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Now that he wasn't working, Lee napped constantly. Kristin was seven months pregnant, and they agreed that after the baby's birth, Lee would be a stay-at-home dad, at least until he figured out what to do next. In the meantime, they would live off their savings and Kristin's salary from a new job at an ad tech firm.
Lee's actions, however, only grew more bizarre. He watched Home Alone several nights a week. He wore his beanie all day, every day, pulling it lower and lower. When Kristin went into labor, he slept through most of the two-day ordeal, first slumbering at home and then resuming his nap at the hospital. When he woke up, he insisted, against Kristin's wishes, that she not get an epidural, which provoked a heated argument with one of the doctors. After their son was born, Kristin's mom says the doctor pulled her aside and commented that she'd never seen an expectant dad react that way. Kristin confronted him about his behavior later, and he promised her, “I'll do better.”
In those heady first months of parenthood, he failed. He took copious naps. Sometimes she'd cook him dinner, and he'd reject it and order a burrito. “I was like, what is happening?” Kristin says. “Everything felt so strange and out of control.”
Distraught at his lack of interest in their son, she decided to stage a moment of parenting normalcy. If she couldn't coax him into engaging with their child, she'd settle for its illusion. While Lee lay on the couch, she handed him the infant and grabbed her phone to record the scene. “You're standing, and you're so cute!” he coos as he props up the baby on his chest. “You're smiling and making a sound!” He dotes on his baby for less than a minute before handing him back to Kristin.
She kept trying to probe what was on his mind, and he kept replying, “I'll do better.” The repetitiveness of his answers struck her as robotic. It seemed of a piece with the way he now touched every tree he passed on their walks. “I think deep down I knew something was wrong,” Kristin says. She thought maybe he'd developed PTSD after the surgery or was struggling with a bout of depression. She'd been asking him to see a counselor with her. Finally, as she prepared to return to work, she threatened to leave him if he didn't. Lee agreed.
In the couples' therapy session, Kristin cried openly and talked about how her husband didn't seem to care about their new baby. “Lee was just blank,” she recalls, and she wondered why he wasn't reaching out to comfort her. Suddenly he stood up, announced he'd forgotten to return the therapist's office bathroom key, and wandered out of the room to put it back, returning a few minutes later.
When her maternity leave came to an end, Kristin hired a nanny and went back to work, but her alarm was mounting. She started booking appointments with every specialist she could think of while Lee spent his days in bed. “So I'm cajoling him out of bed, getting him into the car, making sure my son is out with his nanny, covering my own work somehow,” and then shuttling him from appointment to appointment. “It was like that for three months.”
In mid-March of 2017, Kristin and Lee went to a neurologist to get the results of an MRI. To Kristin, it seemed that the neurologist had initially been skeptical of her concerns. Lee was young, healthy, and communicative.
