Experiencing more love, less sleep
“My biggest concern was lack of sleep,” she says. “As far as labor and birth, Alfredo is an OB, so I just kind of trusted him.”
THE PARENTS: Rene Orth, 36, and Alfredo Perales Puchalt, 38, of Point Breeze
THE KIDS: Esther Perales-Orth, 2; Gabriel Perales-Orth, born March 23, 2022
THE NAMES: They were drawn to Biblical names, and to names that had the same spelling — and similar pronunciation — in Spanish and English.
He loved opera, but he’d never met a composer. She was eager to talk with someone outside the bubble of classmates at the Curtis Institute of Music. They met — online, then for a date at Tria — just to become friends.
It was Rene’s third year at Curtis. Alfredo, who was raised in Spain, was doing postdoctoral work at the Wistar Institute. He planned to return home in a few months.
“It was better that he was not in my world,” Rene says. “He was working on a cure for cancer. That’s amazing! It’s easy, as an artist, to become super self-involved and think that your work is everything.”
There was more: Alfredo is 6-foot-3, a match to Rene’s 6-foot stature; he loved to travel, and faith was important to him. But on that first date, he regaled her nonstop with details of a road trip he’d taken in Europe with a friend.
“Then I got a message from him that night or the next day: I’m so sorry I talked the entire time. I really want to ask you questions, too.”
There were more dates: concerts; a game night at Alfredo’s place; a night on Rene’s apartment roof deck with intimate get-to-know-you questions. And then Rene found herself texting Alfredo from an opera festival in Fort Worth, Texas: “I need to know if you’re going back to Spain, because I really like you.”
Alfredo began hunting for another postdoc position and delayed his departure for Spain … indefinitely. They were engaged in December 2016 — he proposed near a pond behind Rene’s parents’ house in Dallas — and married the following October, a weekend-long celebration in the Poconos that included relatives and friends who flew in from Spain, Australia, and New Zealand.
The leaves were stained yellow and red, the guests sang karaoke on Friday night and polished off 100 liters of sangria. “It was amazing and touching to see how many people traveled so far to come and be there with us,” Rene says.
Alfredo wanted children. Rene felt wary. “As a general rule, I don’t like change, and children bring about a big change in your life. I didn’t know how it would work, being a mother and a composer, a freelancer, an artist. I was afraid of losing everything I’d worked for.”
But once they were married, she began asking the question more existentially: “Is parenthood an experience I never want? If I live to an old age, do I want to die without having children?”
The answer was clear. She told Alfredo that conception would likely happen immediately, but her husband, who had been an ob-gyn in Spain, said, “That’s not how it works.”
This time, it did. Rene, whose Spanish is “a long work in progress,” managed to come up with the words to share the news with her mother-in-law during one of Alfredo’s weekly family Skype calls.
The pregnancy was easy: Her only craving was for frozen fruit, they walked 100 kilometers of the Camino de Santiago when she was 16 weeks pregnant, and Rene continued gym visits into her ninth month.
“My biggest concern was lack of sleep,” she says. “As far as labor and birth, Alfredo is an OB, so I just kind of trusted him.” Rene had contractions for two weeks prior to her due date, but apparently the baby needed a deadline; her labor began in earnest the night before a scheduled induction.
They went to Pennsylvania Hospital around midnight; Esther was born at 3 p.m., after two hours of pushing. “I was not one of those women who is like, ‘Ohmygosh, my baby, I’m so in love!’ ” Rene says. “I was really glad for everyone to stop touching me so I could relax.”
Esther was not a sleeper; in fact, she cried whenever her parents put her down. “You had to be holding her all the time,” Alfredo says. “There was no other way to put her to sleep.” Rene had an opera workshop scheduled for spring 2020, but COVID-19 scotched that, and soon she was home, with scant work deadlines, being a full-time mom.
Rene and a friend composed a 10-minute digital opera, TakTakShoo. Meantime, she and Alfredo collaborated on baby No. 2. This time, the positive pregnancy test brought a surge of sadness. “I was grieving how my relationship with Esther would change, even though I knew having a sibling, in the long run, would be great for her.”
The pregnancy was harder: Rene felt more moody, angry at times, and suffered sciatica, reflux, and insomnia. Esther screamed and clung to Rene if she tried to leave the house.
When Rene’s water broke, she took Esther for one more outing — it was a routine for the pair to hit Sprouts, then Target to try on sunglasses — before settling her for a nap and heading to Pennsylvania Hospital. Alfredo met her there at 10 p.m.
This labor was quicker: 4 cm dilation at dinnertime; 7 cm at 11:30 p.m. Rene turned on her side, felt excruciating pain — ”The head is there!” the OB announced — then pushed for 20 minutes.
Now, Rene says, sleep remains a scant commodity. Even with help from her mother and Alfredo’s mom, who stayed for five weeks after the birth, “I feel like I’m constantly handing a child off to someone and then taking a different one.”
Parenthood has prompted new questions: “What does success look like, both as a mother and as a composer? How do I get gigs that I care about, but also have quality time to spend with my family?
“Your priorities change,” she says. “You find you’re a lot stronger than you realized, you need a lot less sleep than you realized, there’s a lot more love in your heart than you thought you had.”