Thomas Greene (S1E3)

Thomas Greene on Fatherhood, Storytelling, and Grief After Losing a Child

Hosts Sophia and AC Valdez interview Thomas Greene, acclaimed novelist and essayist, founder and former president of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and popular Montpelier restaurateur. Greene opens up about becoming a father to his daughters, Sarah and Jane. 

Greene describes his happy upbringing in a large family, his planned path to parenthood, fears around childbirth, and Sarah’s difficult delivery by C-section. He recounts how a crisis during his then wife’s high-risk pregnancy with his younger daughter Jane forced him into primary caregiving for Sarah and how improvised bedtime storytelling helped him feel he became a “dad,” not just a father. Greene details Jane’s premature birth at 28 weeks, six months in two NICUs, coping through research, community and family support, and how the loss affected his marriage, his writing, and his evolving relationship with Sarah into adulthood.

Website: www.SophiaMedia.co/MyFirstYear 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:13

Welcome to my first year as a father, where we talk about life, fatherhood, and thy pivotal first year of becoming a dad. Hi, I'm Sophia.

SPEAKER_00 0:24

And I'm AC. Our guest today is Thomas Green. Tom is a novelist and an essayist. He was also a college president and the founder of Vermont College of Fine Arts. He's also now a restaurateur. He owns Hugo's Bar and Grill in Montpelier, Vermont, which is both a restaurant and a jazz club.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Tom first became a father in 2006 with the birth of his daughter Sarah. Sarah is now 20 years old. Tom became a father again three years later to his daughter Jane. Jane died after six months in the Nikyu. Tom joined us to discuss fatherhood and how he wrestled with his grief while raising his eldest daughter.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

Hi, Tom. Great to see you.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Good to see you again, Sophia. Good to be here. Can you tell us briefly about your parents and growing up in a family of seven children, as I understand it?

SPEAKER_01 1:37

Yeah, there was there were nine of us in total. Yeah, my parents met in um in college. They both came out of out of poverty and the depression. Um they were first generation college students. They met at a teacher's college in Massachusetts. They got married, they had five kids in five years, which is kind of amazing. My poor mother, you know, she said when everybody was uh when one was sick, they all were sick and she would just sleep on the couch. And then there was a five-year break, and I was born, and I think I was a mistake, or to put it more kindly, probably an accident. And so they felt bad for me and gave me a friend, and that was my brother Dan, who was born a year after me. So there's a total of seven of us. And we were a very tight, you know, nuclear family that had, you know, dinner around the table every single night. You know, my mother cooked, my dad asked the questions or more of the questions. You know, we had deep discussions about civil rights and social justice and other things, and uh uh we traveled and it was uh, you know, we we were sort of poor and we didn't know it. My dad was a history professor then and with seven kids, and but we lived in a big old rambling house in Wormass. And, you know, I was lucky. I'm lucky to be a writer because I actually had a happy childhood.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

So did you always imagine growing up, especially in such a large family, having children, or did it feel kind of inevitable? How did how did that take shape in your imagination?

SPEAKER_01 3:00

You know, I think I probably figured I would have children someday, but I was not somebody who had a burning urgency to have children. You know, I mean I was not somebody who was like, this is my life plan, I want this many kids or I want that, you know. It's more, you know, I got married a little later. Well, the not anymore compared to standards now, but I was in my 30s. And my wife really wanted to have children, and I was like, yeah, okay. But it wasn't a, you know, I there are people I knew who were like had a plan. I didn't have a plan. I always felt like having children long term was something I wanted to do, but it wasn't there was no urgency. My urgencies were were driven more by other things I was trying to do at the time.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

And you didn't have any, given you that you have um you come from such a big family, there wasn't any pressure on from your parents either, right? For you to get married, settle down, and have kids.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

No, I mean they I mean the the married part they were more into. You know, they they they thought that would provide, I think, stability in my life. But yeah, no, there wasn't a pressure of children because they were my older brothers and sisters were all having kids.

SPEAKER_02 4:03

Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

I mean, my parents had 14 grandchildren, so ultimately. So there was a bunch of them running around already. So there was plenty to play with.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Right.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

But when you and your wife decided to have children, was there a conversation beforehand? Was it just spontaneity?

SPEAKER_01 4:22

No, no, it was it was a it there was a deliberateness to it, you know, that she was driving, but yeah. You know, that the two times that we had children, both of them were planned. And what would what did that conversation look like? Boy, I don't I don't remember. I mean, she really wanted a lot of kids, actually, honestly. I mean, so there might have been some pushback for me on like a lot of kids. But uh I don't remember the specifics of it, you know, it was more organic. It's the type of thing you decide before you get married, right? I mean, that's a conversation you have. I think before you get married, if one person's like, I never want to have children, the other person's like, I really need to have children, then you know, you're probably not a match because those are big existential life choices you have to make. And so I think we had settled that conversation before, and it was clear that I was willing to have children, you know, two or three in that range. And so we had kind of a concrete conversation about what that might look like.

SPEAKER_02 5:14

And was she working at the time?

SPEAKER_01 5:17

She was. So we actually did like a little bit of reversal. So she was um when I first met her, she was bartending at the restaurant where I later opened Hugo's.

SPEAKER_02 5:25

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

My restaurant now. Yeah, there's a lot of history in that building. It's a it's it's strange.

SPEAKER_02 5:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

So she was bartending and I met her there, but then I met her in a different context. But when I we got married, she was working as an editor, um, a book editor, and and I had I had left my job and was writing full-time. And so she was going to the office, I was not. And then we did a switch after Sarah was born, where I went back to direct a graduate program in a college, and she was then not working at home full-time, which she was, you know, until Sarah was probably 10, 11.

SPEAKER_02 6:00

Do you remember what the pregnancy was like for you? What was going through your head at the time?

