They say that the people who love you will stand beside you when life gets hard. I learned that sometimes the person who sees your pain most clearly isn’t the one who promised to love you forever.
A year ago, I brought home three babies in one afternoon: Mandy, Randy, and Tobby. Three car seats lined up on the living room floor like a small, impossible miracle.
Nobody warned me what carrying triplets would do to my body. After a difficult birth, doctors used careful words like “compromised pelvic floor” and “postpartum recovery timeline.”
I used simpler ones.
Nobody warned me what carrying triplets would do.
***
On hard days, if I sneezed, laughed too loudly, or lifted a full laundry basket the wrong way, I couldn’t always make it to the bathroom in time. It wasn’t something I chose, or something that happened because I hadn’t taken care of myself.
So I bought discreet protective underwear and wore it on difficult days. I tucked the package under the bathroom towels. Only Richard, my husband, knew it was there.
It wasn’t something I chose.
My husband teased me about the underwear now and then.
Early on, I laughed with him because I thought laughing meant we were still on the same team.
But lately, the jokes had started landing differently. Sharper. Louder when his friends were around.
“You worry too much, Bel,” Richard told me one morning when I asked him to stop mentioning it at brunch.
My husband teased me.
“I’m not worried,” I said. “I just don’t love being the punchline.”
“It’s a love language. If I couldn’t tease you, I’d have to hate you.”
I let it go.
I let a lot of things go that year because I was tired, and the triplets needed me more than I needed to be right.
***
David was the one friend who never joined in. He’d been Richard’s best friend since college and his oldest friend.
He was tall, quiet, the kind of man who remembered which triplet was which and always asked how I was sleeping.
“It’s a love language.”
“You look wrecked, Bel,” David said once, kindly. “Let me hold Tobby while you eat something hot.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to. Sit down.”
