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!”

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.