I thought I knew the man I had married.
I especially thought I knew him when he promised me, with complete confidence, that he would be the kind of father our daughters could always count on.
But the days immediately after I gave birth to our triplets showed me just how wrong I had been.
Three years ago, I never would have imagined that the man who cried with happiness when we saw three tiny heartbeats on an ultrasound would eventually pack a suitcase, leave me alone with our newborn daughters, and fly away on vacation because becoming a father had become “too stressful.”
But that is exactly what happened.
And when he finally came home, he walked through the front door expecting everything to be exactly as he had left it.
Instead, he stopped in his tracks, stared at the boxes lined up by the wall, and screamed,
“This can’t be happening!”
To understand how we got there, I have to go back to the beginning.
Three a.m.
The baby monitor cast a soft blue light across my face as I sat cross-legged on the nursery floor with a half-warm bottle in my hand.
Two of my daughters were fussing.
The third had finally, mercifully, gone quiet.
I hadn’t slept for more than an hour at a time in six days.
My body still hurt from giving birth.
My hair hadn’t been washed since the hospital.
I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten an entire meal while it was still warm.
My phone buzzed on the carpet.
It was a text from my sister, Naomi.
“Are you still up? Send me the shift schedule.”
I typed back with one thumb.
“Ava and Mia awake. Zoe sleeping. Send coffee.”
Her response came almost immediately.
“Coming at seven. Hang on, Layla.”
I set the phone down and leaned my head against the wall.
Four years married.
Three babies.
One husband somewhere over the Pacific with a suitcase full of swim trunks.
I kept trying to connect the man I was dealing with now to the man I remembered from the ultrasound.
I couldn’t.
My husband, Eric, had cried that day.
Actually cried.
He had stood beside me in the examination room, gripping my hand as if he were afraid I might somehow float away.
When the technician told us there were three babies, he stared at the screen in disbelief.
“Triplets,” he whispered.
Then he laughed.
“Three of them. I’m gonna be the world’s best dad! You hear me? The world’s best!”
The technician smiled politely.
She had probably heard some version of that promise a hundred times.
But I believed him.
That was the problem.
I believed every word.
Eric had wanted a big family from the very beginning of our relationship.
His parents had only had one child: him.
He used to tell me that growing up had been too quiet.
“I want noise,” he would say. “A house should sound like one.”
When we found out we were having triplets, he was ecstatic.
Before I had even reached my second trimester, he had bought three matching onesies.
They were purple, and each one said:
“Sister 1.”
“Sister 2.”
“Sister 3.”
He showed them to everyone.
He talked about our daughters constantly.
He told his friends how lucky he was.
He told his mother he was going to be the greatest girl dad who had ever lived.
But there was one thing Eric didn’t do.
He didn’t prepare.
I bought four parenting books.
They sat on his nightstand beneath a stack of golf magazines.
When it came time to assemble the cribs, Eric told his friends in their group chat that he was “in the trenches, building nurseries.”
But instead of building anything, he went to the driving range with his friend Luke.
I assembled all three cribs myself.
Naomi noticed.
Naomi always noticed.
One evening, she stood at my kitchen sink drying a wine glass while I complained about the nursery.
“He gets excited about the idea of things, Lay,” she said quietly.
I looked at her.
“What does that mean?”
“It means being excited about something isn’t the same as showing up for the work.”
“He’ll show up.”
“I hope so.”
“He will.”
Naomi didn’t argue.
That was one thing I loved about my sister.
She would say what she believed once, then let you make your own decisions.
She never stopped loving you simply because you disagreed with her.
At my baby shower, Eric stood in the middle of the living room, surrounded by family and friends, telling everyone that he was going to be a girl dad three times over.
He called himself “the luckiest man in the tri-state area.”
Everyone laughed.
Everyone congratulated him.
Everyone told him how wonderful it would be.
But his mother, Deborah, watched him from the doorway.
There was something in her expression I couldn’t quite understand.
Later, she pulled me aside near the coat rack.
“Layla, honey,” she said. “You can call me anytime. Day or night. I don’t care.”
I smiled.
