Chapter 6

But I’m getting ahead of myself now. Back to that first summer. One of the visitors to our home was a poofy long-haired orange cat. It showed up in the yard one day, got chased up a tree by Tiber, and yowled until I came over to rescue it. It followed me around for the rest of the day, and subsequently started coming over to visit every day.

The cat was extremely friendly and appeared to be fairly healthy, so it was evidently being cared for by someone. But nobody in the neighborhood seemed to know who. Jason Brumwell remarked that it had often sat at the bus stop with the kids in the mornings during the school year. Melissa Benoit said it had gotten itself into their basement one summer and was stuck there for an unknown length of time. When she finally freed it, it stuck around, so Melissa offered the cat some food, which it ate ravenously.

The cat started sleeping at our house: it had to be shooed out of the garage in the evenings, and we’d find it curled up on the rocking chair on the porch first thing in the mornings. We started feeding it. One afternoon when a particularly fierce thunderstorm rolled through town, accompanied by a tornado siren, we made sure to scoop it up from outside and bring it downstairs to the basement to huddle with the children, our pets, and us as we waited for the all-clear. From that day forth it assumed it had the right to enter the house whenever it pleased, and started pawing at the window of my office and yowling whenever it saw me in there.

Whether we liked it or not, the cat appeared to be adopting us as its owners. We called it Orange Cat, because everyone in the neighborhood just referred to it as “the orange cat.” Orange Cat was shockingly gregarious, and unlike our skittish gray cat Ivy, who had always been terrified of the twins, Orange Cat would let them pet her and didn’t flinch whenever they came trundling over shouting “kitty!” at the top of their lungs. I also hold certain beliefs about orange cats vis-à-vis cats of different colors, stemming from my childhood: we had a fat orange cat named Butterscotch who had a bobtail and was the best cat any boy could hope for. He wasn’t shy, he loved to play, he sought out the company of people. While I do not have any hard evidence to back this up, I firmly believe that orange cats possess certain genetic traits that make them cooler and generally more bad-ass than other cats. Nearly every veterinary clinic I’ve been to, for instance, has a clinic cat that just loafs about the place and generally gives zero fucks about anything: those cats, in my experience, are almost always orange cats. When we lived in Vermont, our neighbors had an enormous orange cat named “Compton” for his general street smarts and devil-may-care attitude. Garfield? Orange cat. Morris, of Nine Lives fame? Orange cat. Captain Marvel’s Goose? Orange cat. Winston Churchill had an orange cat, named Jock, he loved so much that after his death, his family insisted that an orange cat be kept at Chartwell, his estate, in perpetuity.

We developed an understanding with our own Orange Cat: we would provide her food and shelter in the garage, as needed, and in return she would make herself available for pets and chin scritches to all members of the Ingraham household. She happened to be a ferocious hunter, and as a deal sweetener she took to leaving decapitated bats and choice mouse organs for us on the porch.

Everything was fine up until the day I got a text message from Heather Wallace, one of Jason’s sisters: “Trouble on Facebook, you better take a look.”

Indeed there was. Heather had attached a screen shot of a neighbor’s Facebook status, someone I realized I still hadn’t met. “Love it the new people that wrote a bad review on red lake falls moved next door to me,” the guy wrote. “Today he come into my yard and steels [sic] my plums off my tree wow and I have never meet [sic] him some balls.”

Wait, what?

“Not to mention feeds and houses our cat, that she no longer comes home,” a woman, who appeared to be his wife, wrote in reply.

“Go tell him to quit feeding her,” a friend of theirs offered.

“I’m going over there tomorrow,” the woman said, rather ominously from where I was sitting.

Hoo boy. This was it, I thought. Finally. The good people of Red Lake Falls were ready to peel back the veneer of Minnesota Nice. Shit was about to get real. You expect a certain amount of gossip in a small town—the fact that everybody knows everybody else’s business is one of rural life’s challenges and charms. I was ready for it. But accusations of plum theft? That was something else entirely.

