by Mark Lukach
“Yeah, that’s true,” I said. “But you talk about this kind of stuff with Marie all the time.”
“That’s different. I met Marie in IOP. We had to talk about it there. I’ve never met Sachi before. I’m meeting her for the first time, and we both know that we’ve been hospitalized, but that’s it.”
“If you’re not comfortable, we don’t have to talk about it.”
“I’ll see how it feels when they’re here,” Giulia said.
They arrived, we all got something to drink, and then we walked the few blocks to the beach. Giulia and Sachi were tentative, not sure how to start.
“So, how long were you hospitalized?” Giulia asked, finally breaking the ice.
“Um, about two months,” Sachi said. She was shy, speaking to the ground. It was obvious she hadn’t told too many people about this. “I was in a padded room by myself for a month of it.”
“Wow, I can’t imagine,” Giulia said. “I was in there twenty-three days and that felt like forever. How long ago?”
“I was nineteen when it happened, so a while ago. I’ve been on medication ever since.”
“Wow,” Giulia repeated. “And now you’re pregnant. Congratulations, how exciting.”
“Yup. Just like you,” Sachi said. They were warming to each other. “How’s the pregnancy going?”
“It’s great, I love it.”
“No worries?”
“No worries.”
And it began. Zach and I drifted back to let them talk and have their own space for a friendship based in shared trauma. That first morning on the beach blossomed into regular coffee outings and phone calls. Giulia and Sachi became a part of each other’s support systems. In the years since Sachi’s diagnosis, she’d acquired strategies for managing her stress and her disease, which included medication, therapy, and exercise. Sachi had much to share with Giulia for how to approach the three as an interconnected plan for stability. As for Giulia, she was a veteran of Kaiser’s bureaucratic health system, and she helped Sachi connect with a great OBGYN and navigate some of the decisions around her pregnancy and mental health.
Giulia’s concept of friendship was expanding. She had always made friends who were connected to work, which was the biggest part of her life; in college, she’d hung with the other business school kids, and since she’d moved to San Francisco, her work friends were some of her closest.
Her job was losing its centrality to her identity, so her friendship circle was drifting as well. Far more crucial was that she had spent twenty-three days in the psych ward, and the following eight months suicidal, and had survived both. There were many more people out there who had been through something similar, and Giulia was going to find them only if she talked about it.
Giulia and I shared the morning before she took the bus across the city to her job. She was no longer on the scooter because of her pregnancy. It was the first symbolic gesture that we were doing things not just for ourselves any longer, but for a family of three, and that gesture trickled down throughout our lives. Most important, it underscored the value of taking care of each other. We were doing this not just for each other, but to create a safe and harmonious home for our child.
In the mornings, we practiced kindness with each other. I chatted with her as she made her morning coffee and asked her about how her day looked and what time she might get home. She asked about my writing and didn’t judge when the assignments were slow in coming. Our small gestures were unromantic but felt even more important than romance, because they were our daily practice of showing each other that we cared.
An underlying question we had to address was what our plan was once the baby arrived. I think we both knew where we were drifting—Giulia headed off to the office each day, while I busied myself with work and home care—but we hadn’t said anything officially. Giulia loved her work, and I wasn’t ready to be back in a school full-time. I was still a bit hungover from my year of caregiving and wasn’t ready to resume responsibility for a group of teenagers. Besides, I could easily fill my days at home with the responsibilities of the house.
The crib arrived, and we converted the guest room into the nursery. We kept our guest bed in the room but pushed it off into the corner, to make space for the crib and the green glider Giulia had bought off Craigslist. It was snug, but it all fit. Goose watched in apprehension at what we were doing.
With the furniture in place, we lay on the guest bed together and finalized what felt natural anyway: Giulia was going to return to work after her maternity leave, and I was going to be the stay-at-home dad. I could write during nap time, but my main focus would be on the baby.