SPEAKER_01 6:07

Yeah, it was terrifying. I mean, I was like, yeah. Even before birth. Well, I was I was afraid of the birth process, you know, like that. I don't like medical stuff. And and that was freaking me out, probably on a level, you know. I made a mistake, I made a calculated error in not doing like the class thing there, but I did because I just don't like following rules. We got like a private lesson from somebody, and I think the class might have helped, you know. So we didn't do I we didn't do any of that stuff. You know, I just like had the teacher, I hired them separately to come like give us like a two-hour one-on-one. I'm like, okay, now we know what's going on. But uh, you know, I mean, for her, the pregnancy was great because she was totally happy being pregnant. You know, she loved she loved being pregnant. For me, I was I remember I was playing basketball like five days a week. I got in really good shape. I was like playing full court basketball all week because I'd played basketball as a kid, I played in college, but I hadn't played. And somehow it was like that connected me back to my childhood. Like it was like I was like in denial, but I was also preparing, I think, for what was to come. So I was very nervous about the birth process, more so than the parenting piece of it, which is you know kind of probably the inverse of what you should think about.

SPEAKER_00 7:19

Right. But you know, given the like it is no no you not even a smooth pregnancy winds up always being a hundred percent easy. Right. And I'm kind of wondering like once you got into the hospital and given that level of trepidation that you had, how did that work out? Was it you like, whoa, this is actually easier than I expected, or uh no, it's far worse.

SPEAKER_03 7:45

Okay, so tell me about why.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

So, first to tell you that when I, you know, my wife called to tell me that her water broke, I had just arrived at a book club. A group of women were doing a book club, they were reading one of my novels. They had given me a glass of wine. We didn't think it was happening that night. I was like sitting there drinking a glass of wine, and my wife called on my phone. I'm like, oh, you're water broke. And I was like, okay, well, I'm doing this thing, and all these women are like, no, you have to go now. Like, you have to go. Like, you know, you you we're kicking you out, you know. You did someone's putting my coat on, and I'm like, oh, this is really happening. Okay. And then like I I picked up Tia at home, and um, the hospital we were going to, Dartmouth Hitchcock was like 45 minutes away. So, you know, I was just like hauling down the highway. It's a long ride. It's a long ride, yeah. And we got there, and um, you know, at first it was fine, but she's a petite woman, she has a lot of pain, and um, people have a particular plan around birth. She had a plan she wanted to do, which was not have drugs or other things, but then that went out the window, you know, as soon as she was in like a lot of pain, and you know, it was like when the guy came in with the epidural, it's like God came in the room, you know. But I remember just being completely flipped out, and then at one point, like suddenly everybody was in the room, doctors, everything else. And it had been a long time. I mean, we've been at this now for a while, and Sarah wasn't progressing, and her heart rate was slowing, so they wanted to do a C-section, which my wife did not want at all. So she was telling me to fight for her. She's like, fight for me, fight for me. And I was like, you know, I said to the doctors, I was like, Does this is this something that has to be done? And the guy's like, There is no choice here. And I said, Well, how long is it gonna take? And he was like, 20 minutes. I was like, 20 minutes? That I mean, we've been at this for like 12 hours. I was like, I you know. So she had a c-section, and Sarah was born and came out redheaded and healthy and uh beautiful and perfect.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Oh well's well that ends well, I guess. But yeah, I think some people would be shocked at how quickly a c-section actually goes. In the right hands, at least.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Yeah, I mean it's it's fast, and and I mean they didn't to be honest, they were worried about me because I was a little wobbly, like they didn't want me in there. The guy's like, uh, we're gonna keep you over here, and you're not looking at anything, and you're not touching anything. And I'm like, okay, well, I don't need to. So I was up top near my wife's head while it was happening. I didn't had no view down below, which is fine with me. I just wanted to see the baby. And uh yeah, yeah, same, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm not one of those getting in there people, you know.

SPEAKER_02 10:25

I don't understand those guys, but so what was it like the first moment you laid eyes on Sarah?

SPEAKER_01 10:33

It was kind of, you know, it's funny. I haven't really thought about this till you asked me. Um, this is gonna be a hard conversation today, I can already tell for me emotionally. I think I'm gonna be wrecked. You know, I mean, I was I was just she she was she was perfect, you know. She had she had red hair, which surprised me. Uh her hair is now blonde. You know, I was blonde as a baby and had some ginger in my beard and stuff in my middle-aged years. But she was she was she was redheaded and blue-eyed, and um, you know, she was very healthy looking and very perfect. You know, I don't know what's kind of like it was kind of a sense of overwhelming, but I also was aware of the whole external audience that was out there in the world who was waiting for news of this. So that was a big part of my job was to leave and go out in the parking lot at six in the morning and call first my wife's mom and then my parents and then brothers and sisters and other people and let everybody know that we had a new queen in the world.

SPEAKER_02 11:30

Did you get to hold her for for a little bit?

SPEAKER_01 11:33

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, she was, yeah. I mean, she was nursing pretty much right away. And then, you know, we I was holding her, and then um, and then it was there were visitors and and they would take her away sometimes to just give us a break and let Tia sleep. But then they just kick you out. Like it feels like it feels like you should be there for a couple months. You know, like where's where's the whole team? You know, they just they just throw you in a car and send you home and they're like figured out.

SPEAKER_02 12:00

And you're like, we're not ready for this.

SPEAKER_01 12:03

I wasn't I wasn't ready for it. My wife was fine, I wasn't ready for it.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

Can I take a step back real quick? Were you close with your own dad? Very, yeah, I'm still close with him. Did you all have conversations about you know what to expect? No, given that he'd been through this seven times? No.

SPEAKER_01 12:20

Well, well, I mean, I we did, but he didn't, he, he wasn't there. I mean, you gotta remember it was the 60s. You know, he and he had a bunch of kids at home. He would literally drop my mother off at the front door of the hospital. Wow. And then go home and wait for and the doctor would call and say, you know, you have a football player, you got a cheerleader, which is like, I mean, so gender hized and weird to think about now. But that was wow, that was like, you know, late 50s, early 60s when my older brothers and sisters were born. That was kind of the way it went down. And so he wasn't there for the birth of any of his children just when they came home. You know, he was a he was a very hands-on father in in a lot of ways. But uh, you know, it was a different time, different kind of roles, different division of responsibilities. Men often were not in that's a that's a more recent phenomenon.

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Uh, and so I feel like in the early 2000s, there must have been a lot of surprises that hit you. What was that like? What would what surprised you most?

