A food writer has shared the surprising story of how her husband kept a daughter he had as a teenager a secret and how she believes the revelation affected her ability to conceive.
The story of San Francisco resident Arielle Giusto is a story of triumph over circumstance, with a surprising twist surrounding her husband, Nick.
The 41-year-old credits it with unlocking the “trauma” that previously prevented her from conceiving, even if it meant finding out that her spouse of several years already had a daughter.
The revelation was provided by Nick himself, after a fertility doctor asked him if he had ever had a child before. During a subsequent phone call he confessed that he had conceived a child with a girl while he was in high school and claimed that she had had an abortion.
He later admitted to his wife that the child had not been aborted (he had a daughter who is now 26), paving the way for a reunion more than a year later. She attributes this to her recent successful pregnancy which, by the looks of her husband’s Instagram, culminated in her own child.
The story of San Francisco-based food blogger Arielle Giusto is a story of triumph over circumstance, with a surprising twist surrounding her husband, Nick. It was conveyed in a NYT op-ed titled A Devastating Secret on the Road to Motherhood.
The 41-year-old credits it with unlocking the “trauma” that was preventing her from conceiving, even if it meant finding out that her spouse of several years (seen left) already had a daughter (right). The couple is seen after meeting in 2019, when she was 20 years old.
—Has your husband ever gotten someone pregnant? Giusto recalled that his doctor asked him in an opinion piece written for The New York Times – a routine question that almost led to a marital crisis.
“No,” she allegedly responded, as the two tried to get to the bottom of why she was infertility.
‘I do not think. “I’ll ask,” she added, before returning to the couple’s $1.6 million home in rural Woodacre, less than an hour’s drive from San Francisco.
“It seemed like something I should know,” the noted food writer wrote in the just-published Times article, titled A Crushing Secret on the Road to Motherhood.
During the trip, she called her husband; She initially told him about her day at work as a chef at a local restaurant, before getting into the nitty-gritty of the question posed by her doctor.
‘Hello?’ he remembered saying, after being met with silence on the other end of the line.
“Yes, I’m here,” responded her spouse, now 44 years old. And, uh, yes, I have. My last year in high school.
The admission, Giusto recalled, surprised her greatly, but she managed to remain calm.
The revelation was provided by Nick himself, Giusto wrote, after a fertility doctor asked him if he had ever had a child before.
“Wow, you never told me that,” she allegedly replied, asking her husband if his partner at the time had had an abortion.
“Uh-huh, he did,” he responded, and his wife wrote that his voice was “barely audible.”
‘That? Four years of marriage and this never came up? She reportedly asked: all while she tried to keep the conversation light,
She continued telling him, ‘Let’s talk later.’ For now, I suppose I can inform you that her parts appear to be in good working order,” before continuing along the route back home to Redwood.
Once there, the couple met, cooked and enjoyed dinner before settling in for the night.
Once in bed, a visibly disturbed Nick made another confession, he recalled, one that would forever change both of their lives, for the better.
“There was no abortion,” she told him, her face pale. “My high school girlfriend kept the baby,” she continued, revealing that the girl’s parents asked her to sign an agreement in which she said she would not participate in the girl’s upbringing.
“I gave up my rights before the child was born,” she told him. ‘I have never seen her. I don’t even know if they told him about me.
Pictured is the couple’s $1.6 million home in rural Woodacre, less than an hour’s drive from San Francisco. Maeve lived more than 300 miles away, near the Sierra Nevada.
He went on to offer an emotional apology, telling Giusto: “I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know how to tell you and then so much time passed.’
She added: ‘Every year we were together it became more and more difficult. Once we started trying to have a baby, I felt like I couldn’t tell you; I didn’t want it to interfere with your experience.’
The words, the food writer recalled, shook her to her core.
‘My experience? This is about us. Our experience. How can you keep a secret like that? he said, writing about how she jumped out of bed while airing the rhetorical question.
“I was worried you would leave me,” Nick supposedly responded, his face frightened and twisted with apprehension.
“Okay, let’s hear it,” Giusto allegedly told him, trying to calm him down. ‘Tell me the whole story.’
Struggling to look her in the eye, he explained why he voluntarily gave up his first chance at being a father.
Hello girlfriend, he told her, he was from an evangelical family, and his punk rock personality at the time did nothing to soften the controversy created by getting a preacher’s daughter pregnant.
Giusto wrote about how desperate she was to find the girl due to the nature of her own upbringing, without much input from her own biological father. Worried that Nick had inflicted similar pain on her daughter, she found Maeve’s mother’s address on Google and sent her a letter.
His family, he said, declared abortion was out of the question and, with college on the horizon, Nick made a difficult decision.
“I gave up my rights to the fetus,” she told Giusto, owner and director of a food blogging site. “They said it was what she wanted.”
He reportedly took her hand at that point, a gesture Giusto rejected.
The couple eventually got over this awkwardness and set out to search for the baby Nick had given up.
Through high school friends, he discovered she was a girl named Maeve; When the couple moved from natural conception to intrauterine insemination (IUI), after the first two rounds failed, Giusto became even more despondent.
Meanwhile, Maeve was born four days after her father’s 18th birthday, some 19 years early. The couple quickly approached the girl’s mother.
Giusto wrote about how desperate she was to find the girl due to the nature of her own upbringing, without much input from her own biological father.
Worried that Nick had inflicted similar pain on her daughter, she found Maeve’s mother’s address on Google and sent her a one-page letter a month later.
However, despite the emotional and apologetic nature of that correspondence, no response came.
A year passed during which the couple continued trying to have a baby, without success.
A random Tuesday in 2019 when Nick received a call from Maeve’s mother. She told Nick that Maeve wanted to meet her. They were then reunited and the couple was able to conceive their own child. In the photo, Giusto and his son meeting the child’s grandmother in 2021.
Then, on a Tuesday in 2019, Nick received a call from Maeve’s mother.
He told Nick that Maeve wanted to meet him and had wanted to over the years, getting close but each time deciding against it.
she didn’t want to bother her mother or her adoptive father, Maeve’s mother told her, but she felt emboldened by his and his wife’s letter.
After several phone calls, the couple was able to meet Maeve in a park in September, sitting with the 20-year-old at a table to talk for hours.
A month later, on Nick’s 40th day, the couple rented a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains near where Maeve lived to celebrate, two weeks after Giusto underwent an embryo transfer, which meant he could finally have a pregnancy test.
She wrote that she brought one and planned to do so the night they arrived, and that when they did, Maeve joined them for dinner.
They spent hours catching up on their experiences during high school and childhood, after which she picked up the dishes and snuck upstairs to administer the test after her most recent IUI attempt, she recalled.
Ten minutes later, he saw two blue lines – a good sign that the test was positive.
She began to cry, while listening to the two voices of her husband and daughter in the kitchen. The couple has since given birth to a son, Nick’s social media shows, a fact Giusto attributes to meeting Maeve.
“I no longer needed to wonder where our babies were,” she wrote of that discovery. “They were here with us.”
The couple has since welcomed a son, and Nick shared heartwarming photos of his family’s adventures together on Instagram.