The couple in question, I soon learned, lived across the back alley from us, next door to the Presbyterian church. We hadn’t met them because the husband, Danny, worked on gas and oil pipelines and had been off in the Dakotas for most of the summer. His wife, Missy, and their two small kids had been with them. But they had left their cat in the care of Larry, our older neighbor across the street, for the summer, and Larry had let it freely wander the neighborhood. Now they were back in town and their cat didn’t want to come home.

The allegation about the plum tree was a mystery, to say the least. I had never been over to their house. The only thing I could think was that I had spent some time in the alley trimming back some of the overgrown brush from our lawn—maybe someone had seen me there and through the game of small-town telephone, “trimming brush in the alley” had transformed into “stealing plums from the neighbors”?

Later that day I told Bri about the Facebook posts and watched all the color drain from her face. She had warned me, intermittently, that the cat probably belonged to somebody else and they’d be pissed off once it stopped coming home because we were feeding it. I had pooh-poohed these concerns—if it was somebody else’s cat then what the hell was it doing in our yard all day for weeks on end?

But her fears had proven justified and now we had a mess to clean up. I was prepared to let the people come over so we could tell them to go take a shit in their hats, and if their cat was so important to them they shouldn’t have left it alone in the neighborhood all summer. Briana, more diplomatically minded, insisted instead on a proactive peace offering. It was late summer and she was in a baking mood, so she said she would bake them an apple pie and I would bring it over to their house and make amends. We ran the plan by Jason Brumwell to make sure it didn’t violate any unspoken small-town Minnesota norms regarding neighborliness.

“Why don’t you bake them a plum pie instead?” he suggested.

“This isn’t funny!” Briana yelled at him.

The next day, fresh pie in hand, I embarked on the long walk from our house to Missy and Danny’s. I took Jack with me based on the purely cynical calculation that a small child would help humanize the evil out-of-town reporter and that they’d be less likely to start any serious shit in his presence.

We went to the front door and I knocked. It was answered by a petite woman with long red hair.

“So uh, I’m your new neighbor and I heard that—” I began, but I didn’t get a chance to finish my opening spiel.

“Yeah, look,” she said. “We left the cat with Larry over the summer, okay? And he wasn’t supposed to let her outside, but we found out he kept leaving her outside, and now we’re back home and she won’t even come see us, I guess because you’ve been feeding her.”

“Yeah, sorry I had no idea who she belonged to!” I said. “When she started showing up we asked around but nobody seemed to know. I guess we should have asked Larry. But anyway we’re sorry, we weren’t trying to like, steal your cat, I promise! Briana feels really bad and she baked you a pie.” I offered the pie.

“Look, kids!” Jack said. Missy’s two daughters, about Jack and Charlie’s age, peered out from behind her.

“Thank you,” Missy said. “Could you just . . . stop feeding her?”

“Yes, of course. What’s her name, by the way? She’s a great cat.”

“Her name’s Honey.”

“Honey!” one of the girls squealed.

“That’s a good name for an orange cat,” I said. “Maybe some time if you want, the girls could come over and play in the yard with Jack and Charlie? They love making friends in the neighborhood.”

“Yeah, sure,” Missy said.

And that was it. Briana’s face was pressed up against our kitchen window as Jack and I walked back. “How did it go?” she asked.

“Well. Not great? But not bad, either,” I said. “I told her if her kids ever wanted to come play with Jack and Charlie they were welcome to.”

“Great, now they’re gonna think we’re trying to steal their kids, too.”

That was the end, for the time being, of the Great Orange Cat Debacle of 2016. We learned our charm offensive had worked several months later when for Christmas, Missy, out of the blue, gave us four tickets to a performance of the Nutcracker in Grand Forks. This was surprising to me; based on our experiences in other places where we’d lived I’d assumed that Danny and Missy were now our sworn enemies and would continue to be so until we either moved away or died. When things go south with neighbors it’s often impossible to put them on the right footing again. But Danny and Missy have since become good friends. Their girls come over to play with our boys in the summers, and vice versa. And in the end, oddly enough, we ended up adopting the orange cat after all. In 2017 Danny was off to West Virginia for work on the pipeline, and Missy and the girls went with him. They were gone for much of the year and Larry was put in charge of the cat again. Eventually he told them he couldn’t take it anymore—it was too much of a hassle to run over to their place every day and deal with the damn cat. So they agreed to let him see if anyone else was interested, and of course when we found out, we volunteered immediately. Now the orange cat—Honey—lives with us but still spends plenty of time with Missy, Danny, and the girls when they’re in town.

