by Mark Lukach
She nodded.
“In fact, maybe love, in the purest sense, is about being kind to someone with no expectation of how they’re going to respond. They can ignore your kindness, reject it, or return it tenfold, but you just continue to be kind, and that is love.”
Giulia’s eyes filled with tears. “Well, we’re not doing a very good job of loving each other, then.”
“We’re not,” I said. “But who says we can’t change it.”
Our next stop was Kenya, where we lived even more remotely than we did in Indonesia. We stayed at the Daraja Academy, an all-girls high school that our friends started, the campus a potholed forty-kilometer drive away from the nearest city. The school was set in the chalky red foothills of Mount Kenya, a landscape that alternated between parched dry and drenched with floods. Elephants and zebras and even lions were regular sights in the area, and the fence around the campus was mostly to deal with animals instead of people.
The campus felt very different from any place we had ever been. The students had all been carefully selected from communities through partner organizations. Daraja was built to be a school for girls whose families otherwise couldn’t afford high school, without which they probably would have either been married off or gone to work in a low-paying job. Instead, they were at Daraja. The energy of a school full of young women who were grasping on to education as their path out of poverty was contagious. There was a pride, an ambition, but also a fragility that you could sense everywhere.
Giulia and I helped around campus in a variety of ways: teaching, working in the office, cooking in the kitchen, even lending a hand for maintenance projects like fixing up the garbage pit. We worked hard, but we also had a lot of downtime. We lived in a rondavel on campus and spent hours at a time sitting together and reading and gently talking. We shared stories that we had learned about the girls and marveled at their courage and willpower. So many of them had lived such demanding lives. We talked ourselves into being more courageous about our own lives. We had been given so much compared with how little they had, but they fought and fought, so we should fight, too.
It was typical voluntourism, the juxtaposition of lives of authentic suffering as a means of contextualizing our own, but the gratitude it instilled in us was genuine. We made amazing connections with the girls, especially Giulia, who took part in a health class and opened up to some of them about her year of mental illness, becoming an instant confidante. For the rest of our time on campus, girls approached her to talk through the feelings that we would have called “anxiety” and “depression” but that they bottled up in shame.
We visited a nearby orphanage, run by a sister organization of the school, and spent most of the day doting over a six-month-old girl named Harriet. We were supposed to walk through the grounds and work with the grade-school-aged children, but we kept returning to the nursery to see Harriet. Giulia helped feed her as I watched, and I saw in Giulia a vision of parenting that I hadn’t considered since our road trip to my sister’s wedding almost two years before. When I changed Harriet’s diaper, I caught Giulia watching me, and I could see in her gaze that she was seeing the same future in me.
In our last week, I got dropped off in the city of Nanyuki and ran the forty kilometers back over the potholed roads. I wanted to feel small against a landscape of enormity. I wanted to feel energized to a life of tremendous potential. I wanted to be alone and spend the whole time wanting to return to Giulia.
Bangkok was the spark, but Kenya was the slow burn, the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute opportunity to practice our focus on kindness toward each other, and we left the country transformed.
Our last day overseas, after four months away from home, was in Dublin, Ireland. I saw on the hotel map that there was a lighthouse at the end of a seawall, a few miles’ walk from our hotel. We were tired of sightseeing. It was lightly drizzling, but it was the last day of our trip and we didn’t want to stay in the hotel, so we bundled up like we did at home and went walking.
What looked like only a few miles on the map turned out to be much farther. It took more than two hours to get to the lighthouse. We walked slowly and calmly through the streets, holding hands and letting go throughout. We passed a giant beach with the tide so far receded that there were hundreds of yards of wet sand, the bay far out of reach.
The seawall jutted a mile into Dublin Bay, with the lighthouse at the very end. After a month in the dry heat of Kenya, it felt wonderful to be in the misty cold, surrounded by salt water, before returning to our beach living in San Francisco.
As we walked back from the lighthouse, Giulia took out her iPhone and started playing around on it. She spent the whole walk back on the phone. I was annoyed and walked ahead. Who does that—shatters the beauty of the last day of a long trip by isolating herself in her phone?
A few blocks from our hotel, I finally stopped to wait for her. She had fallen far behind me, well out of sight, but the route home was straight and easy, and after fifteen minutes, she arrived.
“Here, Mark, I want you to read this,” she said. Her eyes were sparkling and looked wet, from the fog but also from tears.
“What is it?” I asked, agitated.
“Just read it. I had to write it now. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time and I had to write it right then and there, on our walk.”
I took her phone and started to read. It was a blog post, for the travel blog we had been keeping for our trip.
Today marks a special day. It’s our last day in Dublin, but more than that, it’s our last day in a foreign city. Tomorrow we return to the United States, ready to embark on a new journey: our life back at home.
I know Mark tends to be the spiritual, reflective one on this blog, and I mostly just post pictures. But for my last post I want to make a special dedication to my husband. While we walked to a lighthouse, I reflected on the reality that I wouldn’t be alive in this world if it wasn’t for him and his unconditional love. I suffered from a major depression that stole from me my love for life, and I was suicidal for a very long time. I was hospitalized in a psych ward for 23 days. I describe this period of my life as “hell on earth.” But Mark. Oh Mark. He was by my side every single day.
