doing exactly what Pete had said, starting a conversation around women’s experiences of childbirth and mental health. For a week or so there was the exhilaration of checking the blogs and Twitter every few hours, watching the likes and reblogs pouring in, a cascade of affirmation and solidarity. And praise for Pete, of course. Not many men would have had the emotional maturity or the patience to pick their partner up like that, was the consensus, let alone take over the nurturing of our child.
Then I realized people at work had read it, some of whom knew Pete through me and so knew exactly who he was writing about. A few made supportive comments, which was nice. Others said nothing, which made me wonder what they thought. Then I heard I had a new nickname on the creative floor: Maddie Mad Dog. I started to feel furious with Pete for not hiding my identity more thoroughly.
I went to Prague to film a Christmas commercial for a big electrical retailer. This time it was the art director I slipped up with.
Jenny, my CBT therapist, usually shied away from the touchy-feely stuff, but somehow it came out at our next session. She listened patiently as I spilled all my confusion and self-loathing to her.
“Did your father have affairs?” she asked when I’d finished.
I stared at her. Of all the things I’d been expecting her to say, that wasn’t one of them. “Yes. At least three that we knew of.”
“And your mother accepted them?”
“Well—not happily. But there was always a feeling that it was up to him whether he left us for the other woman or not. That, if he decided to stay, she’d still be there for him.”
“Something of a saint, then. Or at any rate, a martyr. And now here you are, the breadwinner of the family, repeating the same behavior. Only this time with the genders reversed.” She left a long pause. “I think you need to talk to Pete. Perhaps with the help of a couples therapist. You’ve clearly got some buried resentment about the way your parenting roles have turned out.”
Meanwhile, Pete was trying to follow up the success of his NICU story. He discovered that our local pizza place didn’t let men use the baby-changing rooms, which had been designed as part of the female toilets, so he started a campaign to get them to change their corporate policy. It worked, on one level—people were happy to click on the petition when it came up in their Facebook feeds, but they didn’t really care enough to post messages of encouragement, the way they had with the mental health piece. The only newspaper he could interest was a local one, and even then, when the article ran, he discovered the editor had cut it to half its original length.
Gradually, he talked less and less about ideas for articles and more and more about being a parent. Theo had pointed at the snow and said, “Bubbles!” Theo had been on the roundabout in the playground. Theo had thrown a tantrum in Sainsbury’s. I got used to reaching for a bottle as soon as I got home, letting the red wine take the edge off as I mentally tried to shift gears from the racing-car frenzy that was advertising to the kiddie rides of Pete and Theo’s routine. Sometimes it worked. More often, I was still thinking about a knotty production problem with one half of my brain even as I smiled and nodded along to some story of playground peril.
So I completely understand now why Pete wants to write about what we’re doing with the Lamberts. It’s a chance to be the old Pete again, the journalist, to have people read what he writes. But it’s also a chance to be NICU Pete, too, Saint Peter: to bask in the affirmation of an online audience, the invisible crowd of spectators who’ll click and like and share and tell him what an inspiration he is.
I don’t stop him, of course. How can I? But, disloyally, it does occur to me that, in the olden days, saints all had one thing in common. They didn’t have wives or partners to think about.
28
Case no. 12675/PU78B65, Exhibit 18, DRAFT document saved by AUTORECOVER, retrieved from Peter Riley’s hard drive.
This is a story about two broken families determined to heal.
This is a story about a bolt from the blue that could have led to discord and hatred—but instead has led to