedish fish. But moose,” he said.)

  “About everything.”

  “Everything, like what?”

  “Yeah, I’m nervous about having kids. It’s a big step. Are we ready?”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “I mean it. Are we ready. Do we need more time?”

  I didn’t want to snap back at him that I didn’t have a whole lot of time. I was thirty-five. Three of my friends had had miscarriages in the past year and one had delivered a stillborn baby. When you walk into a doctor’s office at thirty-five and say you want to have a baby, they give you a withering look and refer to you as an “older” mother.

  “Actually, the term is ‘geriatric mother,’ ” my geneticist had said during one of my appointments.

  “That’s not funny at all,” I resp
onded.

  His expression didn’t change. “It’s just what we call it.”

  “What are you so nervous about?” I pressed Nick in the car. My hopelessly optimistic husband was never nervous about anything. He’s the one who calmed me, who urged me to have faith that everything would work out the way it should. Why this one thing? I knew the answer. It was because it was something he wanted to be good at, to be completely ready for. Having kids is a big deal. It can be the grenade that blows up your relationship. Having kids for us was an even bigger deal, since we still weren’t sure how we wanted to go about having kids. But no matter what we decided—trying to have our own kids, using a donor egg, adoption—it would all take an investment of time, energy, and money. My head began to hurt. I’d been buoyed by Leffe’s enthusiasm for teamwork. Husband and wife facing the harsh reality of life as a team of equals. Now I felt deflated that Nick wasn’t as excited about facing the next step as I was.

  “It’s just…Sometimes it takes over….Sometimes it’s all we talk about and it dominates every conversation. And I feel left out,” Nick said. “I want to feel more involved.”

  When had he said that before? When I’d sidestepped him in our house auction. He was right. I’m a planner. When I decide I want to do something, I go after it. I had been talking a lot about pregnancy and having babies. And it felt like Nick was floating away from the conversation. When it’s your body that has to get pregnant, it can become a very self-involved choice.

  Nick went on.

  “And sometimes I worry it’s too soon. Have we been through enough things together? Have we done enough? Have we done everything we wanted to do before we have kids?”

  I had my own fears about kids, but Nick’s doubts made me feel even more scared than my own.

  “I love you, baby girl. Maybe I’m being ridiculous,” he said and pulled the car to the side of the road so he could hold my hand and look at me. I blinked back the tears.

  “No, I get it,” I said. “There is one more thing we could do.”

  When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world in my arms.

  —MARY OLIVER

  Before Nick and I left San Francisco to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, I wrote out a list of things I wanted us to accomplish during the trip:

  Be together

  Be happy

  Don’t die

  Maybe pet a baby elephant

  We also made a pact. If one of us couldn’t make it up the mountain for any reason, the other would keep going.

  “Seriously,” I said to Nick. “If I get tired or hurt or sick or if I see a kitten or a small monkey that I think I need to rescue, you keep going.” I knew if anyone was going to fail to make it to the top of the mountain, it would be me.

  “We’re not getting another pet. We’ve talked about this,” Nick said. “And if I can’t make it to the top, if I fail, then you keep going too.” Nick wasn’t going to fail. He doesn’t fail at anything.

  At 19,341 feet, Kilimanjaro is a very, very tall mountain. And while the climb to the top isn’t technically difficult (you don’t need an ice ax or ropes or anything), it’s a strenuous four-day challenge that is incredibly taxing on the body. About 25,000 people climb the mountain every year, and of those only 40 percent make it to the summit. High-altitude pulmonary edema, where your lungs begin to take on potentially fatal fluid, is a real threat when humans venture that high. The effect the altitude has on the body is unpredictable and it doesn’t matter what shape you’re in. In 2010 Grand Slam tennis champion Martina Navratilova was brought down the mountain by a crew of porters before reaching the summit after becoming deathly ill. The woman whom Tennis magazine chose as the greatest female tennis player for the years 1965 through 2005 had to be evacuated from the mountain!

  Almost everyone experiences some form of altitude sickness—intense muscle pain, nausea, an inability to breathe, dizziness, insomnia, or mind-altering headaches.

  Why were we doing this again?

  My dad takes seventeen different kinds of medications a day to treat his muscular dystrophy. He can no longer breathe on his own, and without the aid of an oxygen machine he would suffocate. He’s frequently nauseated and stricken by intense bouts of pain and headaches. It wasn’t lost on me that the symptoms of altitude sickness that I could experience on Mt. Kilimanjaro mirrored his daily existence.

  “You’re not him,” my mom told me during one of our many conversations about my muscular dystrophy diagnosis.