SPEAKER_01 13:17

Well, this was so Sarah was born in 2006. Um I think when you're going through things that are different or new or challenging, we we have coping mechanisms that tend to block out the situation that we're actually in. So it's only later with the span of time and memory and history that you can actually, like I can right now, feel the weight of responsibility I probably felt. But at the moment, I was kind of just going through the day-to-day motions of this thing of having a baby at home. And and, you know, and uh I had an incredibly capable partner who was very good at this. So, you know, we had kind of a bit of a division of labor on some level. I mean, I cooked, I've always done the cooking. So I I I would cook, I would shop, I would do those things. I would I would take time with the baby and hold the baby. And but I couldn't, I obviously couldn't nurse or feed the baby, you know. And so, you know, this is kind of division of labor that happens and you sort of figured out as you go. But I also went quickly back to work for the first time, like three weeks after she was born. And I had been working at home for years. But I got this opportunity, as I said, to run this graduate program. I thought it was gonna be three or four months, and and so I uh took advantage of it.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

Yeah. So that was just an opportunity that just came along at that time. It wasn't like, oh, now you're a father, you felt like you you had to look for some other job other than just being a writer at home.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

No, it was a phone call I got, and we talked about it. And uh and she saw it saw it as a good opportunity too, because you know, because there was also the potential possibility could lead to something where she wouldn't have to go back to work because you know, she was our healthcare and she was a steady salary, and I was riding the wave of being a writer where you know I get a book advance and I live on it for you know eight months, and then I gotta get another book advance, and you know, or get a deal, a European deal that pays a little money or some royalties come in. And you know, it's a it's a funky way to make a living.

SPEAKER_05 15:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

So having her steady income as a book editor helped, but this created the possibility that maybe she wouldn't have to go back to that and she didn't because you know that three-month gig I had ended up turning into becoming a college president, which is a whole other thing.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

Wow. I think you had you had just mentioned something about looking back, there were times where you were I forget the exact words you said, like you were in hiding or something, something to that effect.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Denial probably.

SPEAKER_02 15:42

Denial.

SPEAKER_01 15:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:43

Yeah. So now that you look back to that phase of your life, what were the ways that you were in denial about you know having this new baby in your life?

SPEAKER_01 15:56

I I think I was trying to just kind of keep on keeping on what I was doing before, you know, as much as I could. You know, I mean I I had uh I still wanted to be out with my friends, I wanted to do things, I want to do all that stuff. And there was some things that were limiting that way, you know, because because you did have to, you know, she's home home with the baby all day and I'm out all day, and then I'm coming home, and um, you know, I was like, here, your turn, you know, for a while. And uh and that's that that was a that was a change, you know. And so I I think I think trying to kind of find that balance where I could be supportive and helpful, but also I was starting what was an incredibly ambitious project and I was writing a novel.

SPEAKER_05 16:36

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

You know, I was starting a college with when my daughter was two, three months old, and uh, which I can't, I I thought was gonna be, you know, more hubris, thought was gonna be kind of like kind of a quick thing. It was like two years, it was like two years of 12-hour days. And so there was a I don't know that my experience was typical of what and not there's a typical father experience, because there are all kinds of fathers. Right. But I leaned, I think, into the I gotta make some money, I'll make some money for us. I will provide, I will get the food, I will make sure we got the right house. We had a house that was in the country that we liked, but I also my wife felt very lonely and didn't have the presence of like other moms and other things. So we, you know, I orchestrated a move into town and bought an old Victorian where there was a neighborhood full of people with children, things like that. So there were things I I did deliberately that were globally useful to being a dad, but the hands-on stuff wasn't quite my bread and butter until a little bit later.

SPEAKER_00 17:43

What was the moment that kind of did was there a moment that changed your perspective on that? Necessity did.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

It was when my second daughter, Jane, uh when Tia was pregnant with Jane, and she went into the hospital for a routine ultrasound, and her water had already broke, and she was at like 20 weeks.

SPEAKER_00 18:03

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

And so they said, and this was Dartmouth Hitchcock, which was an hour away, and they said, You're not you're not leaving the hospital.

SPEAKER_04 18:11

Right.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

And so that meant I was going home to Sarah alone, and Tia was in the hospital, and Sarah's three, and try to explain to a three-year-old that her mom is 40 miles away and she's not gonna see her much because infection and other things, you know, we could sneak her in, but it wasn't gonna, she was not gonna be seeing her much for a couple months, probably.

SPEAKER_02 18:32

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 18:33

Then suddenly it's just me, and this is not what she signed up for, Sarah. You know, she's like, Where's my where's my mom? What what's it what's what's he doing here, you know?

SPEAKER_00 18:45

And at that age, she's old enough to understand that her mom is going to have a baby.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Oh yes, yeah, she did. I mean, she's the one who actually woke me up in the morning with the pregnancy strip in her hand. Sarah did. No way. Showed it to me, and I was like, oh god.

SPEAKER_00 19:01

Here we go. But what was the conversation like, how do you have that kind of conversation with a three-year-old? I can't imagine because having a small child myself, it seems so difficult.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

Well, here's the thing, and I've written about this, but I um had that there's a uh a moment that was incredibly cathartic for me in that process. I'm gonna try to get through it because it might get a little emotional for me on this one. But um Sarah was trying, I was trying to put Sarah to bed, and she was just throwing a crazy tantrum. She was all throwing stuff in her room, she was like banana, she was so angry, wanted her mother back the whole thing. And I realized that I did have like one tiny superpower, which is storytelling, you know? And so I said to her, I said, you said to her, Do you see him? Did you see him? And she's like, Who? And I was like, that's Mr. George Mouse, he's right over there. She's like, No, he's not, you know, this kind of thing. And she stopped crying for a second. And she's like, What is he doing? I was like, it's Mr. George Mouse. He didn't you didn't see him. He he doesn't, he knows your name. And she's like, Does he know does he know your name? And I'm like, No, he doesn't know my name because he just, you know, the thing about this is that adults, I said to her, you know, they they stopped believing in magic, so animals know this. So they just call him him or her. You know, so he's like, him's right there, and that's Sarah, you know, and she's like, he knows my name. She's like, where does he live? And I was like, he lives at one laundry place, you know, where the laundry room is, you know, and and he said, him doesn't know where that is, which was true. Uh that would be me. And so I started telling her this story, and then it became a sort of ongoing quest story I would tell her at night over a period of years about, you know, that Mr. George Mouse was really the narrator of a larger story, which involved a group of skunks that formed a band and like a a uh like it was uh there was one skunk who came into town, Chicken Bone Jones was his name, and he came into town and he was a blues man and he formed a band of skunks. And for a time, everything in the neighborhood was really peaceful because all the animals would get together and listen to the skunk band. But then people began to trap the skunks and move them because they would be skunks. And uh so as a skunk started to disappear, the music stopped, and the neighborhood was in disarray, which meant that Ernie the Squirrel and Mr. Raccoon had to go find the band and bring them back together. And this was this long quest story with all these different characters I told over a fan of three years.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