Other challenges began to present themselves as our Minnesota honeymoon wound down. Finding after-hours medical care out here is not so easy. The closest urgent care facility is the hospital in Grand Forks, an hour away, although we found that “urgent care” typically means just getting checked into the emergency room. One day in the fall Jack began complaining of pain when he peed. Back in Baltimore this would have been a standard urgent care call—drive out to the place around the corner, get a quick exam, and most likely be prescribed some antibiotics. Instead Briana had to take him to the emergency room in Thief River Falls, where they did the exact same procedure but we had to pay a lot more for it out of pocket due to how our health insurance is set up.

But we really didn’t appreciate the medical challenges of living in a rural area until the next summer, when Jack and Charles were getting screened to enroll in preschool at the elementary school in town. We were excited to learn that the county offers universal one-day-a-week preschool. Part of the enrollment process was a standard hearing and vision screen. Charles, who had always been oddly sensitive about his ears, took great offense at having headphones placed over them and couldn’t complete the screening. No worries, the staff told us, just see if you can get it done at your pediatrician’s office before school starts.

The boys loved the pediatrician we had lined up for them, a Dr. Sreedharan in Thief River Falls. Charles had no problem completing the screening there but afterward Dr. S., as he told people to call him, took Briana aside.

“Has Charles ever been screened for autism?” he asked.

Dr. S. laid out the potential markers. Charles rarely made eye contact with unfamiliar people. He occasionally engaged in nontypical behaviors, like walking around the perimeter of large objects, like tables, while intently staring at them out of the corner of his eye. His cognitive abilities were quite literally off the charts—he had all his numbers memorized before the age of two. On the flip side, his expressive communication abilities were a different story. He was harder to understand, and had a much more difficult time articulating his needs, often causing him to erupt in frustration.

In the backs of our minds, we admitted to ourselves later, we had always wondered about this. Charles had lagged behind Jack on most of the big developmental milestones, like crawling and walking. Potty-training Jack had been a cinch, but Charles had been fiercely resistant to it. We knew that because they had been born six weeks prematurely they were at greater risk for autism and any number of other health problems.

Dr. Sreedharan explained that he wasn’t a specialist and couldn’t offer a definitive diagnosis, but it would be good to take Charles someplace where they could. There was no such facility in Thief River Falls. Ditto for Grand Forks, an hour away. The closest place was in Fargo, two hours to the south. When we called to set up an appointment, we found that they were booked out for months.

Those months, through the fall and winter of 2017, were a period of profound unease and uncertainty. If Charles was autistic, what sorts of services—speech therapy, physical therapy, and the like—would he need to live to his fullest potential, and would northwest Minnesota be able to provide them? It’s one thing to move to the middle of nowhere with a healthy, self-sufficient family whose chief needs could be fulfilled by the occasional Amazon order. But how would a child with special needs fare out here? Would we be depriving him of the care he required by not living in a place like D.C. or Baltimore, where there were world-class medical facilities?

The evaluation in Fargo was less than ideal: he’s not on the spectrum, they said, he’s just a genius. Their “autism evaluation,” as it turned out, was based largely on a written questionnaire we filled out. That wouldn’t cut it as far as the school was concerned: they—and we!—wanted a rigorous clinical evaluation, which is what we thought we were going in for. The results, or lack thereof, from Fargo left us grappling with what to do next. Was there even a clinic within a thousand miles of the place that was used to dealing with kids like Charlie? Was he doomed to get written off as a “bad kid” in school just because teachers and doctors out here didn’t have much experience with kids like him?