While I hold his hand today, everything feels different. We have been together since we were only 18 years old, for almost 11 years, but the love and admiration that I have for him today feels completely new.
This was never meant to be just a fun trip to get away and explore the world. This was a healing journey for the two of us. Getting sick changed everything . . . for the better.
I am a better person having suffered through a mental illness. I am a more loving daughter, wife, and I know one day mother. I wouldn’t change a single thing. My past led me to today. I have a newfound love and appreciation for myself and my life. A new way of seeing the world and the people in it.
So my love, this post is for you. Thank you for being at my side in sickness and in health, through the good times and the bad, while we were lying on the beaches of Indonesia or with the beautiful girls at Daraja . . . you are my everything.
I’m looking forward to our many journeys in life. Holding hands, of course.
In other words, “Boy, we can do much more together.”
seven
September 2011
We pushed our overloaded grocery cart out of Trader Joe’s in the foggy September afternoon. “I’m really excited with the location I’ve picked for the new campaign photo shoot,” Giulia said as we loaded up our groceries. “Getting the permits was a pain, but we’re going to be shooting at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater.”
“Where’s that again?” I asked.
“You know, that cool park in the Marina that has the archways and columns and looks like it’s from a European city.” This was Giulia’s second photo shoot at her new company at the job she’d found a few months after we returned home from Ireland. Although she hadn’t worked in more than a year and a half, she fell back into her work routine as though
she hadn’t missed a day.
“The model is going to fly in from L.A. and I’ll spend the day with her at the shoot, but I might need to ask you to take her back to the airport if that’s okay?”
“Yeah, sure, no problem,” I responded, enchanted by how firmly our lives felt back on track.
Giulia was positively buzzing about her new role, and now that she was back at work, I was sincerely trying my hand at a career in writing, working from the house on freelance projects, to mixed success. Some days were packed, others were completely empty. Not yet ready to return to a full-time teaching load and all the demands that meant on my schedule, I pieced together work in whatever way I could.
On the weekends we ran errands together, as we had done for three years before she had gone psychotic. Our lives felt like they were back in our control.
So much in our control that we were trying to get pregnant.
As we loaded the last bag of groceries, Giulia abruptly changed topics. “Let’s get a pregnancy test,” she said, an eager smile on her face.
“No, no, no.” I shook my head. “We just started trying, it’s barely even been a month. Let’s not get too excited. There’s no pressure yet. Let’s be patient.”
But Giulia wasn’t listening. She grabbed my hand and pulled me along to the CVS next door to the Trader Joe’s. I dragged my feet, but I was grumbling mostly for show. I had been looking forward to this for longer than I could remember. I envisioned fatherhood as my life’s ultimate goal, something I learned from my mom, who always said that her true calling was to be a mother. Even when we were eighteen and newly in love, I talked to Giulia about wanting to have children together. Nine years and a psychotic episode later, Giulia’s work felt good enough, our relationship felt good enough, her sleep felt good enough, and we both thought it was finally time. Her psychotic break had delayed this, and even threatened to take it away from us, but now we were finally here, “trying,” an amazing euphemism for having lots of excited, joyful sex.
But I played it cool. I had to. The prospect of children and happily ever after felt dangerously fragile. We had consulted with Giulia’s psychiatrist, who had come around to the conclusion that her episode was a onetime thing. Giulia’s magical combination of medicine was lithium and Prozac, and the big question was whether to remain on the medication or not. We read blogs and forums and consulted with specialists. There was no conclusive research about the impacts of these drugs on a developing fetus, so it became a matter of what felt most right. Giulia and I both believed that the ideal pregnancy was an unmedicated pregnancy, but removing all medicine felt a bit foolhardy to Giulia’s psychiatrist. While the impact of medication on a fetus was unclear, a relapse of psychosis while pregnant would be devastating, to Giulia and our baby. We had to walk a fine line between taking care of Giulia’s mental health and protecting the baby’s developing health, and it wasn’t clear if the medication would be helping one while harming the other.
We ultimately decided to taper off lithium, mostly because Giulia wouldn’t be able to breast-feed on it. The salts in her milk would be too much for our baby’s young kidneys. But Prozac, according to our research and the two doctors we spoke with, was commonly taken by nursing mothers, and while no study was able to conclude that it was completely benign, none had proven any ill effects, either. So we decided to slowly remove lithium but stay on Prozac. The taper worked wonderfully. Giulia continued at work, she didn’t feel any more stress or struggle to sleep. So she stopped her birth control. A month later, she was dragging me around CVS to get a pregnancy test.
While I worried about the drugs and the possible return of psychosis, I was mostly playing it cool because I didn’t want the “trying” to be stressful. We had friends who had tried for two years to get pregnant, and they readily admitted that it had been a very taxing two years. The last thing I wanted was to welcome another challenge into our marriage that could shake the foundation of our relationship. I didn’t want Giulia to work herself giddy about dreams that might take several painful years to wither into impossibility. So I grumbled. I pushed for a conservative approach. I pretended I was in no rush. But deep inside, I was ready.
