I won’t pretend those first days were anything but chaos. Three newborns means feeding on staggered, overlapping schedules around the clock, means sleep arriving in unpredictable twenty-minute fragments, means a body still recovering from birth being asked to function like it wasn’t.
I expected Grant to struggle with it. I didn’t expect what actually happened.
Six days after we brought them home, I walked into our bedroom to find him packing a large suitcase, methodical and calm, like he was preparing for a routine business trip instead of walking out on a household that currently contained three one-week-old infants.
“Grant. What are you doing?”
He didn’t stop folding shirts.
“I booked a trip,” he said. “Two weeks, Cabo, with Danny and a few of the guys. I need it, Ivy. The crying, the chaos — it’s genuinely affecting my mental health. I need to reset before I can be any good to any of you.”
⸻
I stood in that doorway for a long moment, one baby already crying somewhere down the hall, completely unable to form a full sentence.
“You’re leaving,” I finally said. “Now. This week.”
“It’s already booked,” he said, zipping the suitcase closed. “Nonrefundable, actually. I looked into moving it, but there wasn’t really a good option.”
“Grant, I can’t do this alone. There are three of them.”
“Your sister’s around, isn’t she?” he said, already halfway to the front door. “She loves this kind of stuff. You’ll be fine.”
I stood in the living room, three newborns somewhere in the house needing me all at once, and watched my husband walk out the front door with a suitcase, leaving behind a silence that felt somehow louder than any of the crying had.
