Pete Buttigieg, former presidential candidate and current US Secretary of Transportation, shared his thoughts on “vulnerability and gratitude” in an emotional essay about his first year of parenting with his husband Chasten Buttigieg. In the essay, which was published on Medium this week, Buttigieg revealed that both of his children were hospitalized with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) shortly after they were born, and opened up about how terrifying the experience was for his family.
Buttigieg, his husband, and both of their children—Joseph August (Gus) and Penelope Rose, twins born during the summer of 2021—got sick with RSV last year. RSV is the most common germ that causes lung and airway infections in young children, per the US National Library of Medicine (NLM). The virus tends to cause a spike in outbreaks between fall and spring. There is no vaccine yet, but researchers are working on it.
“By October, we had started to feel more confident and comfortable with all the routines (and the surprises) of parenting,” Buttigieg wrote. “Then one day, the kids got a cold. Soon it was a cough. Then Penelope started to have trouble breathing. Over FaceTime, our doctor expressed concern about the way her belly was retracting under her ribs as she worked to take in air.” Penelope was admitted to the hospital first, but Gus was taken in soon after that when his skin took on a “mottled” look.
After spending a few days on supplemental oxygen, the twins were discharged from the hospital, but Gus took a turn for the worse and had to be readmitted that same week. “We watched things go from bad to worse,” Buttigieg wrote. “Periodic visits by a single nurse turned into anxious and repeated consultations by a large and growing group of respiratory therapists, nurses, and doctors constantly in different combinations.”
Buttigieg went on to describe a chilling thought he had during his son’s illness. “In one dark moment, I wondered if my weeks of parental leave would amount to the entirety of my time with our son, this beautiful infant whose face I had seen for the first time just weeks earlier and whose life had now come to matter to me as much as my own.”
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During this time, Buttigieg continued to do whatever work he could, often taking meetings from the hospital where his son was staying. The “days blurred together,” he wrote, adding that they “lived in the space between hospital and hotel, between cafeteria visits and Zoom calls, between fear and boredom.” After about a week under intensive care, Gus showed signs of improvement, “and day by day, started clearly getting better.” The day his breathing tube was removed signified “a new hope” for their family.
Thankfully, Gus remained stable, and the twins recently celebrated their first birthday, enjoying cake “by the fistful” for the first time. As he reflected on this moment of joy, Buttigieg shared the gratitude he feels for the friends, family, and health care workers who stepped up to help him and his husband.
“It really does take a village, even in normal circumstances, to raise a child, and our village had been there for us,” he wrote. “But so had policy, from the research that helped create the modern medical strategies to treat our son, to the basic legal protections that came with my marriage to Chasten, ensuring we would be treated by our insurance company and by hospital staff like any other family.”
Buttigieg also admitted that “yes, sometimes parenting is terror.” But this tough year taught him a lot about how “magical” it can be to care for another person so much. “Parenting, too, is an expression of hope,” he wrote, “indeed one of the deepest and most vulnerable commitments you can make in the spirit of hope.”
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Source: SELF
