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.
⸻
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.
⸻
We brought them home three days later, into a house that had felt spacious and calm exactly one week earlier and now felt like it belonged to an entirely different, much louder family.