We needed another opinion. We turned to what we knew: Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

At the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD), Charles underwent an additional two days of evaluations. He was, in fact, on the spectrum. But, as far as the doctors were concerned he’d be best off in a regular classroom with an individualized instructional plan. And he’d benefit greatly from regular speech, physical, and occupational therapy sessions to help him catch up on the skills that other kids just took for granted. The important thing at this point in his life, they stressed, was small classrooms with regular routines and familiar faces. We wanted to know if we should move back to Baltimore. Sure, they said, we could find a Maryland public school for him, but class sizes would be larger. We might be able to find a private school in Maryland that would take him on, but it would not come cheap. If we had found a great small school where he could get the assistance he needed in Minnesota, then perhaps, they suggested, we should stick with that rather than spend so much time trying to find the equivalent for Charles in Maryland.

In the years since the diagnosis, ferrying him back and forth to all those appointments—and dealing with the bills associated with them—has proven to be one of the great challenges of living here. The Pew Research Center recently reported that for the typical suburban and urban residents, the closest hospital is about a ten-minute drive away. The average rural hospital, on the other hand, is about seventeen minutes away from the average rural resident. Our nearest hospital was twenty minutes, in Thief River, but it doesn’t provide any of the specialist services Charlie needs. So we’ve patched together a plan of care based on what’s available, and what we can reach in a reasonable drive. One specialist is in Grand Forks. Another is in Crookston. One comes to the clinic in Red Lake Falls, but only periodically. Since I’m the one working, Briana bears the brunt of the ferrying duties. It’s exhausting, no doubt. But then we ask ourselves: would it be any easier in Baltimore? There would probably be more options for service. But with both of us needing to work there, whoever was driving the Charlie bus would end up burning through sick time at a prodigious rate. Yes, the clinics would probably be closer. But once you factor in the traffic congestion for late afternoon appointments. the travel time would probably be similar. A ten-mile trip in suburban Maryland can easily take longer than a forty-five-mile trip in northwest Minnesota.

Once we had a diagnosis, the other big anxiety was how the community would respond. The Brumwells were the first people we told. Somehow, it was like they knew exactly what to say. Kristin Weiss, Ryan’s fiancée, said simply “Oh. Well, that’s his super power!” Jason quipped that he took after his father. All of them said, emphatically, that Charlie was Charlie and that this didn’t change anything. It was exactly what we needed to hear.

The other wild card was the school. Would the teachers treat him differently? Was a tiny school like J. A. Hughes Elementary (typical grade size: twenty kids) be equipped to work with a kid like Charlie? Would they try to redirect him to a special ed program? We let the school know about the diagnosis, in kind of a casual “FYI” kind of manner since we didn’t know what the typical protocol was. To our surprise the teachers and administrators immediately sprang into action. They bumped him up to two days a week of full-time preschool, in order to help him develop the social skills he was lacking. They worked with a special educator to put in place some in-classroom interventions, like a cool-down corner where he could take a break when he got overstimulated. They quickly performed their own evaluation, to ensure he met Minnesota state guidelines for requiring educational assistance.

Within a couple of weeks of learning about the diagnosis, the school put together a meeting between us, the principal, the pre-K teacher, a school psychologist, a special ed teacher, and a speech pathologist. They agreed that he should be in a regular classroom, on an individualized educational plan and with para-educator assistance when needed. They were extremely supportive, and to my relief and embarrassment they didn’t seem to think of Charlie as a burden, or a drain on school resources. He was just a kid with a certain set of needs.

By all appearances he is currently thriving at J. A. Hughes Elementary in the town of Red Lake Falls. His kindergarten classroom is small—fifteen kids—and filled with friendly, familiar faces. As luck would have it, his kindergarten teacher, Hannah Seeger, had formerly taught special education. It is difficult to think of a more ideal environment, anywhere in the country, for a child with his specific needs than the place he is at right now. The small scale of the school drastically reduces the risk of things going south during the unstructured moments, like recess or the bus ride, that kids on the autism spectrum often have trouble with in a typical public school setting. Jason Brumwell drives the bus that picks him up for school in the morning, and Ryan drives the bus that takes him home. In larger public schools, in particular—like the ones we left behind in Maryland—kids like Charlie can easily get lost in the crowd. A special need can become a special burden, and overworked, underpaid educators can be forgiven if they don’t have time to comfort a five-year-old having a meltdown because somebody else is using the crayon he wanted. Westchester Elementary, the school the boys would have attended had we stayed in Maryland, has about six hundred students. J. A. Hughes has less than a third as many. It’s the kind of place where at the end of the school day, every single day, Principal Chris Bjerklie stands by the door to greet and high-five every single kid who walks out. If he can’t make it, school secretary Julie Buse does it instead. In the wintertime they make sure every kid is properly attired—boots, snow pants, hat, mittens—before heading outside to face the cold.

