Chapter Twenty Welcome to the World
Twenty
Welcome to the World
I loved it when Robbie called me his “missus.” There was so much fondness in the way he said it.
I liked how proud he was when he told people I was his.
But the truth is that the first few years of our marriage were tough on both Robbie and me.
He chalks that up mostly to a single fact: I didn’t trust anyone.
I hate it when he says that, because it makes me sound harsh, but he isn’t wrong.
In my core, I knew that men were selfish, women were duplicitous, and anyone could be cruel.
I knew these things like I knew that dogs have fleas; it was a fact that I’d had proven to me again and again and again. People couldn’t be relied upon.
At my worst moments, even Robbie wasn’t safe from my near-nihilistic belief system.
I was suspicious and sometimes outright accused him of not having my back.
A voice inside me still warned: “Don’t let your guard down, or you’ll get hurt.
” So I told him I thought that he didn’t understand me, that he never could, and that I didn’t believe I could truly count on him.
Those words hurt him because they weren’t true, so he’d blow his stack.
Robbie had a temper. While he tried to keep himself in check when I provoked him, either by accident or on purpose, there was no denying his anger was there.
And yet somehow after we fought, we always came back together.
What bound us to one another was stronger than all the forces and flaws that threatened to divide us.
In 2005, we escaped the bustle and noise of Sydney and moved to Blue Bay on the central coast. I loved how peaceful it was there.
We could walk from our house to the beach, which Robbie and I made a point of doing every day.
Robbie was apprenticing to become a bricklayer.
I was working as a receptionist for a company called Employment Training and Recruitment Australia, which coached unemployed people on how to find jobs, helping them polish their résumés and ace their interviews.
I’d actually been hired there after I went to them for help.
My office was walking distance from our apartment, so we only needed one car.
We still had little money—at times I waitressed at night to help pay our bills.
But Robbie and I were getting along, and once in a while, I’d wonder what it might be like if we could have kids.
I had never forgotten the doctors who’d told me becoming a mother was highly unlikely.
At different points in my life, I’d been told that one of my fallopian tubes was blocked, and I had polycystic ovaries, among other problems. When I’d told Robbie that, however, he’d joked that my eggs had never seen sperm like his before.
“They have hatchets on ’em!” he’d boasted, before giving me one of his big bear hugs. “Don’t worry, Jenna. Why don’t we leave it up to fate?”
In July 2005, we went out and had what Robbie calls “a big slosh” night at our local RSL club, which is a peculiarly Australian institution.
The Returned and Services League was founded in 1916 after World War I, and its clubs were created as gathering points for returned military and their family members.
We loved the RSL near us because the food was great, the cocktails were strong, and the prices were relatively cheap.
We ordered lamb shanks and played a little keno in the casino, and both of us were drinking like camels.
By the time we got home, we were so tipsy that it seemed too difficult to climb the stairs to our apartment.
So we lay down in the grass in front of our building and took turns pointing out stars and constellations we thought we knew the names of.
My head was spinning, and we were laughing and rolling around on the lawn when suddenly I said, “You know, I haven’t had my period in two months or so. That’s a little weird.”
Robbie lifted his head up. “Hatchets!” he said, then flopped back down.
The next day, I bought an at-home pregnancy test, which came back positive.
I didn’t believe it. After two more said the same thing, however, I went to the doctor, who took some blood and pronounced me seven weeks pregnant.
Still doubtful, I wasn’t convinced until the doctor performed an ultrasound and I saw the baby’s tiny heart beating.
Robbie was thrilled—we’d beaten the odds!
Maybe one of those seven strings we’d tied to our wrists on our wedding day (and left there until they disintegrated) had worked its magic on our fertility.
Or maybe the doctors who’d evaluated me five years before had made a mistake.
Either way, we were going to be parents, and we couldn’t have been more elated.
We went out for breakfast to celebrate—I have a photo of me sitting on Robbie’s lap afterward, grinning my face off.
Then, when we got home, we called our families and announced: “We’re having a baby! ”
I loved being pregnant. I was empowered by the idea that I had something—someone—bigger than myself to live for.
Right away I started assembling a baby book.
On the “Parents to Be” page, I affixed photos of me in a bikini, my belly protruding, and of Robbie and me laughing, our arms around one another.
Right away I began singing the “Alphabet Song” to my tummy, along with “Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” because I’d heard music was good for a baby’s brain.
One afternoon right around my due date, Robbie was still at work when I felt a sudden dampness in my underwear.
I was scared—was something wrong? In a panic, I called a friend, who immediately came over and ferried me to the hospital.
It turned out I’d just lost my mucus plug—a gross-sounding thing that I’d never heard of before.
But my water hadn’t broken yet. Robbie’s bricklaying job was an hour and a half away, but he would have plenty of time to get to the hospital: I had about twenty hours of grueling labor ahead of me.
One Thursday in February 2006, at 7:34 p.m., Robbie and I welcomed our first child, an eight-and-a-half-pound boy we named Alexander Anthony Giuffre.
I was over the moon about him and felt great physically, so we brought him home the next day.
In his baby book, I would soon record his top-percentile Apgar-test scores, his eye color (blue-green), and his hair color (light brown).
On the page marked “Welcome to the World,” I wrote, “Alex came out just perfect.”
About a week after I gave birth, we moved closer to Robbie’s parents, to a little house in Bass Hill, just west of Sydney.
Now we began calling them simply Nonna and Nonno, which is Italian for grandma and grandpa.
Meanwhile, it turned out that one of my grandmas, Shelley, had left me not just furniture but also a little money when she passed.
I used it to fix up a baby-blue nursery with a Winnie the Pooh motif—a Pooh bear carpet and stickers of Piglet and Eeyore on the walls.
Robbie refurbished a white crib—a hand-me-down from his sister, Angie—and I hung a frilly white curtain around it. I wanted Alex to feel loved.
We were nervous parents at first. Alex was hungry all the time, but he fussed a lot, and I worried he wasn’t getting enough nutrients from breastfeeding.
It turned out Alex had colic, and he woke half a dozen times a night for the first two months.
Only Robbie could get him to stop crying, by turning him face down and pressing his palm into poor Alex’s distended belly.
Exhausted and worried about not meeting Alex’s needs, I was constantly asking Robbie’s mom and sister for advice.
But wow, how happy Alex made me. “You are truly a special boy,” I wrote in his baby book when he was one month old. “You have no idea what you mean to your Father and I, and what you have done to bring such closeness to the family.” At nine weeks old, he smiled. “I love being your Mummy!” I wrote.
Watching Alex grow was like medicine for me.
I adored every inch of him, but there was something else, too: Alex made me feel essential.
He depended on me. And the simple fact that I mattered so fundamentally to him gave my life purpose in a way nothing else had before.
Every parent knows how healing it can be to give your child something you didn’t receive as a child.
Sometimes it felt that by tending to him, I was tending to the child I’d been, giving myself the love I’d needed.
By keeping Alex safe and warm and fed and happy, I also got to experience all those feelings—as the grown-up mom that I now was, but also as the affection-starved little girl that I used to be.
In August 2006, when Alex was five months old, I was surprised to discover I was pregnant again.
I’d thought that while I was breastfeeding, that couldn’t happen.
My doctor just shook his head when I told him that old wives’ tale.
Having been born five years apart from each of my brothers, I liked the idea of my kids coming so close together.
Still, a second pregnancy was a lot to handle.
Becoming a parent had put me on a steep learning curve, and I was just barely keeping up.
I also worried about money, which we never had enough of.
Robbie was overjoyed, though. We’d figure it all out somehow, he said.