![]() Eight weeks after their sons were born, Julia went back to work and Neil stayed home with the boys. It was a low point, but they got through it. “And I knew that biologically I was the best option to make that milk.” “I didn’t feel like there was any other reason for me to be alive anymore, except that needed to make this milk for them,” she said. At the time, all she knew was that she felt empty. What Julia suspects now is that she was going through some combination of seasonal affective disorder and postpartum depression. It was cold, and it was hard to take the babies outside in the snow. “I was really just kind of surviving.”Īlso, it was Alaska in October. “I had these charts for a while to remind me of when I fed that baby, when I fed that baby and when I ate, because I couldn’t remember,” she said. Neil would get home, feed the babies while Julia slept, and then they’d switch off. Meanwhile, Julia was struggling, too. “And there would be someone behind me honking their horn to drive, you know.” “I’d be driving home, and sometimes I’d be sitting at stoplights, and I would open my eyes and the light would be green,” Neil said. He hadn’t accrued any paid time off. He worked the overnight shift, midnight to 8 a.m. He’d just started working at a regional airline, conducting inspections on planes. So the day after she got home from the hospital they decided Neil had to go back to work. “I was just worried about falling into this big pit of debt.” “And I really didn’t know how much of that was going to be covered by my insurance,” Julia said. His hospital bill alone was $55,000 - just over half their annual income. They were premature, one had a heart condition. “But with my very best attempts, I came up at the end of my pregnancy with only about 21 paid days off,” Julia said. What Julia got through her job was one bucket of paid time off for either vacation or illness which had to be accrued based on hours worked. Ten states have some version of paid family medical leave. Whether workers get paid leave depends on a patchwork of state and local laws. federal law requires companies to give their workers 12 weeks off a year for family medical situations: having a baby or needing to take care of a sick spouse, for example. Neil stayed home with their son and studied to become an airplane mechanic. Julia, a nurse practitioner, and took a job in Anchorage working with victims of child abuse. When he was four months old, they decided to move to Alaska, where Neil had spent almost 14 years as a fisherman. Neil got home, they started dating, got married and had a son. But before she had a chance to respond, he sent another email asking if they could just not talk about it and move forward. Don’t worry, it’ll wear off in a few days. Later, when he left to go fishing in Alaska for a few months, Julia received an email from Neil that confessed: “I have an intense crush on you. Julia had just gotten out of a relationship and was not in that headspace, and Neil could tell. “I thought, ‘She’s really speaking my language!’ Nah, I thought it was cute,” he said. “The first thing I said to the person who would be my husband was ‘Argh,’” she said. The only thing Julia really knew about Neil was that he was a fisherman. In 2001, Julia Mitzel and Neil Fant met on a boat in Seattle that belonged to some mutual friends. ![]()
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