DURING LABOR, MY HUSBAND BEGGED ME TO MOAN MORE QUIETLY, THEN LEFT ME ALONE WITH OUR TRIPLETS AND WENT ON VACATION BECAUSE THE BIRTH WAS “TOO STRESSFUL” FOR HIM — but when he came home, he screamed, “This can’t be happening!”
My husband, Grant, and I had been married four years when we found out we were having triplets.
He’d always talked about wanting a big family, back when we were dating, back when a big family was still an abstract idea sitting somewhere far off in our future. The day we saw the ultrasound and the technician quietly counted three separate heartbeats, Grant grabbed my hand so hard it left a mark, grinning like he’d just won something.
“Three at once,” he kept saying in the car afterward. “Ivy, we’re going to have three kids in one shot. Can you believe it?”
I couldn’t, honestly. I was thirty-one years old, we’d been trying casually for almost a year with no luck at all, and suddenly I was carrying triplets with barely any warning.
For the first few months, Grant’s excitement never wavered. He read baby name books out loud at dinner. He turned the spare bedroom into a nursery three separate times before settling on a design. He told everyone at his office, then everyone at the gym, then eventually strangers in line at the grocery store, that he was about to become a father to triplets.
But somewhere around my seventh month, as three cribs actually got assembled in that nursery and the reality of what was coming stopped being an abstract idea, I started to notice his excitement thinning out at the edges.
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“Three babies,” he said one night, staring at the ceiling instead of at me. “That’s not really something people plan for, is it. It just happens to you.”
“We planned for a baby,” I said. “We just got three instead of one.”
“I know that,” he said, a little sharper than the moment called for. “I’m just saying. It’s a lot.”
I told myself it was normal. Every parent gets nervous before their first child, let alone three at once. I told myself Grant would find his footing the second he actually held them.
I was wrong about that, though I didn’t understand exactly how wrong until the delivery room.
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Labor started two weeks early, on a Wednesday afternoon, and by the time we reached the hospital, everything moved fast in the particular, overwhelming way triplet deliveries apparently tend to.
The room was loud. Nurses moving in and out constantly, three separate monitoring setups beeping at slightly different rhythms, a delivery team nearly twice the size of what I’d expected for a normal birth.
Grant stood near the head of the bed, and instead of the steady presence I’d hoped for, I mostly remember him looking increasingly pale and increasingly annoyed by the entire process, like labor itself was some inconvenience being inflicted on him personally.
During one particularly hard contraction, I cried out loud enough that a nurse glanced over with concern.
Grant leaned down close to my ear.
“Can you try to be a little quieter?” he whispered. “You’re making a scene. It’s really stressing me out.”
I don’t think I fully processed what he’d said in that moment. There wasn’t room for it, not with everything else happening in my body at the same time. But I’ve replayed that sentence more times than I can count since then, and it never once sounds any better than it did the first time.
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Wesley came first, then Nora four minutes later, then Callum, the smallest of the three, six minutes after that. All three healthy, all three loud, all three exactly the kind of overwhelming, immediate love I’d expected to feel and hadn’t been entirely sure I would, given how exhausted and raw I was by the time they finally placed them against my chest.
Grant cried too, that first hour. I want to be fair about that. Whatever came afterward, that first hour in the hospital, holding all three of our children at once, he seemed genuinely, completely overwhelmed in the good sense of the word.
It just didn’t last very long.
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