Even with the smaller school, Charles still has his challenges, of course. He and Jack joined 4-H in kindergarten, for instance. Briana volunteers with the program, in part to keep an eye on Charlie and in part because she just enjoys helping out. One day a month they board a different bus than usual in the afternoon, which takes them to the community center in town where 4-H is held. I had some reservations about letting five-year-olds navigate an unfamiliar bus situation by themselves, but for the first few months everything went without a hitch. But then, one day in February, everything went wrong.

Jack was out sick from school that day, so the brothers wouldn’t be able to look after each other the way they usually did. We found out later that Mrs. Seeger, Charlie’s kindergarten teacher, was also out. So was Ryan, the usual bus driver. And on top of it all, the 4-H bus did something different that day: rather than take the 4-H kids directly to the community center it made a number of stops beforehand.

Charlie’s usual support structure—brother, teacher, bus driver—wasn’t in place to help him deal with the double whammy of both riding a different bus and dealing with a different route than usual on that different bus. When the bus pulled up to the community center to let the 4-H kids out, Briana realized with horror that Charlie wasn’t there.

She called me. Had he gotten on his usual bus instead? No, that bus had already come and gone and he wasn’t on it.

She talked to the other 4-H kids. Had Charlie been on the bus? Yes, they said. He had gotten off at an earlier stop, the one down the road. She flew out the door and ran down the road.

The temperature that day was right around zero—not too cold by northern Minnesota standards, but cold enough that a kid wandering around outside could be in some serious danger before long.

Fortunately, Charlie’s snow pants are bright, Day-Glo orange—his favorite color. That was the first thing she saw, his bright orange snow pants walking down the road between two older kids. She ran up to them, breathless.

They had gotten off at the same bus stop Charlie had and he had just started walking with them, the kids said. They took him to their place and their dad, with some alarm, told them to walk him over to the county social services office, which was at the courthouse right down the road. That’s what they had been doing when Bri found them.

Charles didn’t seem particularly fazed by the incident, but with his expressive communication being what it was, we had a hard time figuring out his side of the story. He believed that he had gotten off the bus after the 4-H stop, rather than before. He saw the red brick Catholic church outside the bus and mistook it for the red brick community center. He tried to go into the church but the door was locked. He went along with the other kids because he didn’t know what else to do.

It didn’t end anywhere near as badly as it could have—just google “autistic child missing” for a sense of the worst-case scenarios. But it badly rattled us, and it rattled the folks at the school, too. His teacher called us. The principal called us. Jason and Ryan called us when they heard what happened. An administrator called us. Another administrator who lived in our neighborhood showed up at our door to apologize and broke down in tears.

It’s hard to work out the counterfactual of how this would have played out in Baltimore schools. Would they have had five-year-olds navigating unfamiliar bus routes to begin with? Would Charlie even have been able to enroll in a regular kindergarten class with extracurricular activities? Had he gotten lost in a much larger, much stranger neighborhood, would the consequences have been much worse? Would administrators have even had time to care?

Impossible to say, in the end. What we do know is that everyone at J. A. Hughes took the incident seriously and have put in place different protocols for bus boarding to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again. And when they say it won’t happen again, Briana and I believe them. We can’t protect a kid like Charlie from the world forever. But in a place like Red Lake Falls, he has the freedom to face a world where the scale is smaller, the faces are friendlier, and the consequences for screwups are less severe.

On the other hand, there’s no question that a big school in Maryland has more to offer a bright kid than a small one in rural Minnesota. At J. A. Hughes the gym doubles as a cafeteria, and the library is used as the auditorium. There is no full-time librarian. The school shares a band teacher with the high school. Phys ed classes are mysteriously referred to as “phy ed.” Sitting here it’s easy to imagine all manner of wondrous, world-expanding extracurriculars that my kids are missing out on because they attend a tiny school in the middle of nowhere.