Hold on. I'm I'm a little blown away because this is just such an improv moment. And I think that's one thing that fatherhood forces on you is like the ability to think on your feet in order to calm someone down who isn't at all rational.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

Well, I will say so. This is the powerful thing about it, just to be succinct about it, is that I knew stories could do a lot of things, right? I knew stories could make people happy, they could do other things. I wrote stories for a living. I knew that stories could even start a college, because that's mostly how I started college, was by telling the story of the thing I was going to do while I was doing it, you know, even though a lot of it was BS and people would say, like, that's not gonna happen. But it the more you told it, the more it became real. But what I didn't realize was that stories could make Make a father become a dad. Oh. And that's that's really what happened in that moment in that room that night for me. And that was everything was different after that.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

Oh, I love that.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

That's an incredible distinction, too.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Yeah, big distinction. Yeah. So Jane is in the hospital for quite a long time, as I understand it. You're dealing with Sarah at home alone.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

Well, Sarah, uh, Tia's in the hospital. Tia would be. Oh, Tia's in the hospital. Okay. Tia's in the hospital because Jane hasn't been born yet. Tia had to um, they didn't know how long she was going to hang on. You know, they they the chances are that Jane would even be born alive were slim. But Tia was a very incredibly strong, willful person. And so she hung on bed rest a little more than a month in the hospital with her water broke without getting an infection. And then she started to get the infection in that situation, it is a question of when, not if. And as soon as she gets an infection, takes hold their test her all day long, the baby has to come out. And so for Jane, that was at 28 weeks, and that's when Jane was born. I was at the college when I got the call from the hospital saying that I had to get down there if I wanted to see the birth, which I it was 45 minutes away. I didn't get down there in time. When I when I got there, Jane had already been born. And that was uh as stressful an experience as I've ever had in my life, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 23:34

Yeah, I could only imagine.

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Now, Sarah, at this point, I had to like enlist good friends. I'm like, you gotta go to my house, take care of Sarah. You know, at that point it was like you're running triage, right? You know, I gotta get down to Dartmouth, baby's born, new baby's born, Jane's born. When I got there, Tia was in a room, the baby was not with her. There was a like a minister in there, which I guess had become somebody who had befriended Tia on her bed rest and had come in and talked with her, you know, pastoral person. But for whatever reason, it he it pissed me off that he was there because I didn't because I didn't understand the context. I was like, is she dead? Like, is because is that why he's here? You know, because I didn't know if Jane had made it or not. And they were like, no, no, she's your daughter's alive. Do you want to see her? And I was like, uh yeah. So they took me and they took me into a room where she was on a table. And I mean, she looked like a cricket to me. She was so tiny. She was one pound uh four ounces.

unknown 24:26

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

And while I was there, the guy's like, she's doing well. And then she started to code, which means she was gonna die on the table, and they resuscitated her. So we saw her later that day, and um, she was in a you know incubator kind of thing, you know, and uh they wheeled TN to be next to her in the NICU. And um, you know, NICU is a crazy place. People spend time in the NICU. Most people spend three or four days in a NICU. That's kind of the average stay for people who have a baby. We were there for six months.

SPEAKER_02 25:00

Six months. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Six months. And people just and at two different ones. We were five months at Dartmouth Hitchcock and one month at Boston, and uh Jane never made it out of the hospital. I mean, she lived her entire life in the hospital. But people describe the experience of being a NICU as akin to combat in terms of PTSD, because there's like combat, there's a lot of moments of quiet, and then there's suddenly great trauma and something changes quickly, and there's also the cacophony of sounds all the time. The beeping, the constant beeping, the machines, the wearing, the whole thing. So yeah, we became hardcore uh NICU regulars.

SPEAKER_02 25:40

I I honestly I don't know how you live through that uh, you know, six months. And and you'd said before that you really had an aversion to medical stuff.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

Oh my god, so much. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_02 25:52

Yeah, and that I I just can't imagine being under that kind of stress, you know, with all the stuff that triggers you, and then also with your own child being being there and you don't know what the next moment's gonna bring. And that lasting for six months, I just cannot imagine.

SPEAKER_01 26:14

It was um it was an experience like no other, but I have to say that I think that this is true of not just me, but everybody, that we're far more resourceful and stronger than we think we are. And um when we're faced with levels of crisis like this, we go to a place where we're able to sort of deal. How you deal depends, and it's uh different for everybody, but you have no choice. So you do it. You just do the work. You show up every day and do the work, and that's that's all you can do. And and there's also the kind of things that bring you joy and the celebrations and sort of the victories become smaller and more finite when you're in that kind of situation. You know, like she had a good night, her oxygen was in the 90s. The friendships we made with the nurses and the doctors. We were there so long that the doctors at Dartmouth were on the head doctor in the NICU. It's a small NICU, it's a very good one. It's on a month at a time and then they leave. It's like they're on for a month and then they leave, and another person comes on for a month and then they leave, and then another person comes on. So it's like four of them, and they rotate months. So the guy who founded the NICU was there when Jane was born. He was like in his last week of his one-month shift, right? And so when he first saw Jane, he said to me, I gotta tell you, I I like her spirit. That's what he said. There was something about the way she was moving. He said, I like her spirit. And his name was Dr. Little, and then he was gone for like three months, and then he came back again. And the first day he came back, he walked in to like the weekly doctor's and nurses meeting, and I was running the meeting.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Wait, wait, wait. You gotta tell me how that you that happened.

