Being a woman without children, I can only imagine what it’s like to raise one child. But what about raising three children, and not three children born consecutively, but all at once. Yes. TRIPLETS! Raising triplets is a huge undertaking, one that TV writer Cort Casady along with his wife Barbara are quite familiar with. They raised three triplet boys, Jackson, Carter, and Braeden, and Casady documents the raising of his three boys in his memoir Not Your Father’s America: An Adventure Raising Triplets in a Country Being Changed by Greed.
Cort and Barbara met, fell in love, and got married. They knew they truly wanted children, but the process of getting pregnant wasn’t exactly easy (though initially, I’m sure they had fun trying-wink). Having difficulties, Cort and Casady resorted to IVF and other fertility treatments, which I am now very familiar with.
However, there was heartbreak in conceiving a child. They lost a baby early on, and were devastated? We’re Cort and Barbara never going to have children? But soon Barbara was pregnant with triplets, which truly threw them for a loop. There was talk of elimination of one or two of the embryos, but Cort and Barbara decided to keep all of them. Knowing being a woman of a certain age (Cort and Barbara became parents when most of their peers were sending their oldest to college), Barbara to extra care of herself and her pregnancy.
The Casady boys were born in January of 1995. Being multiples, they were underweight and had some health issues that needed to be attended to. But soon Carter, Jackson, and Braeden were safely home with their parents. And that’s when the fun, and a lot of hard work began. Fortunately, Cort and Barbara had a lot of help from family, friends, and several nannies, though it did take time to get the nanny situation figured out. It truly does take a village to raise a child, or in this case, three children.
Cort lovingly records Carter, Jackson, and Braeden’s development and progress from babyhood through childhood onto the teen years and then young adulthood and college. No small detail escapes Cort. And to think about it no details are small. It’s a major accomplishment to learn how to walk, go to school the first time, travel to a new place, and figure out one’s place in the world. And what I appreciate it, is how Cort and Barbara encourage their boys to be unique individuals with their own separate ideas, talents, and skills. Often parents think their children should be carbon copies of each other, especially those who are multiples. Cort and Barb don’t do that.
But Cort does so much more than cover his son’s growing up. He also covers the major events that have occurred during their lives (and ours), and how it has affected so many people. Though very young when September 11th happened (the triplets were in first grade), the boys knew something very bad had happened. How do you explain this horrific act of terror to children when adults could barely explain it to themselves?
Cort also discusses corporate malfeasance and greed. Remember Enron? And then there was the fall of financial institutions thought too big to fail and a recession that hurt countless Americans. Sadly, it seems corporate malfeasance and greed is built into the fabric of our society.
Cort doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, and he knows politics and social issues are very thorny topics. But I do appreciate how he is concerned about various issues that have harmed everything from our political landscape to our environment to the world of finance and business.
But ultimately, Not Your Father’s America is one father’s love letter to his boys. At times it may seem Cort is bragging, but Cort has a lot to brag about. Carter, Jackson, and Braeden have grown up to be wonderful young men. In a world where we hear about so much abuse parents do to their children, it’s lovely to come across a father who not only loves his sons, he also likes them a whole lot, too.
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