Since becoming a dad,Mark Zuckerberghas learned even more about what’s important in life.
The Facebook founder, 34, has opened up over the years about how much his reality has shifted since he and his wife,Dr. Priscilla Chan, welcomed their now-3-year-old daughterMaxima, a.k.a. Max. (The two went on to add a second daughter,August, to their family in August 2017.)
Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan, a pediatrician,announced their second pregnancythat March, when the tech CEO got candid about the difficulties they’d had trying to conceive Max.
“We weren’t sure what to expect or whether we’d be able to have another child,” Zuckerbergwrote on Facebook. “When Priscilla and I first found out she was pregnant again, our first hope was that the child would be healthy.”
Dr. Chan, 34, and Zuckerberg have been open about the challenges they’ve faced on the journey to becoming parents, including three miscarriages over their initial two-year journey to conceive,the tech mogul shared on Facebookin July 2015, when his wife was pregnant with Max.
“You feel so hopeful when you learn you’re going to have a child. You start imagining who they’ll become and dreaming of hopes for their future. You start making plans, and then they’re gone. It’s a lonely experience,” he wrote. “Most people don’t discuss miscarriages because you worry your problems will distance you or reflect upon you — as if you’re defectiveor did something to cause this. So you struggle on your own.”
“In today’s open and connected world, discussing these issues doesn’t distance us; it brings us together,” Zuckerberg continued. “It creates understanding and tolerance, and it gives us hope. When we started talking to our friends, werealized how frequently this happened— that many people we knew had similar issues and that nearly all had healthy children after all.”
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Zuckerberg continued, “We hope that sharing our experiencewill give more people the same hopewe felt and will help more people feel comfortable sharing their stories as well.”
“Sharing our experience with pregnancy was incredibly important because werealized how challenging and difficult that wasand there are really dark moments where you think you’re alone,” Dr. Chan said in a September 2016 interview withTodayhostSavannah Guthrie.
“We realized that we weren’t and that there were other people traveling along the same road with you. I think having that, knowing that you’re not alone, was incredibly important for us,” she added. “And we wanted others to know that they weren’t alone either.”
Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook
Since becoming parents, the couple have embraced every moment — so much so that Zuckerbergtook two months of paternity leaveto bond with both his girls after their arrival.
Ahead of August’s arrival, he wrote, “This time, I’m going to take advantage of Facebook’s option to take leave in parts. I’ll take a month off to be with Priscilla and the girls at the beginning, and then we’ll spend the whole month of December together as well.”
He added that he was looking forward to “bonding with the new little one and taking Max on adventures.”
“For a few months during the pregnancy we just had a lot of time to think about the world that she was going to grow up in and there are all these dreams that we had long-term,”he toldPeople en Españolofdaughter Max shortly before August’s arrival. “Leading up to having Max changed my perspective a lot. We actually had a few miscarriages before having Max so at the time we actually knew that we were going to have her, we were just so happy that it’s like, ‘Okay, we think that she’s going to be healthy and is going to come.’ ”
Mark Zuckerberg and family.Mark Zuckerberg/Instagram
And just this past week, Zuckerberg revealed he hadinvented something he calls the Sleep Box— a small wooden box that sits atop his wife’s nightstand and puts out a dim light between the hours of 6 and 7 a.m. — to help Dr. Chan sleep at night, since “Being a mom is hard” and makes getting quality shut-eye quite the challenge.
“As an engineer, building a deviceto help my partner sleep betteris one of the best ways I can think of to express my love and gratitude,” he wrote. “A bunch of my friends have told me they’d want something like this, so I’m putting this out there in case another entrepreneur wants to run with this and build sleep boxes for more people!”
source: people.com