SPEAKER_01 27:53

I don't know. It just kind of happened organically. There was like a weekly meeting, and I had been now I was like, I was used to running things, and so I just like and I was sitting at the head of the table and like you know, and and kind of going through what the week plan was and stuff. And he walked in and he was like flabbergasted by this. He like stopped the meeting and he's like, he pointed to me, he's like, You come talk to me. And when two of us walked down the hall, me and Dr. Little, you know, and we went down the hall and and we were halfway down there and he stopped and he's like, I have to tell you something. When I walked in there and I saw you running that meeting, I thought, what the hell is going on? He's like, and I was and he's like, and I was pissed. I was like, I was like, can I leave this place for a minute of parents running the meeting? And he's like, and then I thought about it, actually, just while we were walking, I thought about it, and I realized that if I was a father, I might have done the same thing. And he said, You know how I don't shake hands? Because he would never shake hands. He was worked with little babies who were sick. He's like, I want to shake your hand. Wow. And he shook my he shook my hand in the hallway and I just lost it.

SPEAKER_02 28:55

Yeah. I mean, I was just thinking how it tells you how intense these places are, even for the doctors, that they could only handle one month at a time. And then they have to take what three months break before they could come back. And then for you to for you and Tia to be there for like six months or for Jane to to have been there for six months, that's uh really incredible. And you were saying how you know during these times we actually learn about the the strength, the depth of our our own strength. So do you remember was there anything that helped you find your own strength?

SPEAKER_01 29:38

I mean, I think about Nick used with babies like Jane, and basically what happened to Jane was her lungs never fully developed, right? And so the thing that saved her were these machines that allowed her to breathe. But the very machines that allowed her to breathe were also the thing that was killing her.

SPEAKER_02 29:53

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_01 29:54

Because they were creating a disease called BPD, which is common for you you don't want anybody to be on a uh a breathing machine for six months. Um the goal was to try to wean them off and get off it. But she never got to a place where she could. But these folks are working on the margins of science. They're working in areas that they don't have the answers, all the answers. And they're they're testing different things. So, I mean, I actually spent a lot of time doing like research around like what was happening and cutting edge stuff. And if this also kind of annoyed the doctors at first. Like one doctor was like, okay, Dr. Google's in the room, and I'm like, no, it's not Dr. Google. I actually I mean, I I just I just read the you know uh the University of Texas paper that came out, and he's like, What? You know, and I looked up experts in the field, you know. I just kind of like I wanted to do something, you know, and I found a doctor in Boston who ran a NICU at at children's hospital, and I called him out of the blue, and I eventually got through to him, and he called me back, and we had this long conversation at night, and I explained him Jane's whole situation. He's like, Look, I don't want to interfere with anybody's care, but feel free to call me anytime, which is the last thing he should have said to me, because I was calling him every night, and uh and I was like, This is what happened today, and what's your read on it? Because I'm just like maniacal about information, you know. And uh like he's like asleep sometimes. I'm waking him up, and he's taking my call. I mean, he was a gem of a human being, and he ultimately oversaw Jane's move to Boston for that last month. Um, not that it made a difference, but so I do think I do think you'd do that. I also I had one really powerful moment where there was only one baby in the NICU who had been there longer than Jane, and that was a boy named Callum. And Callum was like, like I always thought Jane was bad, but Callum seemed like he was the worst of the worst babies in terms of the sickest. Like he'd been there, they'd been there like almost a year, and like Callum like had his own room. Wow, like he could walk, he could walk a little bit, like, and he was like tethered like a spaceman to like an oxygen thing, and he would walk around. And well, it turned out that Callum's dad, I knew uh I knew his brother. And his brother reached out to me one time, he's like, you know, my brother's also the Nikki U at Dartmouth. You guys should get together. And so we made a plan, and uh he connected us and gave us we exchanged phone numbers, and he and I got together for lunch one day while we're in the middle of this. And it was like we were the only people on the planet having this experience, which certainly isn't true, but it felt that way.

SPEAKER_05 32:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

And we got drunk in the middle of the day. I'm not gonna lie about it, the two of us. We sat there, we sat there just we drank a couple bottles of wine, and we just like let go and like explain the whole experience we were having to each other, and that was like really kind of powerful and cathartic too.

SPEAKER_02 32:42

Yeah, I bet. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:45

To jump back a little bit to the domestic front, did you tell Sarah about Jane being born in the NICU? And like how did that conversation go? Again, like knowing that.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

I mean, she was down there all the time. I think she understood as much as she could at three years old. But the the NICU at Dartmouth had a great policy, they were very family-oriented. There's a lot of NICUs where Sarah would not never have been allowed to see her sister, but she was allowed to come in and be there. You know, I mean, Jane looked like it grew quickly into being like a normal looking baby. You know, I mean, she she got chubby.

SPEAKER_05 33:22

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 33:22

You know, she had fat cheeks, she was nursing all the time. You know, it was just that she had these machines hooked up to her. So Sarah would go down and be with her when she could. We ended up, as that six months went on, like, you know, you had to take care of yourself too. So we decided on a strategy which we were not gonna basically live there. We couldn't live with Jane. Jane had great people taking care of her, and we would take turns. Tia would go down. There's some days Tia wouldn't go down. I would sometimes go down at night, like I would go down and spend the night there after work. Tia would be there during the day and then leave at four, drive out an hour home and be with Sarah because we wanted Sarah's life to be normal too, right?

SPEAKER_05 34:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:02

And so that was a it was a very difficult balancing act during that that six months.

SPEAKER_02 34:08

Yeah. And what was it like between you and Tia when this was all happening? Like what what were your conversations like from day to day?

SPEAKER_01 34:21

You know, you're you're living completely in the moment of this experience. I I always made the last phone call of the night, probably around 10:30, 11 at night, I would call down to Dartmouth and talk to the nurse who was taking care of Jane and get a report and then go tell Tia before she went to sleep, you know, while she was I'd wake her up and say, This is where her numbers are at. I mean, it was all numbers driven. You know, we were we were just so in the soup of it that I don't think there was really it was all practical conversations around logistics, timing, what we're doing. Who's picking up Sarah from daycare from her preschool or whatever she was doing uh at the time, she's going to some little kid preschool thing. And so, you know, it was it was it was a lot to manage, and it wasn't right next door either, which is hard. I mean, it's really almost a fully an hour away. So it was very challenging.