This, in fact, was one of Briana’s primary concerns about moving out here. She had attended a tiny K–12 school in upstate New York—eighteen kids in her graduating class! The education she received there was substandard, at best. She was one of just four kids who went on to a four-year degree. Most of the kids simply planned to work on their parents’ farms after graduation, or worse, they didn’t have a plan at all. The school was poor and had little money to attract decent teachers, much less make them stick around for more than a year. Staff turnover was high. Bri had five different English teachers her senior year in high school. Most of that year was spent watching movies with various subs rather than reading real books. They didn’t have Advanced Placement tests. They didn’t even offer calculus. Briana recalls that her twelfth-grade physics teacher spent much of the class time wrestling and horsing around with the guys in her class. At the end of this year, this teacher handed another student, one of the boys who hadn’t bothered to hand in any work, her lab folder. The teacher told the boy to copy what he needed from Briana’s folder in order to fill out his missing work, so he wouldn’t fail. Bri didn’t know about any of this until after graduation.

But these drawbacks only instilled in her a desire to rise above them all. She took advantage of every extracurricular she could get her hands on. Some of the better teachers—and there were a few—keyed her in to life-changing experiences like Outward Bound, which made her realize the world had a lot more to offer than what Owen D. Young Central School let on. She graduated valedictorian and got accepted into Cornell. She remains pissed off, to this day, that her high school math level was so below the level other incoming freshmen received that she had to take remedial classes in her first year of college, mostly because her school didn’t have enough student interest in what was considered “advanced” math.

Her principal, in fact, had made a point of telling her, during her senior year, to “get off your high horse” regarding her class ranking. Owen D. Young Central School was tiny, he said. She was just a big fish in a small pond. Compared to the other kids across New York State? She was nothing.

Nevertheless, she persisted. She made it to college, and she made it out. And she—and I—want our kids to succeed because of what their K–12 education offers, not in spite of it. In all honesty we don’t know if the schools in Red Lake Falls can make that happen. They don’t offer calculus, either. Or trigonometry. They have a robotics club, but no school paper. For the time being we’re pinning our hopes on two factors.

The first is that parental involvement can pick up a lot of educational slack. A kid’s success in school is largely dependent on his innate curiosity and his willingness to learn new things. That’s something we can help our kids develop; it just means we’ll have to take on more of the work of their education ourselves. Jack, now six, wants to play the violin, for example. There’s nobody at his school who can teach him that, which means we’ll have to ferry him off to lessons in Thief River or Crookston.

Looking forward, the bigger point we discovered is that high school students in the state of Minnesota are allowed to take college courses, for college credit, at a local postsecondary institution for no charge through the state’s Postsecondary Enrollment Options program. If we’re still here by the time Jack and Charles get into high school, and they find that the courses there aren’t challenging enough, we can simply ship them off to classes at the University of Minnesota in Crookston for their junior and senior years. Our neighbors Rob and Alice told us that their son Alex took advantage of this program, and they couldn’t speak highly enough of it. In addition to advanced coursework he was able to get involved in the school’s music and theater programs, eventually parlaying that experience into admission to the music program at Oberlin College, one of the best music departments in the country. No such program existed in New York State when Briana was watching her physics teacher tackle her classmates in lab.

For the time being, we’re at a place where we know the elementary education being offered to the boys is ideal, particularly for Charles. And we know that beyond elementary school there are more challenging instructional opportunities available to the boys, should they need it. For the moment, that’s enough.

Honestly, it’s a relief to not have to game out the educational arms race that so many parents grapple with on the east coast: placing your toddler in the right day care, so they can get admitted to the right pre-K program, so they can go to the right private elementary school, followed by the right prep school. It’s exhausting to even contemplate the triangulation necessary to put a kid through school in that kind of environment.

When there’s just one school, those concerns are largely rendered moot. As a country we’ve become so fixated on “choice” in our educational systems that we’ve forgotten how freeing it can be when you don’t have to choose.

