When Motherhood Begins With Multiples

I was wheeled to the room on one bed before being transferred to another, the bottom half of my body numb and useless. My nurse chattered away the entire time. She oriented me to my new space, giving me details about the TV, the layout of the bathroom, the mechanics of the bed, the call button, the hospital menu. Details I had no capacity to take in, much less process. Her fingers flashed across the keyboard as she spoke.

“The milkshakes are my personal favorite,” she finally told me, the only thing I really took any note of since it was almost lunchtime. I hadn’t eaten since 6:30 pm the night before, when my water had broken in the middle of our dinner.

Besides the milkshake tip (I ordered vanilla), my only thought was, “Does she seriously think I can concentrate on any of this right now?” I’d been awake for well over 24 hours, in labor for 12, and was now in the earliest stages of recovery from having my unbelievably large twin-filled belly sliced open.

Those babies were in the NICU. The infection all three of us developed during labor ensured their stay there for the next few hours. Nothing major, something antibiotics or drugs of some sort took care of. A detail that, again, I was in no capacity to really care for or understand. They had to stay in the NICU for a few hours and then they would be brought to me. Fair enough. Fine. Just let me sleep.

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The days that followed continued in a similar stupor. I draw a blank when I try to remember the first six weeks of the twins’ lives. I can conjure up moments in time, though I have no idea where these scenes fit in the overall timeline:

A stranger at the store or the doctor’s office squealing, “Oh twins! I’ve always wanted twins” as I fail to muster up similar enthusiasm.

The feeling of exhausted dismay, as I remembered the admonition to “sleep when the baby sleeps”, but what do you do when there are two of them and one of them is always awake?

Propping myself up with pillows—every two hours or less each night—as my husband handed them to me. Tandem nursing two football babies as my head continued to nod forward, the motion always startling me awake. My husband removing the first to rock them back to sleep and me taking the second to rock on the other side of the room in some sort of insane synchronized baby sleep dance.

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I know my apathy continued. Twin infants are the textbook example of survival mode. Like Jim Gaffigan says, when he’s asked what it’s like to have four kids, “Just imagine you’re drowning. And then someone hands you a baby.”

I went to my six-week postpartum checkup, congratulating myself for having the foresight to have my mom come to town so I could tackle this very personal appointment alone. Except I was greeted by the nurse practitioner who immediately asked me, “Where are the babies? We like to see them.”

My sleep-deprived, still-hormonal brain interpreted this as an admonition. I started to tell her that my mom was with them, that it was the first time I was without them, that I was grateful for the break. But I stopped. Maybe mothers of six-week-olds weren’t supposed to want to leave their babies.

Read more about adventures in twin babyhood over on The Kindred Voice.

The Life-Changing Magic of Showers

Bathing is something we think about surprisingly often as mothers. Sponging kids down after each diaper explosion, spaghetti dinner, and marker incident. Wondering if playing in the pool for five consecutive hours counts as a bath for the day (the answer: yes). Doing the math to calculate the last time we showered ourselves (during the newborn days: don’t ask).

I think my youngest holds the record for most sponge-baths in a day: six. Four days is the longest I ever went without showering. I remember my youngest screaming from the pack and play in my master bedroom as I rushed to rinse the shampoo out of my hair but at that point I was all, “You can either have a grumpy mom with stringy, greasy hair right now or a happy mom in five minutes if you just chill and wait for this conditioner to do its work.”

Lately, I’ve been thinking about bathing even more than usual because:

1. I recently went back to showering at night.

And

2. my kids have replaced baths with showers.

They say you should write what you’re thinking about, and people, THIS is what I’ve been thinking about. Welcome to being thirty-two-years-old with three kids five and under and YES it is always this glamorous. So let’s get to it.

Read the rest over on the Twin Cities Moms Collective!

It Actually Goes So Fast

The park was quiet except for my three. They ran around, chasing and yelling at one another while I sat on a nearby bench with a book and a water bottle. It was a perfect cloudy day. Not too hot, but comfortable.

I watched them play for awhile, smiling at their antics, when I saw another mom — topknot, sunglasses, leggings — pushing a stroller. Baby was old enough to sit up in the stroller but too young to play at the park. I watched them walk past as baby’s big blue eyes took everything in. Then a thought hit me like a punch to the gut:

I was her just yesterday.

And it startled me.

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“Enjoy every moment! It goes by so fast!” is the phrase young moms love to hate. This phrase always seems to be tossed out so casually. We roll our bleary eyes because we’re on our eighth straight month of not sleeping through the night; which is a method of actual torture. We try to hide our spit-up stained clothing and unwashed hair, to herd our feral children through the grocery aisles with some semblance of dignity. 

These older people don’t remember, we tell ourselves to cope. They don’t remember how hard it is every day to change all these diapers, breastfeed until it hurts, to sing “Wheels on the Bus” over and over and over.

We slog through the day having woken up at 5:04AM, reheating our coffee in the microwave three times too many. The hours from 3:00-5:30PM crawl by as we’ve exhausted all of our ideas for the day, and collapse on the couch in absolute despair while children scream and throw toys around us. We wonder, as we hit the buttons on the microwave or put a throw pillow over our heads one more time, just how much more can we take?

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I still consider myself a “young” mom, with two five-year-olds and a three-year-old. My parenting journey is still at the beginning. Yet I’m sure that day at the park, it looked like I was living the life to that stroller mom: book, water, sitting, kids playing while I paid half-attention. I used to watch those moms at the park and envy them as I chased after twin 15-month olds dashing off in opposite directions. Sitting at the park on a bench with a book? That was #goals.

