I knew about some of it. The water bottle that doubles as a filtration system and cooking container. The walking stick with an attachment for spearing fish. The solar radio. Occasionally, I snuck beans from his emergency stash. He didn’t realize we’d been eating them in tacos ‘til they were almost gone.
But then I was in a garden center parking lot, pushing a trolley of leafy tomato and pepper plants with our daughter on my hip. My car was in the shop that day, so I was driving his. When I opened the hatchback to load the veggies, I was startled to see the trunk fully packed with duffle bags, boxes, and neatly folded tarps. Fiona asked for goldfish while I stared at the wall of stuff in silence.
When had Jacob packed his trunk like this? And what, exactly, was he preparing us for?
✦
I was 35 when I met Jacob, and I wanted to be a mom. Shortly before matching on Hinge, I’d made an appointment at a fertility clinic; after using the apps on and off for over a decade, I was seriously considering having a baby on my own. But then, there he was. Sweet and handsome. Curious and forthcoming. Still, I kept the appointment.
The results arrived on Valentine’s Day, as we were walking in the snow on our sixth or seventh date. The doctor emailed that my hormones were declining quickly for my age, and if I wanted to get pregnant, I should start trying ASAP. I felt dizzy with urgency as I slipped my phone back into the pocket of my coat, but I tucked my arm into Jacob’s, trying to act normal. A week later, over pizza, I laid out the options: we could break up, or we could start trying together.
It was a little crazy, we both agreed. “But I know I’m ready to be a dad,” he said. We were both shocked, I think, at how easy it felt to say, “Yes. Let’s do this.” At some point during the eight months that followed, between the scheduled sex, the hopeful days and the disappointing ones, we fell in love. Logistics had preceded romance: we first talked about marriage in terms of health insurance. But in each other, we saw a chance. When two lines finally appeared, we felt lucky. It could have gone so many other ways.
And then, it did.
✦
I went into labor at just 33 weeks. Between stabbing contractions, they wheeled me to the room closest to the NICU; the doctors said our baby might need help breathing right away. But when a nurse pressed Fiona’s wrinkly, purple body onto my stomach, she let out a hearty wail. At first glance, she was in great shape for a preemie. I felt nothing but relief when they whisked her away for testing. Jacob went with her, and the big team of doctors seemed cheerful, their eyes smiling over baby blue masks while they cleaned me up.
I wasn’t there when the feeding tube they tried to insert stopped short. Jacob later told me she screamed and screamed as they tried to guide it down her throat. Turns out, Fiona has esophageal atresia, a one-in-five-thousand congenital condition in which the esophagus doesn’t connect to the stomach. What followed were the most brutal three months of our lives.
Day after day, we sat next to her hospital crib and took turns holding her for hours at a time. Six weeks passed before she was big enough for surgery to connect her esophagus to her stomach. Then she was on a ventilator, sedated, her tiny body swollen while she healed.
One day, shortly after being extubated, she looked scared. Her heart rate kept spiking, her oxygen saturation plummeting, setting off alarms. For hours, the nurses assured us it was an unfortunate side effect of weaning from fentanyl, but Jacob wasn’t convinced. With increasing desperation edged with anger, he insisted something wasn’t right and they needed to do imaging. I kept telling him we should trust the doctors.
He wouldn’t back down. Finally, someone agreed to a chest scan, and they discovered a collapsed lung and a pocket of fluid. The place where her esophagus had been sewn together was leaking. Within minutes, there was a surgeon at Fiona’s side, telling us we needed to leave the room. There was no time to get to the surgical floor, and they had to do something we shouldn’t see.
✦
Fiona recovered from that terrible ordeal, but it was a slow process. In the weeks that followed, with the trauma of that night still lodged somewhere in each of us, we still came home without her. I’d go to bed early, and Jacob would stay up late watching Doomsday Preppers, a reality show with people showing off their collections of guns, canned goods, and well-oiled preparations for natural disaster or civil war.
I found the show stressful. Jacob found it comforting. I was waking up every night at 2:00am to pump, and I’d often find him snoring on the couch in the glow of the question: “Are you still watching?”
One night, after waking him up, I turned the TV off and went to Fiona’s room, where I curled up on the carpet and wept. We had no idea when she’d be home.
Around that time, packages started arriving frequently. We’d come back from the hospital to another box — more freeze-dried meals and water filters, a waterproof backpack, 50 mylar blankets folded into tiny silver squares. He’d tuck them away in our garage before another trip to the hospital, and we mostly didn’t talk about it. I was too tangled in our immediate crisis to give his growing collection much thought.
Now, though, gaping at my husband’s packed trunk, I was suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling I couldn’t quite name: was it sorrow? Gratitude? Was it both? It occurred to me that Jacob and the vigilant characters of Doomsday Preppers aren’t wrong to prepare. The number of unlikely, horrible things that might happen in the world is infinite. They’re happening right now, to people who never expected to face such things, on the other side of the world and just down the street.
We felt unlucky with Fiona’s diagnosis. But there are so many one-in-five-thousand conditions: earthquakes, illnesses, storms, accidents. The unlikely eventually add up to the inevitable — a reality that washes me in grief some days. I try to remind myself that improbable gifts find us, too. A sweet conversation with a stranger. A poem or a song that flashes into recognition when we need it most. A first kiss that lingers. It was unlikely that I’d meet Jacob when I did, and then get pregnant with depleted hormones and one functioning fallopian tube. But here I am, crying a mother’s tears with every tragedy that crosses the headlines.
After 99 days in the hospital, Fiona came home. Today, at three and a half years old, she’s healthy and exuberant. She likes to play “doctor” with her stuffed animals, using one of Jacob’s many emergency headlamps as a prop.
Jacob and I are a good team. We’re also very different. When he was demanding more tests at the hospital, I was calmer but too accepting of what we were being told. Who knows how long that leak would have gone undetected without him pushing? I’m a steadier hand in the peak of crisis. But when things settle down, I have a tendency to get lost in unspoken anxieties. Then, Jacob is there to hold me together. He’s the prepper; I’m the optimist. He keeps us stocked with non-perishables. I make sure we have fresh veggies.
When I get home from the nursery, with the plants all crammed next to the carseat, I put Fiona down for a nap, and then I ask Jacob about everything in the trunk. He tells me that if we ever need to hit the road unexpectedly, we’ll be ready. If a wildfire is roaring towards our home or an earthquake cracks through the Pacific Northwest, we have enough freeze-dried food for three weeks in the car. He has a list of places that will be safe, depending on the situation. We have everything we need to survive worst-case scenarios, he tells me.
I roll my eyes a little. But for now at least, with our daughter sleeping soundly in the other room, I also know he’s right.
If you’d like to join Britany’s husband but don’t know where to start, try TwoXPreppers. The group’s name is a chromosomal nod to “women and our prepping needs” — men are allowed, but mansplaining isn’t. Perhaps as a result, it’s a relatively level-headed sub of folks who “prep for Tuesday, not doomsday.”
Our favorite kind of prepping, though, is local organizing. For a deeper dive into the importance of knowing your neighbors in a crisis, check out this episode of The Conversation. As podcast guest Daniel Cueto-Villalobos describes, being in “a Minneapolis that was literally under occupation was a lot to process personally, but it became very clear that the way through this was through mutual aid work and really relying on the community.”
Overprepped? Try this delicious bean chili, with walnuts (!) and chocolate (!!!). It might just be the perfect excuse to organize a neighborhood potluck.