SPEAKER_02 35:12

Yeah.

unknown 35:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:14

So survival mode. Pretty much.

SPEAKER_01 35:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:18

What about the rest of your family? I mean, you mentioned earlier that you came from such a large family. How did your relationship with those people change? Whether it was siblings, parents, anyone else?

SPEAKER_01 35:31

Yeah, I mean, it's um we're we're we're a really tight-knit group. I mean, I'm very lucky that way. You know, I've got six siblings. We have a sibling text thread, we text every day. Nice. You know, we we all get along for the most part. We we rely on each other. So I mean, having having that, like my my siblings were coming up and visiting Jane. They were they were around, they were a resource for me. So I think, you know, and they have children of their own. So I'm I'm in addition to being a father, I'm an uncle many times over. You know, I've had to go through tribulations that way too. You know, I lost a nephew who was uh I was his godfather and he he took his own life when he was 22. And that was just entirely brutal on my brother, and my brother relied on me. He's like, he's like, tell me what this is like losing a child. And I'm like, well, it's not really relative in the same way. I mean, Jane was six months, Sean was 22, and and he's like, I just need to know how long is it gonna last? How's it got long is it gonna last? Like he wanted to know how, and I said, it's I said it's gonna be a while. I said, here's the thing about grief. Look, it's not it's not a straight line, it kind of moves in different ways. But the other thing I'll tell you about grief is that the flip side of it is joy, which is very strange to think about, but that is very true. The flip side of grief is joy because there are moments when even you're in the darkest time and the worst things are happening, or you lost somebody so important to you. There there are moments of profound joy as you remember pieces of that life or what happened with that life around. And so you have to know that. And I said to him, and someday you're gonna wake up and the sun's shining, and everything feels a little different, and um you're gonna keep moving. And in the Irish tradition, you remember that as long as you're telling stories about somebody they're never actually gone.

SPEAKER_02 37:15

So that's beautiful, yeah. And I it just it sounds like uh it's such a Taoist concept, too. Just you know, you can't have good without the bad and light without darkness. Yeah, this whole idea of um the grief always also is accompanied by joy, I think, is a really important thing to recognize. So what do you remember the most about these joyful moments when it comes to Jane?

SPEAKER_01 37:48

You know, I I there was such a solidarity and love for her in that hospital and the friendships we made with the nurses who were incredible people. I mean, if there's any justice in the world, nurses will inherit the earth someday. I mean, they're they're they are the they are the greatest people in the world. I mean, the the people they're so selfless in terms of the work they do and how hard it is. And it must you know wears on them, you know. They have to deal with this stuff every day and they get attached to people. And I think the people, particularly working with end-of-life care, whether it's the elderly or if it's babies that are in trouble are doing some of the most difficult work that could be done. So I remember the joy that came from that. Again, I know you know a big piece of it, I think that came out of it was my relationship with Sarah was stronger. As I as I suggested, you know, that there really made me a dad, not just a father. And I think there is a distinction sometimes. And I think that, you know, Jane made me a stronger person. May have ended my marriage because we, you know, we never really fully recovered from it. And that is uh the the statistics on parents who lose children getting divorced is like 75%.

SPEAKER_02 38:58

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 38:59

Extremely high. And uh, you know, for us it was a bit of a slow burn after that. But we, you know, we we found ourselves sort of growing apart, I think, and and a big part of it was you know, we we shared this loss and it was hard to know what to do with it. And uh, and we were each dealing with it in our own different ways. You know, for years, there there's a a ceremony at University of Vermont Chapel they do for people who've lost children. Tons of people go because there are lots of people who've had this experience, right? Not just babies, but they wanted me to uh give a keynote address at it for years, and I always said no. And and the reason I said no was that I think there is a distinction between a miscarriage and a six-month-old baby dying, and I think there's a distinction between a six-month-old baby dying and a 25-year-old son dying. But I ultimately gave that talk and I explained why, and that's how I started by saying I had said no to this five times. And the reason I decided to say yes to it was that I realized that there are things about these experiences that are incredibly universal to all of us. Really, the the one job of being a parent is to make sure your kids outlive you on some on some level. And this isn't to cast any, we didn't do anything wrong. I mean, there was no failure on our part, there's no failure on the parts of people who lose children. Um don't get me wrong, but that is that is a piece of it. You know what I mean? If you you want to boil it down to its simplicity, but it it is it it does, it is sometimes that simple, you know. You just you you you want your kids to live a long, a much longer life than you. Not that you want to die young, but you want to live long and you want them to live longer. You know, for me it was I could not have done this interview and talked, I could not have talked to you about this 10 years ago, you know. And it took a I mean, I wrote a I wrote a novel about that. It was a bestseller called The Headmaster's Wife, that was about parents who lose a child, in which I took what I was feeling around grief and these ideas and put them into a novel. And that's what novels do well, is they sort of obfuscate the truth sometimes to create a greater truth. But it wasn't until really 2020 or 2022 when I wrote Notes from the Ports that it was the first time I sort of tackled the idea of actually writing about this experience with Jane. And and and that in that little essay, you know, called Our Girl Jane, I don't know what it is, five, six pages. The hardest thing I've ever written in my life. I mean, there's just simple clarity to it. There's not much of that story, it's straightforward. But writing it was uh was the hardest thing I've ever done from a literary point of view.

SPEAKER_02 41:34

I keep thinking back to what you said about was it Dr. Little?

SPEAKER_01 41:38

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 41:38

Is his name? Um the Nikki. He founded the hospital and he must have seen I don't know how many babies, right, over the years. But he specifically said that Jane had a grey spirit that he liked.

SPEAKER_01 41:54

He did, yeah, and she did and she did. And she um she was a fighter, you know, and she had a she had a she had a personality. And she was brown-eyed, which was different. Um Sarah's blonde and blue-eyed like me, and Jane had her mother's brown eyes, and and I would have loved to have seen uh what she would become.

