“So at night, when Emma wakes up, I’ll feed her and let you rock her back to sleep,” I suggested.
“No,” Marius replied. “I’d like to feed her.
Emma was breastfeeding, and while Marius was equipped to provide Emma with care in every way, he didn’t actually have breasts. “How are you going to do that?”
“Formula,” he replied
“Formula?” I repeated. “But she needs breast milk.”
“Not really,” he said. “You’ve already passed along the enzymes she needs. Now, it’s just a matter of nutrition. Formula has everything she needs.”
“Everything I’ve read says she needs breast milk for the first six months. Or longer.”
“My parents are doctors,” he countered. “They say it’s not necessary. There’s a lot of exaggeration out there about this topic. I wasn’t breast fed, and I’m perfectly healthy.”
Honestly, I didn’t like breastfeeding. My breasts were always sore, and Emma seemed to want more milk than I could produce. I couldn’t leave the apartment for more than a few hours at a time without leaking milk on my clothes and I had all sorts of dietary restrictions, the most difficult for me being the ban on coffee. I didn’t object to reducing breast milk. I actually welcomed it. But I thought Emma should move from breast milk to formula slowly, to let her adjust to the change.
“Okay,” I said. “But let’s do it gradually over the next few weeks.”
Marius kissed me. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right. It’s better to go slow.”
That night, I walked like a zombie to Emma’s room around 12:30 wondering why she hadn’t cried for her midnight feeding, only to find to her in Marius’s arms, a bottle in her mouth.
“What’s that?” I whispered, squinting in the darkness.
“Go back to bed,” he said. “I’ve got this.”
“You’ve got what?
“Emma’s midnight feeding.”
I stared at the bottle and my daughter cradled in Marius’s arms. “What are you doing?” I looked at Marius, who had an expression of innocent astonishment on his face, as if he couldn’t imagine what might be the matter with me.
“Go on,” he said. “You’ll wake her up. We’ll talk about it again in the morning.”
Marius stood and gently ushered me back into the hall and closed Emma’s door.
The next morning, I fed Emma when she woke. After she’d gone down for her morning nap, Marius stood in the kitchen, near the petchka, making espresso in a stovetop Italian espresso pot. I had not had coffee for nearly six months. I’d been barred from it during the last half of my pregnancy and now during breastfeeding: The caffeine would show up in my breast milk and could affect Emma. One of my biggest cravings during the pregnancy had been for a caramel latte, something I almost never drank when I wasn’t pregnant, but seemed unbelievably delicious once it was forbidden.
“Have a cappuccino,” he said, putting a cup before me.
“You know I can’t,” I said, eying the cup as he swirled milk froth over the espresso.
“Actually, I was talking about it with my parents, and they think we should be giving Emma baby formula. It has all the vitamins she needs. Besides, she really liked the formula I have her last night. It’s already started—why stop now?”
“Everyone knows that breast milk is better,” I said, realizing, even as I said it, that this wasn’t about breastfeeding versus not breastfeeding. We had already decided to stop. This was about the fact that we had agreed to wait for a few weeks, and Marius had gone ahead anyway, ignoring what we had decided.
“It was a surprise,” I said. “Seeing you with a bottle. And then you just pushed me out of there, as if I didn’t belong in my daughter’s bedroom.”
“You needed some sleep,” he said. “You looked exhausted.”
“Of course I was exhausted. Emma wakes up all night. I am always exhausted. That’s no excuse.”
Marius gave me a look that said: Stop overreacting. “You need to lighten up,” he said. That was that. He wasn’t going to discuss it any further.
It wouldn’t have mattered if I won or lost the argument. The pattern that would define our relationship as parents was set: Marius told me what I wanted to hear and then did as he pleased. This happened with many small, daily decisions and with bigger ones as well, like Emma’s middle name. The registration of Emma’s birth at the US Embassy had to be completed soon after the birth, and so Marius went just a few days after we left Maichin Dom. For weeks before Emma was born, we discussed names. But when Emma’s Certificate of US Citizen Born Abroad came in the mail, Emma’s middle name was different from what we had chosen. There it was, in black and white, official. There was no point in arguing. It was too late to change it.
Then it happened again, this time with Emma’s vaccinations. Emma’s pediatrician told us that Bulgarian children were required to have a BCG tuberculosis vaccination, a shot that left a huge scar on the upper left arm. I objected to the inoculation: 
We don’t require this vaccination in the US, and Emma, as a US Citizen, didn’t need it. Marius and I talked it over and he agreed with me: Our two-year requirement to stay in Bulgaria would be over in just eight months. We were going home soon. There was no need to subject our daughter to something that would leave a scar. But when she came home from her next visit to the pediatrician, she had a bandage on her arm and swelling all the way to her shoulder. When I was angry, Marius looked at me as though I were overreacting. “Did we decide against that?” Marius asked. “I thought we came around to the idea in the end. Well, it’s too late now.”
When I tried to talk to him about these incidents, he justified them, saying it was in my interest (feeding Emma formula instead of breast milk) or he’d forgotten what we’d agreed upon (Emma’s middle name) or he’d made a mistake (the TB vaccination). He acted as if it was all perfectly normal behavior.
Maybe it was. Maybe he was right—I was overreacting. I was oversensitive. Perhaps post-partum hormones had made me ‘difficult.’ For many weeks after Emma was born, I didn’t know what to make of Marius. I struggled to give him the benefit of the doubt. I tried to believe what he told me, that he’d made a mistake about the middle name. Maybe he really had driven off toward the Embassy, navigating through the center of Sofia and up toward the Vitosha mountains, and he’d been distracted by something on the radio, so distracted that he had forgotten the middle name we had chosen for our daughter. I wanted to believe in his integrity. I wanted to believe that he was a man with such big ideas that the mundane ones were simply overshadowed.