Goose jumped up to be on the bed between us. He rested his head on Giulia’s belly, and with our decision made, we lightly dozed in the new room and drifted in and out of anticipatory dreams of the days ahead.
My phone rang five minutes into the soccer game. I played goalie on a soccer team in a men’s league in the city, and we had an eight p.m. kickoff ten days before Giulia’s due date. I told the guys I needed to keep my phone handy, just in case. I stashed the phone inside the goalpost, and when it started ringing I ran off the field screaming that it was my wife and we were going to have a baby. I didn’t even pick up the phone, I just knew. I sprinted to the sideline, grabbed my duffel bag, and kept running to the car, still in cleats, shin guards, and goalie gloves. Giulia had texted: “My water broke in the bath. It’s happening!!!”
I sped home, showered, gathered up our overnight bags, triple-checked the new car seat, and dropped Goose off at a friend’s. I couldn’t wait to meet our son.
Giulia labored for twenty-seven hours, and with the final push, our son arrived. I held on to Giulia and there was Jonas, opening and closing his eyes, a brown tuft of hair on his head. He cried out to the world, and the nurses handed him to Giulia, and he was on her chest, reaching for her. I leaned into them and wrapped my arms around my family.
I fell in love instantly. I had been dreaming about this person since I’d first met Giulia in college, but those dreams disappeared and were replaced as Jonas became real, his own majestic person. I had been wondering who he was going to be, and now he was here to show me, and I knew I would follow him wherever he took me.
That first night Giulia rested and the nurses left us alone, but I needed to tell Jonas all of the important things immediately, so I stayed awake and whispered to him that the world is beautiful, and it is because of you, Jonas, and for you, Jonas, and you must care for it like it will care for you.
Nothing mattered to me as much as Jonas. I wanted to know everything about him. He gave us hints and clues through his cries and yawns and squeaks, and I read up on every small detail about infancy. Giulia and I spent hours discussing minute decisions that felt essential: cloth or throwaway diapers, video or audio baby monitors, which baby carrier, stroller, car seat, white noise app to help him sleep—everything. I lost sense of all other priorities. I dropped all writing projects, I stopped surfing. Everything began and ended with Jonas.
My obsession with Jonas made it easier to not worry about Giulia. Of course she was awake in fits and starts throughout the night to feed him, and I was up at her side to help with the diaper change and to coax the two of them back to sleep, and Giulia wasn’t showing any signs of anxiety. Being with Jonas was like freebasing love, and we both inhaled deeply.
Our birthing class teacher told us that our baby would show his personality right away, and I searched for clues to understand who Jonas was. He broke out of his swaddling blanket and was happier when we were wearing him and swaying him, rather than still. We nicknamed him the Man in Motion, because the easiest way to calm him down was to take him for a walk in the stroller or rock him.
I was eager to parent Jonas and did everything I could, except the obvious: nursing. But even there, I was so amped on my desire to nurture that I threw myself into supporting Giulia, to comical results. Giulia had several bouts of mastitis, and I learned techniques to massage her
breasts before, during, and after nursing. We developed a routine: Giulia settled into the green glider, Jonas in her arms happily eating away, and I stood behind her, working my hands into the mix to soften up her pain. It was tender and a beautiful moment and utterly ridiculous. The first time Suoc walked in and saw it, she muttered to herself, “This is not how it happens in Italy,” and walked out of the room shaking her head.
When Jonas woke up at night, I fumbled awake to change his diaper before Giulia nursed him. We put him between us in bed, and Giulia curled up to him and dozed as he ate. I loved co-sleeping. We huddled together like a family game of Tetris, Goose at our feet as well. I lost track of the day and time because they didn’t matter. Everything that mattered to me was in my bed.
I tried to wake up to the sounds of Jonas before Giulia did, so he and I could have each other to ourselves for a few minutes, to giggle and stare and wonder. I promised him all the things we would do together, the surf trips and baseball games and science fair projects, but he kept pulling me back to where he was, just a little guy with a full diaper and an empty stomach. I felt like I was drowning in something that was too perfect to have a name.
