Me

. It was incredibly emotional. I started to prepare myself to be the single father of two children, and I read everything I could find. The only problem was that I was short one name, and this seemed like a major problem to me, because it had been hard enough to come up with the first one! I’d searched through so many cultures: I looked at India, Brazil, Egypt. . . . I even looked at the names of some of the Taino Indians, the indigenous natives of the island of Puerto Rico. I’d finally decided he would be called Matteo, a Jewish name that means “gift from God.”
    But now I needed to find another, and quickly, because until that point we were referring to the baby as “Baby B” (as they labeled them on the sonograms). Still, it was not as difficult as choosing the first one. I closed my eyes and visualized a brave and fearless child. For this reason, I called him Valentino, because he is like a warrior: Valentino the valiant one.
    Time has never moved more slowly in my head than during those next six months. They seemed eternal. Naturally, when a woman is pregnant with twins there is always a greater risk for complications, which of course concerned me, and I was always in close touch with the woman carrying the children, making sure that everything was running smoothly.
    But in the midst of it all, what I felt in the deepest part of my soul can only be described as unadulterated bliss. Absolute happiness. I imagine that anyone who has children will wholeheartedly agree it’s like spending nine months waiting for the most incredible gift of all. All I wanted to do was stand on my rooftop and scream the great news out to the world. But I had to be very cautious, because I didn’t want anything to affect the woman who was carrying my children. I wanted her to be calm and maintain her inner peace so that her pregnancy would proceed without complications. If for whatever reason the media found out what was going on, they might have discovered who she was and then barraged her with questions and intruded on her everyday life. Besides not wanting people to bother her because I didn’t want anything to affect her or my children, I felt terribly responsible for imposing so much pressure and invading someone else’s privacy. It has been my choice to lead a public life, and for that I accept the consequences; but I would never want to impose that on someone else.
    So to ensure that the secret would be kept from the rest of the world, with the exception of my parents, I only told three people. It’s not that I didn’t trust the rest of my friends, but I was nervous that it might mistakenly slip from someone’s lips out of sheer excitement, which would have been a disaster. There were even some friends—and this is when you realize who your true friends really are—who asked me not to talk to them about it, because if the news were to somehow get out to the press, they didn’t want to find themselves on the list of people who might be responsible. . . . They were with me at all times making sure I was okay, but they didn’t want to know more than what was necessary. And I will always be grateful for that loyalty and affection.
    Like a good first-time father, while I waited for the boys to be born I read every book there was to read: child development books, books about twins, books about the first weeks of life. In fact, there are remarkably few books available about being a single father (and those that are available primarily focus on what to do after divorce), and I wanted to be fully informed on the subject by the time they were born. So I spent all of my time reading, learning, preparing. My mind was like a sponge; I wanted to know anything and everything about how to be the best father possible. At the same time, I was fully aware that most of what it’s really like to be a father can’t be learned in any book, nor passed on from person to person. It’s an instinct that only shows itself when you hold your baby in your arms, and learn to interpret his various cries, laughs, smiles, and motions. An instinct that you never know you have until you reach that moment.
    I was at the hospital when they came into the world. My sons were born via a C-section, and immediately after they were born they were brought to my room, where the incubator /warmer was waiting for them. There was a nurse there who checked all their vitals: their pulses, temperatures, color, size, everything. She shook those poor little