Pete Buttigieg opens up about twins’ difficult first year, early health issues in heartfelt essay

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, are reflecting on the difficulties and rewards of their first year as the father of twins.

On Saturday, the country’s first openly LGBTQ cabinet member posted a lengthy essay on his personal Medium account sharing “all the routines (and the surprises) of parenting” — from their “‘surprise’ adoption scenario” to scary moments the family had to spend in the emergency room.

Buttigieg, 40, posted a link to the Medium post on Twitter, writing that the couple was “reflecting on the miraculous growth that our kids — and we ourselves — have gone through in this magical and demanding first year as parents.”

The history-making couple, who got married in a private ceremony at the Cathedral of St. James, a small Episcopal cathedral in South Bend, Ind., in June 2018, first announced that they had become fathers on Aug. 17, 2021.

In early September they both shared the first official photo of the twins on their separate social media accounts.

“They were perfect, beautiful, heart-melting, a girl and a boy whom we named Penelope Rose and Joseph August. Born premature, each weighed around five pounds,” Buttigieg wrote about meeting the twins for the first time. “Chasten and I marveled at how tiny they were, how utterly vulnerable and dependent.”

It wasn’t an easy start, however. Speaking about the twins’ “early health needs,” Buttigieg said that they often required “constant, active care.”

“Penelope developed severe reflux, terrifying us when she would stop breathing and turn purple in a matter of seconds,” he wrote. “More than once, it happened in the car, prompting Chasten to hurriedly pull over so we could unbuckle her from her seat and help get her breathing back into rhythm while standing on the side of the road,” he added.

She got better, but just a few weeks later, as they started to feel more confident about their roles as new fathers, “the kids got a cold,” he wrote. “Soon it was a cough. Then Penelope started to have trouble breathing.”

Pete Buttigieg (left), with husband Chasten and their twins, wrote about his first year of fatherhood.

Chasten, 33, took her to the emergency room, while Buttigieg stayed home with their son, who they nicknamed Gus. “His skin took on a mottled look,” he recalled, “and by the next day he was admitted to the hospital too.”

All four of them were diagnosed with a respiratory virus called RSV. “For us, it just meant a nasty cold, but for premature infants like them it was a serious threat,” he wrote, adding that the kids had to stay at the hospital receiving oxygen for a few days.

Gus, however, later had to be transported to a “full-scale children’s hospital in Grand Rapids, about a hundred miles away,” where he was placed on a ventilator.

“Most parents don’t start off expecting to be among the ones who know their way around a children’s hospital. But suddenly it’s you,” he wrote.

After a terrifying week in a respirator, Gus stabilized and “started clearly getting better,” Buttigieg wrote, adding that both kids, who have just celebrated their first birthday, are now “completely healthy.”

“In one year, you go from someone absorbed in your own worries, hopes, and career, to having fully faced just how much in life is outside your control,” Buttigieg wrote. “And how magical it is to spend every day with someone who matters more to you than your old self could possibly have dreamed of.”