Giulia held four-week-old Jonas in her lap, her arms wrapped tight around his arms so he wouldn’t squirm too much with the sting of his vaccination shots. The first one startled him, and the second and third induced pure terror. But soon the nurse was cooing, “Good job, Jonas, you were such a brave boy. You both did great as well,” she added to us with a smile.
We spent the rest of the day around the house, forgoing our usual afternoon walk on the beach. I had read that babies were often tired after their first vaccinations, but Jonas seemed fine. He ate heartily as usual and was asleep by seven p.m.
But at eleven p.m. Jonas awoke in hysterics, his little arms aflutter in panic. I sorted through the folds of his pajamas to check his injection sites, and they were a little bit red and a little bit swollen, but only a little. Giulia and I held him together, shushing and whispering and telling him how brave he was and that it was okay, the shots hurt a little bit but it was going to feel better soon.
But he couldn’t calm down. He kept crying. We blasted the sound of white noise from the speakers, we rocked him, we swung him back and forth the way he loved, we fed him, we did all the tricks that usually worked, but he wouldn’t stop. He had never cried like this. We felt helpless. It was just a little pain from a vaccine, yet I was shaking to see our son act so scared.
Finally, after forty-five minutes, he collapsed to sleep out of exhaustion. I fell into the couched, completely wrecked.
“I don’t know if I can do this, Giulia,” I said. “I love Jonas so much, but there’s so much bad that can happen to him. I can’t stop thinking about it. I just . . . can’t . . . I don’t know.” Now I was the one crying uncontrollably. I didn’t get to what we both were thinking. The psychosis he might have to face. The suicidal depression. Who knew if he was destined to suffer the way Giulia had?
“I’m so scared that I can’t be strong enough for him,” I said.
“You can be strong enough for him,” Giulia said. “You love him. That’s strong enough.”
I wanted to believe her, but I sat on the couch for many hours, long after she had gone to bed, awake to listen for more scared crying, thinking about Giulia’s parents and what they must have felt through her illness, happening on the other side of the world in another language. I couldn’t push the thought out of my head that the cliché might be wrong. Maybe what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
Giulia took the legally allowed six weeks of maternity leave but wasn’t ready to return to work. She had been in her job over a year, and she loved the work and the people, but the company had started to implode with internal drama when she went on maternity leave. She requested an extension of her leave, and they demanded that she return immediately.
Within hours of hearing that the company wouldn’t grant her the time she needed, Giulia was online looking for other opportunities. She submitted her résumé to a few spots before bedtime that night. The next day, she told her company she wouldn’t be returning. She wanted to be at a place where she felt supported as a working mom.
In the third time in as many years, Giulia was offered a promising position at a major international fashion brand. It was going to be the biggest position she had held in her career, at the biggest company. She went from unsure about returning to work to ecstatic. Jonas had just turned five months old when she dressed herself up for another first day.
The first morning of work, her alarm rang before Jonas had woken up. Giulia woke Jonas to feed him a few minutes before she had to leave. She forced herself to smile as we stood in the doorway and waved her off. I turned back into the quiet house.
Now what?
First up, to make lunch. I spent an hour steaming and pureeing butternut squash while singing to Jonas as he jumped in his bouncer in the kitchen. I packed up a bag to go out for a beach walk and realized when we got there that I had forgotten the food. When his diaper was dirty, I had five extra diapers in the diaper bag but no wipes.
It was a bumpy start, but I got the hang of it. We developed several staple activities—walks on the beach, of course, but also outings to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park and story time at the library. I met another stay-at-home dad at Ocean Beach and latched on to him. His daughter was a year older than Jonas, but we both had dogs who needed walking, and more than that, we needed company from the isolation of being a stay-at-home dad. Even in a progressive city like San Francisco, moms often waved from a distance or chatted for a few minutes, but they never came too close.