  About a month before we left for Africa my mom started getting better. She went into a behavioral therapy program and had her medication calibrated. She was like a whole new person, bright, cheery, and optimistic. She was my cheerleader again. She texted both Nick and me several times a day to tell us how much she loved both of us and how happy she was doing cardio and yoga with her new trainer.

  It would have been overwhelming, if it wasn’t such a huge relief. Her happiness even let some lightness into her relationship with my dad. She was more content, less angry. As I watched her massive transformation, I thought back to Chana’s advice: Take care of yourself first.

  “Seriously,” my mom repeated to me. “Your future won’t look anything like Dad’s. We waited until it was much too late to be proactive against this. You’re doing everything you can to fight it before it even begins.”

  I also did everything possible to ensure against failure on the mountain. My friend Mikey Sadowski works for one of the top-rated Kilimanjaro climbing companies, Intrepid Travel. Before I booked the trip with them, I talked to Mikey for hours about the best routes and guides. “Is there a guide who can carry me if I need to be carried?” I inquired. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who asked this question. The answer was no.

  Before leaving for Africa, Nick and I took iron pills and drank non-FDA-approved chlorophyll drops that supposedly increase the body’s ability to take in oxygen. We got a prescription for Diamox, a drug that promises to decrease the potential for altitude sickness despite causing intense and painful tingling in the limbs, dizziness, ringing in the ears, and blurred vision. It forces you to pee every twenty minutes and makes beer taste like rusted copper.

  “The side effects of this have to be worse than altitude sickness,” I complained to Nick when we tested the drug back home and I walked straight into a wall. Both my hands and feet stung with pins and needles for an hour.

  “Nope,” he said with confidence. “Altitude sickness makes you feel like you’re going to die.”

  To reach Mt. Kilimanjaro from San Francisco you take an eleven-hour flight to Amsterdam, an eight-hour flight to Nairobi, a one-hour flight to Kilimanjaro Airport, and then a two-hour drive to Marangu, a village nestled in the jungle at the foot of the mountain.

  It was rainy and cold when we finally arrived at the Kibo Hotel in Marangu. The ramshackle German-built lodge appeared abandoned. A stooped man named Isaac, who couldn’t have been younger than 110, heaved our two enormous duffel bags out of the car. I worried he’d collapse under the weight, but he excitedly ushered us into the shelter of the lobby.

  “I’m starving!” I pleaded with Isaac.

  “Do you want French fries?”

  I almost kissed him. “That’s all I want in the entire world.”

  A sign above the front door of the hotel proudly welcomed Jimmy Carter.

  “Do you think Jimmy Carter is here?” I whispered to Nick.

  “Mr. Carter, the president of the United States, was here in 1988,” Isaac interrupted proudly. That sign had hung above the door for twenty-eight years.

  “Well, if Jimmy and Rosalynn can climb this mountain, then I shouldn’t have a problem,” I said. “They don’t exactly strike me as mountaineers!”

  “Mr. Carter, the president of the United States, climbed it by helicopter,” Isaac said and shuffled into the kitchen to fry the potatoes. Isaac was a one-man operation.

  Threadbare lime green sheets wi
th hot pink giraffes covered the two single beds in our room. I’d never seen an electric shower before, but Nick was very excited by the one in our bathroom. It looked like a showerhead from a postapocalyptic future, held together with thick rubber bands and fraying wires sticking out in every direction.

  “I haven’t seen one of these in years! Not since I backpacked South America. This will shock the fuck out of you,” Nick said with nervous excitement as he inspected the unraveling wires. “Seriously! Do not touch anything metal while you’re wet. God, this is cool! I’ll bet I could build one of these.”

  We squeezed into one of the very small beds and stared at the ceiling and the flickering single fluorescent bulb hanging from it.

  “It’s a little tight, don’t you think?” I didn’t want to give up on the romance or anything, but the two of us didn’t fit in a single bed.

  “It’s good practice,” Nick replied.

  “For what?”

  “In case we ever sleep on a submarine.”

  We’d both finally turned off our phones. There’d be no Wi-Fi or cell service on the mountain. The last time I had “unplugged,” or not had both Internet and cell service for longer than twenty-four hours, was when we’d met in the Galápagos. I remembered the last moments I had cell service on that trip. With a small glimmer of a signal left, I frantically e-mailed everyone I knew to tell them I would not be available for eight days. In the midst of it, this straw-haired California dude reached over the seat on our bus to shake my hand.

  “Hi. I’m Nick,” he said. His eyes were an honest shade of blue.

  “Yeah. Hi. You know we won’t have Internet this whole trip?”

  “I know. Devils! But I’ve made peace with it,” he said, leaning back comfortably into his seat.

  “Good for you! I haven’t…so can you just let me finish a couple of things here? I’m busy.” Without the Internet the course of my life was forever diverted.