SPEAKER_02 42:13

Yeah. I just feel like it's just so poignant to for me to picture her being so little is like up a one pound and four ounces or six ounces. And then but you know, with a big spirit and you keep saying that uh the time with her actually made you stronger. And it it just um makes a lot of sense. I feel like there's this whole visual contrast about like such a tiny, tiny being, but having a huge spirit and having a huge impact on you as her dad. It's uh it's just very powerful. I don't have any better word for it.

SPEAKER_01 42:55

Yeah, I mean, and and honestly, not just not just me, but people around the world, as you know from reading that story of mine. Right. That you know, my wife asked people to send uh postcards to our house after Jane died because she had been running a blog.

SPEAKER_05 43:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:10

And and they came from every corner of the world. All all all the continents, you know, and every state in the United States. And not just postcards, but quilts, other things.

SPEAKER_02 43:21

Oh, that's beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

Yeah, and on the one-year anniversary of her death, we got a postcard from the Antarctic Science Station. No way. Yeah, with all the scientists in their like crazy space winter costumes, holding up a sign that said Jane was here. That's what my wife asked people to write. Oh my goodness. So, I mean, you think about the power of this little baby who lived a short period of time and um people connected with her story.

SPEAKER_02 43:48

Indeed, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:50

Yeah, when we came home, our whole town was the little city I live in was there were Jane was here. Oh wow, things everywhere.

SPEAKER_05 43:59

Yeah, crazy.

SPEAKER_00 44:01

Can I revisit the question of grief that you brought up earlier? Yeah, which is uh and grief versus joy. I had a conversation with a friend recently where she said to me, you know, the wonderful thing about grief, and this may go to a little bit of a silly place, is that while you're grieving, people who love you will let you do whatever you want within reason. Did you have a moment like that?

SPEAKER_01 44:28

Uh I don't know if I had a moment like that. I probably had a lot of moments like that. Um I just um I I get I get the point. I think that is, I think there's a truth to that. Uh it's funny, like learning from other traditions, you know. I mean, the you know, the Jewish tradition of is it uh, you know, Shiva, is I that right, the way people sit and they come and come and visit and sit. Sure, yeah. I think that is, you know, growing up Irish Catholic, I mean that that's you know, we had different relationships with death and and people. And I found that incredibly powerful around grieving. I actually found the um having everybody together because that is the that is the joy part, right? It brings everybody together. I mean, you know, we did Memorial Service for Jane, and suddenly all my my entire family was here in in Vermont, and my parents and all my siblings and their wives and kids, and there was a lot of food and joy and drinking and fun and you know, and just kind of stories and conversation. And so I think, you know, we're designed to forget and survive, but always to remember at the same time. And that it sort of gets to that, you know, there is a silliness to it. You're allowed to do things, you're allowed grace. You don't have to you don't have to think about other things, you know, you're allowed to just be for a minute without the other responsibilities of life because uh people recognize what it is you're going through. Man, grace is such a wonderful term for that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:55

But is it that part of things that you think is why you know, as a writer, stories about loss or grief might resonate so deeply with people because we're all going to go through it at some point.

SPEAKER_01 46:09

Yeah, I do think I do think that's a big part of it. A children's writer once told me that children's writing is about, you know, learning how to live and adult writing is about learning how to die. And I was like, well, that's kind of morbid and grim, but I never left my head. And I do think that there is a truth to that that you know, grief is is one of the most significant emotions we feel in life. And and it's something I was so afraid of, you know, I had never lost anybody other than my grandmother, you know, when I was 12, and that tore me apart. But I, you know, as a 12-year-old, that's the experience everybody goes through first, but I had never really lost anybody, and now I've lost several significant people in my life. And um you get better at it, but you also find in it the deeper meaning of what we're doing.

SPEAKER_05 46:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:55

I mean, I'm not I'm not a religious person. I mean, I was raised Irish Catholic, but I was I've been an atheist my whole life. But lately, you know, there are things that are making me believe in magic. You know, Jane Jane is one of them. I mean, I often think of her and I see in a great blue heron appears. You know, that's been happening for years now. And and there was a heron in the story I used to tell my daughter Sarah, you know, and the the heron would just fly by and say, Don't believe the turtle. That was what the heron would say in my story is because turtles are liars. We all know that. So, yeah, I think it's all part of the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 47:30

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me because uh learning to die and learning how to do that well is the same as learning how to live well.

SPEAKER_01 47:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:42

I was just down. I mean, speaking of fathers, it was my father's 95th birthday last Sunday. So I went, I went, we went down and had dinner with him. He's 95. Um, he lost my his wife and my mother about a year and a half ago, two years ago now, I guess. So that was hard. They were married for they were together for 70 years, and uh very, very hard on him. He's astonishing. I mean, he his optimism and his his uh will to live at 95 and his optimism about life and uh you know the things that are keeping him going, really powerful. And a big part of that is is having children. And he he told us that. He gave a speech for the ages to us, you know, where he basically had all his children there and he said, you know, here's the secret to a long life. Do things you love career-wise, marry a person you love, work out all the time, which was his thing. He's like, he's like, I he's like, honestly, I work out more than any of you guys do when I'm 95. He's like, I do. Some of you were slouching it. I think he was pointing at me. And uh, and he said, But the most important thing is to is to give love and be loved, and especially family. So I do think that is part of the big power of fatherhood that you can never forget that you're you're always there. It never goes away. It's a it's a it's a job for life.

SPEAKER_00 49:01

I don't want to skip too far ahead of the timeline, but in the intervening years between Jane's death and Sarah's teenagehood, going off to college, becoming a grown-up, like how did your relationship with her change and was there a particular effect that Jane's death had on that the evolution of that relationship?

