Yes, some husbands were beginning to understand the importance of being full-fledged partners, but with Jay, there was no learning curve—he was a full-fledged partner from the start. He handled the logistics and paperwork of family life, and at our new weekend place in Millbrook, New York, he’d be the one cleaning the kitchen, making sure everything was in order, packing up the minivan （which we’d nicknamed the Monavan） while I was practically comatose on the sofa. It was an unspoken arrangement: Jay understood the demands of my job, the homework and constant sleep deprivation, and stepped up.
Whether or not I was truly conscious of it, when the time came to find someone to build a life with, I went for a guy I knew would be supportive, someone with a progressive attitude toward the division of labor in a marriage. Even today, all these years later, women spend an average of seven more years, as Melinda Gates tells us, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids. That just wasn’t my reality. Without Jay, our girls wouldn’t have gotten their rock-solid start in life, and I may never have launched my TODAY show career.
I STARED INTO THE Tupperware bin full of Legos.
“Paul loved Legos. Would you like to see the bathtub?”
I shuddered. “No, thank you,” I said quietly. “I just don’t think I could do that.”
I was in Clear Lake, Texas, getting a tour from Rusty Yates, whose wife, Andrea, had recently drowned each of their five children in the bathtub Rusty had just offered to show me.
I couldn’t stop thinking about those innocent kids—held underwater, one by one, by their mother, right after she’d fixed them breakfast. Noah, the oldest, at 7, came last; she had to chase him around the house before catching and killing him too. I couldn’t bear to think about how terrified he must have been.
I also couldn’t stop thinking about Andrea—the shell-shocked, hollow-eyed expression, the stringy hair and wire-rim glasses, looking like a husk in an orange prison uniform. She, too, was one of five children. She was also class valedictorian, captain of the swim team, a member of the National Honor Society, and went on to become a registered nurse—before pumping out five babies in seven years.
She suffered from postpartum psychosis, an extreme case of what can go wrong with a new mother. Andrea’s doctor had warned her that her postpartum depression would get worse with each child, and yet they kept at it, something Rusty wanted. I found it so upsetting to learn that two weeks before the murders, she’d been taken off the antipsychotic Haldol but, according to Rusty, was still on antidepressants. Some medical experts claimed that left her contemplating heinous, delusional acts—killing her children in order to save them—and functional enough to carry them out.
It was an American tragedy. And it scared me to death.
When Ellie was a baby, I sometimes worried I might just leave her in her car seat by the side of the road or drop her from the top of the staircase in our apartment onto the hardwood floor below. I never seriously considered doing either, but it terrified me to think that I could. I was just so overwhelmed, knowing this tiny creature depended on me for her survival.
Experts call them “intrusive thoughts”—dark fantasies that can pop into a new mother’s head about the terrible things that could happen to her child, causing her to tiptoe into the nursery every 28 seconds and stare into the crib to make sure the baby is still breathing. Even scarier: fantasies in which she’s causing the harm. I never told anyone I had those thoughts. No one really talked about those things back then; no one wanted to admit she wasn’t the “good mother,” bonding effortlessly and breastfeeding like a pro. Softly lit, as if in a baby-powder commercial, gazing adoringly at the infant on the changing table, who is gazing adoringly right back.
I’d later learn that intrusive thoughts sometimes come with postpartum depression and anxiety, where your hormones are wildly out of whack, wreaking havoc on your brain chemistry. I’d come to understand they might even play a beneficial evolutionary role, putting moms in a state of hypervigilance as a way of keeping their babies safe. Had I known that at the time, it would have made me feel less ashamed.
RUSTY YATES, A NASA engineer, was sitting across from me in the TODAY studio a week after Andrea was convicted of capital murder （later overturned; she was retried and found not guilty by reason of insanity）。 Wearing a blue button-down shirt and patterned tie, his hair close-cropped, his all-American face clean-shaven, Rusty looked like a high school jock after a postgame shower.
“Andrea wasn’t overwhelmed,” he said plainly. “Go to my website and look at our videos”—heartbreaking footage of two giggling tots hopping across the floor like rabbits （one in bunny ears）; Andrea in bed cuddling a newborn, then tenderly touching one of the boys who’s just scurried onto her lap to kiss his new baby sister. “There was no mounting pressure in our family or anything like that. I mean—”