“I won’t take the test,” Giulia said, and she grabbed the package off the shelf. “I just want to have a few handy, just because. I won’t take it for at least a week.”
We paid, drove home, and unloaded the groceries. Giulia disappeared into our room as I arranged the food into the refrigerator and pantry.
I had just finished putting away the produce when Giulia returned to the kitchen, triumphant.
“I’m pregnant,” she announced, arms crossed, bright smile on her face.
“No, you’re not,” I said.
“Yes, I am,” she said, adamant. “I’m pregnant. I just took a test.”
I couldn’t believe it.
She pulled the pregnancy test out of her back pocket, and there it was, a bright purple plus sign.
“Oh, my God. You’re pregnant.” I barely whispered it. It was here. We were going to be parents.
“Yup,” she said, her eyes full of tears and her smile as big as I’d ever seen it. “I’m pregnant.”
Immediately the kitchen felt very full. It wasn’t just the two of us in there anymore. There was a third person in here. And not just a person, but a life, a future collection of memories, passions, and talents, was now in the kitchen with us. My mind raced to images of Legos scattered on the floor, car seats, footie pajamas. We’d need to upgrade our Civic to something that could fit all of us—child and dog in the backseat, camping gear in the trunk, surfboards on the roof.
I leapt out of the chair and ran to her, lifted her up, held her, put my hands on her belly, empty of words, full of hope. Two years earlier, almost to the day, I had taken Giulia to the psychiatric ward. Now she was pregnant. We laughed and kissed and felt so fully and wonderfully alive and in love.
I put her down and then began to think of the details. The first thing I thought of was how to tell our families, and I surprised myself by wanting it to be our secret, at least for a little while. I wanted this celebration for us.
“Let’s not tell anyone yet,” I said.
“Okay,” Giulia agreed, then sat down to the computer and logged in to Skype. She hadn’t stopped smiling. She was acting on autopilot with so much joy, saying one thing and then doing what she instinctively had always wanted to do once she got pregnant.
“I’m going to tell my parents now.”
“You sure? It’s the middle of the night in Italy,” I pointed out, wishing she’d wait but not really caring. If she wanted to tell the world, she should.
“I know,” Giulia responded, her smile somehow growing as the phone rang. After twelve rings, Suoc answered. “Mom, I’m pregnant!” Giulia yelled out, and instantly Suoc wasn’t groggy anymore, she was wide-awake and crying and shaking Romeo to wake up, and we all started to cry together at this gift, this reward at the end of such a long and hard road.
Giulia was right: some happiness is so big that it needs to be shared immediately. After a few celebratory minutes, we told Suoc and Romeo to get back to sleep, and then we called my parents and did the same thing all over again.
Giulia loved her pregnancy. She had always commented on how beautiful pregnant women looked; now, she was the beautiful pregnant woman. I had been waiting to become a dad for years, but I had no idea that Giulia’s pregnancy was going to renew her capacity to love herself. Giulia was in love with her life as a pregnant woman, and it showed. A few times a week she took a photo of herself in the mirror and posted it to Instagram to document her growing belly, the outfits she purchased to flatter it, the smile that grew in proportion to our developing baby. I joked with her about taking so many selfies, calling it “peak selfie time,” but that was because I once again felt the need to moderate my feelings. Her year of illness had made me more cautious in my optimism, but her exuberance was intoxicating and I let my worries slide to the side. She was sleeping
well, thriving at work—the changes Giulia had been suggesting were making noticeable improvements to the company’s bottom line—and, most important, in love with herself.
The night before the official ultrasound to find out the sex of our child, we went to dinner with three of our friends, three brothers. We ate at our favorite hidden Chinese spot and then drove to Polly Ann Ice Cream to load up on milkshakes. Watching the three brothers order, Giulia leaned into me and said, “It’s a boy. Seeing them, I can tell. We are having a boy, and we are going to have a lot of boys.”
The next day the technician confirmed Giulia’s suspicion: we were having a boy.
I met a surf couple named Zach and Sachi, who lived in the neighborhood and had recently gotten pregnant. Zach and I became close quickly, and I shared with him the history of Giulia’s hospitalization after one of our surf sessions. That night, Sachi called me. Turned out she had been diagnosed with bipolar when she was in her early twenties. She wanted to meet Giulia. She had questions about being pregnant with bipolar disorder, and how her doctors would holistically support both conditions. She didn’t know anyone else who had been in the psych ward and then got pregnant.
We all met at Trouble Coffee on Judah Street, a hip spot with fancy toast that was at the forefront of an evolution in our neighborhood. The Outer Sunset was becoming unexpectedly trendy, and Trouble was one of the first places to set the cooler tone.
Giulia and I got there first and sat at the parklet in front of the coffee shop to wait for Sachi and Zach.
“How are you feeling about meeting Sachi?” I asked.
“Fine,” Giulia said. “I mean, I guess I’m fine. I’m not sure what we’re gonna talk about.”
“There’s plenty to talk about,” I said. “Sachi is hoping she can learn from your experience a bit.”
“Yeah, but I don’t even know her. This is serious stuff to talk about the first time you meet someone.”