SPEAKER_01 49:25

That's a great question. I think you know, I think our relationship has evolved with her age. You know, I we we've had different kind of roles in her life, her mother and I. I mean, um her mother far more hands-on. Me, uh, you know, more the storyteller, taker places for the weekend, kind of dad. The the most profound thing for me in this relationship is working with her in the restaurant because she's been working there since she was 15 now, since I opened the place. And so So she knows how to run things better than you by now. Oh, but but absolutely. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I mean, the other day she was giving me a hard time about something, but yeah, she's like now like a salty industry veteran, you know. Thank you, minus the chain smoking, the full sleeve tattoos, thank God. But um, but she's also like a college student, you know, studying philosophy as Kidmore College. And but I I just love how the relationship has evolved, you know, from I was never the disciplinarian. I mean, her mom did that, you know. I was I was always more the kind of listening ear or person who could help. And you know, she had all the struggles of teenagehood that girls have, and compounded particularly by COVID and the pandemic. Right. You know, I mean, they were just home forever.

SPEAKER_02 50:42

Right.

SPEAKER_01 50:43

But to see her now, like finding her voice, like becoming the woman that she's meant to be, and having her as a peer where we can talk about anything, and I can tell her about all the stupid shit I did in my life, you know, when I was her age, and something much stupider than things that she's done, and and and have a level of honesty with each other is so powerful. Like that has been transformative for me, maybe for her too, but it's definitely been transformative for me that I'm able to do that with her now. Yeah, that I'm able to I'm able to talk with her with absolute hundred percent honesty about everything, whether it's relationships I'm in or involved in, or one she's in, or you know, we're able to have these like really frank, clear conversations that don't have any judgment attached to them anymore. Yeah, and that's a real shift in a parental relationship that happens, and it's a gift, I think, when it does.

SPEAKER_00 51:38

I have one last question, actually, kind of on that note, which is um looking back at that and recognizing the growth of your daughter, like do you have goals or ideals about the kind of dad you want to be as she keeps growing up? As you hopefully continue to mature.

SPEAKER_01 52:03

Yeah, yeah. I know I'm I'm still learning. I think it's with men it's touch and go, as you know. Um, you know, like it's it's like we're basically useless till we're 40 years. Call me out of that. Yeah, yeah. After that, you know, it's like after that, it's a bit of a crapshoot for the next 15 years, and then suddenly something comes a kick into gear in your mid-50s. I, you know, I mean, my hope is that is that our relationship just continues to deepen and grow in this kind of trust and friendship. And I don't know what the contours of that are gonna look like, and I don't pretend to know. Uh I'm I'm honestly surprised where it is now. Like the transformations happened over the last year and a half where uh as I talked about, this sort of radical honesty we have with each other. But that's it's the most important relationship in my life.

SPEAKER_00 52:47

So it's funny, I don't think there's so much about parenting that focuses on childhood that I I think that is really burning for me now. It's like, okay, I I can get guidance from a lot of other men on zero to 19. Yeah. Moving into adulthood and like discovering each other as people, like developed people, seems so profound and so uh difficult at the same time because you start to regard each other as such.

SPEAKER_01 53:24

I think that's entirely true. And I think the thing that worries me, or I'm afraid of to some extent, is the 20s. Because I think this is a very hard time for this generation to be in their 20s. Yeah. I mean, it was hard for me. Twenties were hard, but it was different. Like I, you know, I was just out on my own. I was living in a cabin in the woods of Vermont with a girlfriend and dreaming of writing novels and working out of college, uh, you know, as an administrator and just kind of figuring it out. But it takes longer now. Uh the adulting part, you know, the place between college and the rest of life has become suddenly like a bigger for most kids, a bigger time frame and one that's fraught and full of challenges, you know, as all those sort of tasks you have to fulfill, you know, like what are you gonna do for work and where are you gonna live? And who's your circle of friends? And is there a mate or a partner in your life? And the 20s are just awful. I mean, teenage years are awful. I think 20s are worse. And uh for most people, you know, they really are kind of sucky. And then, you know, you get in your 30s, and then you know, hopefully things you can start to get clarity around what you're trying to do, and you have a better toolkit to deal with the ups and downs of life. And so I just hope that maybe I can be helpful to her in this period around how to manage the ups and downs that are inevitably going to happen, how to manage the different challenges because I've been through them, um, how to manage the anxieties that are sure to come from uh and uncertainties around where you exist in the world and how you make your way through it. So to some extent, I think parenting as you get older becomes more an exercise in wisdom than anything else.

SPEAKER_02 55:10

I just have uh um I just have one question. Do you ever find yourself talking to Jane still?

SPEAKER_01 55:20

Uh I I I don't I don't find myself talking to Jane. No, I find myself thinking about her at different times. You know, I used to read to her all the time, you know, when she was in the hall, even though I I don't know. I I was actually reading to all the babies.

SPEAKER_03 55:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:36

Like at night, because I'd go down there at night and I would sit next to her bed and I would read like um don't let the pigeon drive the bus, you know. Great children's book, by the way. Wonderful. Mo Mo Williams, yeah, I love that book, you know. I mean, just so I'd read like Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus to her and and to all the other kids. And you know, and I think it resonated with her. She knew my voice more than anything else. But I don't I don't speak to her. I think about her, and to the extent that I'm able to honor her, I do it by agreeing to do this today. Um, I think, and uh, and which is not super easy for me to be honest, although I've enjoyed it immensely in talking to you guys with your good questions. Um but agreeing to do this by uh writing about it by telling her story when I can because it resonates with other people. So to the extent that I'm keeping her alive in again that Irish tradition of if we're telling stories about people they're no longer can't be gone, right? Then that's what I'm doing.

SPEAKER_02 56:35

And we're really grateful for you for doing that.

SPEAKER_00 56:38

Oh, my pleasure. I'm gonna have to go up to Vermont sometime soon. But Tom, thank you so much. Uh you're welcome. Come visit, man. Yeah, I'll feed you. I'm looking forward to doing this. We hope you enjoyed joining us for our conversation with Thomas Green.

SPEAKER_02 57:07

My first year as a father is an original Sophia Media production created by me, Sophia.

SPEAKER_00 57:14

This episode was produced by senior producer Gabby Watts, with creative direction by Shireen Anderson and original score by Nana Simopoulos, and co-hosted by Sophia and me, AC Valdez.

SPEAKER_02 57:27

Check out our website at SophiaMedia.co slash my first year for more episodes and other shows in the My First Year series. And for social links where you can join our online community.