In the in-between moments, I confronted boredom, which I hadn’t anticipated. I had dreamed of endless shots of adrenaline brought on by his laughter and pushing him in a swing, but those high points were punctuated with lengthy stretches of tedium. Jonas wasn’t crawling or talking yet, and the whole day was a running monologue in baby talk. When I took him with me to the grocery store, I imagined taking him through the fruit section and holding up all the different foods for him to touch and smell as I described them. Instead, the grocery store became more of an annoying errand than it had ever been, and I impatiently rushed through the store with him strapped to my chest.
My time home with Jonas felt weirdly similar to staying home with Giulia for so many months. There were countless, obvious differences between taking care of a newborn and supporting a psychotic and suicidal wife, but the caregiving had a similar tone. I was bored a lot. I second-guessed everything I did. I filled the boredom with reading various opinions to make me second-guess even more. I worried. I doted. I celebrated tiny signs of progress. A single smile made the whole day of microscopic care feel worth it.
Parenting Jonas wasn’t chock-full of life-changing moments of connection the way I had anticipated, but I settled into it, reassured that this was exactly what parenting was supposed to be. I was having an ordinary experience. And after such a disruptive, atypical year with Giulia, ordinary was something to celebrate.
I aspired to make my first-ever homemade lasagna, and Giulia came home one night delighted at the effort. She left me to myself in the kitchen so she could spend time in Jonas’s world for the fleeting moments they had together, and then we put him down for the night. We ate the lasagna together after he fell asleep, and we both brought up how this new routine felt so natural and successful. Giulia seemed to be adjusting well to the new gig. During her lunch break, she pumped while FaceTiming Jonas and me.
We heartily ate the lasagna after our different but equally full days, but most of all we savored this delightful sense of normalcy.
After a lengthy discussion, we decided to baptize Jonas. I had always found appeal in a devout sense of faith, so I was on board from the get-go, as long as we committed to making it real and not just a ceremony for show. If we were going to baptize him, I wanted to raise him in a home of faith. Giulia’s delusions of the Devil and God lef
t her with uncertain feelings about the Catholic Church, but the church ran deep in her Italian roots, and she couldn’t ignore the tug of tradition.
We called up a priest from the high school that Giulia had attended in New York City and scheduled Jonas’s baptism for the day after a friend’s wedding that would bring us out to the East Coast anyway. I bought a new suit, my first since high school that wasn’t from a thrift store.
We walked through the streets of New York, and Giulia looked like her old self, the self-assured, sassy, quick-to-laugh woman I had first fallen in love with. It had been eight years since she had walked so confidently down Lexington Avenue toward her new job, but now, as a mother and breadwinner, her radiant smile was hard earned, which made it only more magnetic. She had lost all the medicine weight through breast-feeding Jonas, and her restored figure gave her even more confidence. I found myself uncontrollably attracted to her, the kind of giddy fascination that had me shyly grabbing at her hand when we walked down the streets together, something I hadn’t felt in years.
It was a glorious autumn morning in New York for Jonas’s baptism, and the city looked as sparkling and promising as Jonas and Giulia did. Jonas had three different outfits for the day, and we changed him from one to the next as the day unfolded—the formal baptism outfit, provided by Suoc; the fancy party outfit, selected by Giulia; and the comfortable party outfit, picked out by me. My brother Carl hosted the baptism party, and we lounged around, feasted, and mostly doted over Jonas. Midafternoon, I proudly took off my blazer, covered my shirt and tie with a raggedy sweatshirt, and fed Jonas a mash of banana and avocado.
In a quiet moment during the party, Suoc pulled me aside. “This is the happiest I have seen Giulia since before . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence. She was still struggling with what to call the thing that had happened to her daughter.
“I know,” I replied. “Me too.”