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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.
