After the NICU, when I got ill, Dad blamed Pete. It was irrational and wrong—Pete couldn’t have been more supportive, and, with the exception of the bike ride, he was there for me and Theo every possible minute. After all, fourteen fathers went on that ride, and only one of them came back to a partner who was having a breakdown. But Dad had gotten it into his head that it was the strain of being a new mother that had pushed me over the edge, and that narrative only worked if Pete was a lazy, unhelpful parent.
Somehow, the narrative managed to survive Pete becoming Theo’s full-time carer as well. Pete and I had been talking about it off and on throughout my maternity—doing the sums, wondering how it might work. It took me a couple of months to fully recover from my psychosis, and even then, I stayed on a maintenance dose of antidepressants. Meanwhile, Pete did the bulk of the caring whenever he could—it seemed to come easily to him, while I had to admit that, much as I now loved Theo, I just wasn’t as naturally maternal or patient as some other women. I’ve always been a bit of an adrenaline junkie. As a teenager, my first love was my horse, Peach: We used to go around Australia together, competing at three-day events. It’s partly why I’m good at a high-pressure job, I think: At some level, I actually enjoy the constant crises, if only because I’ve noticed that I’m usually calmer and more clearheaded in those situations than others are. But the flip side is that I found the quiet, placid rhythms of first-year motherhood mind-numbingly dull, and a part of me couldn’t wait to get back to my desk. Of course, that was very different from thinking Pete would do it—I’d assumed that, like most couples we knew, we’d use a childminder or nanny share until Theo was old enough to go to nursery. If I’m honest, I was sometimes surprised that Pete enjoyed parenting quite as much as he did. He loved nothing better than to get home from work and start looking after Theo, while for my part, I couldn’t wait to hand him over and pour myself a glass of wine.
Perhaps the most serious conversation we had about it was when his newspaper put out a call for voluntary redundancies. He could go freelance, Pete pointed out: With fewer staff, the paper would probably end up using more outside resources anyway, and the kind of stuff he was doing by then—his most recent piece had been “Twelve Traveltastic American Road Trips”—could be done from anywhere. But when we crunched the numbers, there was no getting away from the fact we’d be poor. So, a little reluctantly, we concluded it wasn’t the right time.
And then he lost his job anyway.
Hardly anyone had put themselves forward for redundancy, it turned out—a staff job in journalism was now so rare, people tended to cling to the one they had. And the cuts the paper needed to make were far deeper than they’d been letting on. Some of the other journalists, Pete told me later, had seen the call for redundancies as the writing on the wall it was, and had aggressively lobbied to keep their jobs, writing spurious but eye-catching stories that made them look useful or sucking up to senior management. Pete hadn’t done any of that, and now he seemed almost baffled that those were the journalists management wanted to keep. The fact was—and this, I ruefully admitted to myself, was where my dad’s assessment of him did contain a tiny grain of truth—Pete was simply too nice to succeed in an environment like that, when backs were against the wall and the fighting turned dirty.
For a couple of months after that, both of us were at home with Theo while Pete tried to pitch freelance articles. It was a good time, but scary. The paper wasn’t using more freelancers after all—quite the reverse: The same cost-cutting drive that had led to the redundancies resulted in a tough no-freelance policy; they were working the remaining writers twice as hard instead. With his redundancy payment dwindling fast, I couldn’t afford to take the unpaid part of my maternity leave, so I went back to work after thirty-nine weeks.
For Theo’s first birthday, Pete hatched a plan to go back to the NICU, taking Theo and a birthday cake. It was something many of