Shortly after we moved, incidentally, the Annie E. Casey Foundation published its annual rankings of the best places to grow up in America. The rankings were drawn from various official data sources, concerning things like education quality, poverty and hunger, family structure, test scores, rates of grade repetition, you name it. Minnesota came out at the absolute top of the list. “Where the children are all above average,” indeed.

As summer trundled into fall our first year in Minnesota, we were feeling good about things. We had made peace with the neighbors. We were figuring out the schools, the doctors, and where to buy food. Our cupboards were stocked with applesauce made with apples from our tree in our yard, and jam made with chokecherries from another. The boys were three, somewhere between toddlers and little boys, and they were becoming easier to manage. We lived in a house that, for the first time, felt truly like home. There was space to stretch out in and fresh air to breathe. Work was going well—my output hadn’t imploded since leaving the D.C. newsroom. It was refreshing to be able to log off at the end of the workday, to step away from the social media madness of the news cycle and into a home life that was more grounded, more solid, in many ways more real.

It felt like we were getting everything we had hoped for when we first moved. Yet somehow, it felt like something was missing. We couldn’t quite put our finger on it. The feeling didn’t express itself as a lack, or a shortcoming, necessarily, but rather as a space for something more. Space that had never even been imaginable back in Maryland.

Briana blames me for suggesting what came next, and I blame her. Regardless, whichever one of us gave voice to it first didn’t face much opposition from the other: “What if we tried for a girl?”

Throughout the twins’ infancy we had made dark jokes about having another kid, usually during the most trying moments. One memorable day in Maryland, for instance, both twins had been sick, the drain hose to the washing machine had come undone, flooding the basement, and the dog had eaten something he shouldn’t have and was alternately puking and shitting all over the house. “At least we don’t have triplets!” we would say at times like those.

But we had never seriously entertained the thought of another kid in Maryland. We were barely getting by with just two of them. We, evidently, were not alone. The U.S. fertility rate has been on a long, steady decline, from nearly ninety births per woman age fifteen to forty-four in 1970 to about sixty in 2017. A lot of that decline is due to things worth applauding: expanded access to abortion and contraceptive services, and greater autonomy for women and men to decide whether and how to have kids.

But economic pressures are playing a role in this, too. Middle-class wages have stagnated. Housing has become staggeringly expensive, particularly in coastal urban areas. Day-care and educational costs are skyrocketing. And among the world’s wealthy nations, the United States remains a stubborn outlier when it comes to policies like paid parental work leave (the United States doesn’t mandate any) and universal child care (ditto). In many states, day care is now more expensive than a college education.

Those competing pressures have made it more difficult than ever to have kids, and Americans aren’t exactly happy about it. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the General Social Survey show, for instance, that the gap between how many children women say they want to have (2.7 on average) and how many they’ll actually have (1.8, on average) is the highest it’s been in forty years.

If you want to be strictly utilitarian about it, you might say that policy makers have pursued such an aggressive probusiness agenda over the past forty years that they’ve overlooked the question of whether parents will be able to afford to continue producing the customers who will buy stuff from those businesses in the future. To be more blunt, as a country we’ve pursued economic policies that are good for corporations and their shareholders, but lousy for their employees and their families.

We weren’t interested in producing another future Wal-Mart customer, of course. But we suddenly found ourselves in a place where we had the time, the money, the space, the community support, and the love to bring another life into the world. Given my own anti-kid past, I’m not the kind of person to go around insisting that people who don’t want kids will someday change their minds, or that people who already have kids secretly want more. But our own experience does make me wonder how many other couples might not realize that, given the right circumstances, there could be space for more children, more love, in their own lives?

The big thing we were worried about was the possibility of another set of twins—or worse. Parents who have twins once are more likely to have twins if they get pregnant again. At Johns Hopkins, where the twins were born, Briana’s doctor told a story one day about a couple who had twins—two boys—and then decided to try for a girl. They ended up getting pregnant with triplets, and subsequently found out that all three would be boys. The parents left the office sobbing that day.

We decided to go for it, though. Briana was pregnant within two months of going off birth control. We were greatly relieved to discover that this time there would be just one baby. Our Minnesota child was on the way.