Playing Nice

“I’m not sure I want to be the trailblazer, that’s all.”

“You know how hard it is to find stories that haven’t been done to death already,” he said quietly. “I really think this one could get picked up, Mads. It could be the break I need to get me noticed as a freelancer. But if you want me to spike it, I will.”

Eventually we agreed he wouldn’t use my real name. Because he had a different surname, we reasoned, there wouldn’t be any direct link to me. And he was right about it being picked up. The Sunday Times ran it in the Style section, and it was immediately reposted on various blogs. A well-known yummy mummy with over a hundred thousand Instagram followers posted a link to it, along with a grateful comment about her own struggles after her premature twins spent three weeks in intensive care. I felt good about that—we were 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 friendship, dialogue, and trust.



This is a story about four young professionals, trying to figure out a modern solution to an ancient problem.



In the Bible, King Solomon was famously faced with a nigh-impossible case. Two women both claimed they were the mother of a baby boy. They’d given birth at roughly the same time, but one child had died. Each was now accusing the other of stealing the live infant.



Calling for a sword, Solomon craftily declared there was only one solution: divide the child and give half to each woman. Immediately, one of the women fell to her knees, saying she renounced her claim. She would rather the child was brought up by someone else than see it die as the result of Solomon’s brutal justice. Solomon then ordered that the baby be given to her, as she had just proved herself the true mother.



Whatever this tells us about standards of transparency and openness in the family courts circa 900 BC—what would Solomon have done if neither woman had cried out, or both did? Carried out his original judgment, presumably—it speaks to an ancient truth: Our children mean more to us than we do ourselves.



But what if you are suddenly told that the child you are bringing up—the child you have fed, bathed, played with, taught the letters of the alphabet to, parented for two whole years—isn’t yours? What if you discovered that your child had been mistakenly switched with someone else’s at birth?



That is what happened to my partner and me…

29



   PETE



   “OH, PETE. PETEY PETEY Petey.”

It was Miles, calling on my mobile. I’d emailed him my article, with a request for a couple of quotes. But I could tell from his tone he wasn’t happy.

“It’s only a first draft, obviously,” I said. “If there’s anything you don’t want me to use, just say.”

There was a short silence. “It’s not right. None of it. I’m sorry, Pete.”