I wondered if I looked like I had everything figured out. I still often feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. I wanted to tell her that even these moments of respite don’t last, that I would likely be interrupted by a fight, or an injury, or a request for a snack soon enough.

“I was just you!” I wanted to rush over and tell her. “I know I look like an ‘old mom’ but I swear I’m not. Everyone was right, it goes by fast.”

Read the rest over on Kindred Mom.

Sometimes, Everything Goes Just Fine

The articles blur together as I scroll through social media. (Reminder to self: just stop it already.) You know the ones I’m talking about:

“Preschool Changed My Kid...For the Worse”

“10 Reasons You Should Never Put Sunscreen on Your Child” and it’s companion, “10 Reasons You Should Bathe Your Child in Sunscreen”

“I Totally Regret _____ About My Parenting”

“Why Sleep Training (or not Sleep Training) Your Baby Makes You a Monster”

Okay, I’m paraphrasing here. But you get the picture. These articles are everywhere. They’re scary and overwhelmingly negative. When I see them, I cringe, roll my eyes, and (usually) avoid the clickbait.

But I wonder how this content gets out as I think of all the new moms out there, seeing this garbage as they scroll sleepily through their phones at 1:15 am. (And again at 3...and at 5:45…) Where’s all the positivity?

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One of my first solo outings with the twins was a moms’ event at my church. I rolled in with the double-stroller loaded down with two infant carseats holding my three-month-olds and hardly had time to wonder if I knew anyone else before another mom greeted me.

“Twins?” She asked, with a sweet smile. “Are they boys or girls?”

“One of each,” I told her.

“I have boy-girl twins, too!” she told me. “They’re three now.” We were quickly joined by another mom who had twin girls a month older than mine. We chatted all things twins: newborns, pregnancies, labor and delivery.  Despite the fact that a multiples pregnancy automatically puts you in the high-risk category, I was surprised to discover that each of our pregnancies and birth experiences had been fairly routine.

“This is crazy,” I remember saying, “I feel like all I was told throughout my pregnancy was how risky multiples are and here we all had pretty good experiences.”

“That’s because that’s all you hear!” the mom with three-year-old twins exclaimed, “Nobody talks about the normal stories. They only tell you the scary ones!”

Read the rest of this piece over on the Twin Cities Moms Blog.

I Don't Know How You Do It

I pulled up and parked in my favorite lot: the side mall entrance. There were usually plenty of spots available, especially mid-afternoon on a Tuesday. A couple of afternoons a month I would take the twins, then babies, to the mall to walk around. If I timed nursing just right I would have about an hour and a half to spend there. Fifteen minutes there and fifteen minutes back meant I would return home in time to nurse them again. (Because nursing twins in public is a whole other level of stress, y’all.)

The mall was the perfect spot to stretch my legs while I pushed the stroller, especially with the chilly spring weather outside. I liked to look at the sale racks at JCrew and Banana Republic, though we didn’t really have the money to buy anything. Instead, I’d treat myself to a consolation pretzel (cinnamon sugar) and lemonade from Auntie Anne’s, then sit on a bench and hope the babies wouldn’t cry because we’d stopped moving.

On this particular Tuesday, I hauled the frame for the double stroller out of the trunk of our Prius, released one carseat and strapped it in, then another. I threw the overstuffed diaper bag over my shoulder and headed to the entrance, pushing the handicap button to let us in.

Nothing happened.

I pushed it again, harder this time. And again, at a slightly different angle.

The door didn’t budge. I stared at the door to the mall entrance, now my enemy. I shoved the diaper bag higher up on my shoulder and pulled the door open, balancing it with my legs splayed while I pulled the double stroller inside. Once in the vestibule I pushed the button for the interior door. It didn’t move, either. I glared at the second door. We were basically trapped since the in-line double-stroller took up the entire entry from door to door. I sucked in my stomach, moved around the stroller as best I could, and managed to open the door a few inches before it hit a stroller wheel. I scooched and inched my way in, wiggling first the stroller, then the door, until we made it inside.

I pushed my hair out of my face and looked around at the bright lights inside the department store as I caught my breath. My enthusiasm for this outing had waned during the whole door debacle. I was startled when I realized a woman stood next to the rack of shirts beside us, staring down and smiling at me and the babies.

“Twins?” she asked sweetly, “I don’t know how you do it!”

Well, I thought, I sure could’ve used a hand with the door. Had she been there the whole time? I felt annoyed at her, at the malfunctioning doors, at the fact that no one had come to my rescue. Bothered that she probably wanted to stop and coo at the babies, taking up my precious non-nursing time.

I’m sure I gave her a faint smile, though I know I had absolutely no response. I heard this often. And every time the answer that popped into my head was because I have to.

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"So what's it like to have twins?" is something I’ve been asked dozens of times. It’s diminished over the years, after we added a third to the mix and I was no longer accompanied everywhere by two babies in carseats. More often now I’m asked if my kids are triplets.

I never knew how to answer the question. What is life with twins like? I have no idea. Exhausting, I guess? I might as well ask you what life with one baby is like since that’s something I’ve never known. The concept of one baby is as foreign to me as multiples is to everyone else.

I would usually shrug, give a little laugh, and say something like, "Well, it's all we've ever known!" Or, the ever-vague answer of “busy!” Which was true, if not detailed.

However the conversation went, it was often followed up with the whole “I don’t know how you do it!” thing. I got it from everyone: grandparents, baristas, friends’ spouses. I never knew what to say to this, either.

And maybe I never needed to say anything. Maybe my postpartum hormones were working in overdrive while my sleep-deprived brain tried to make sense of the process of engaging in adult conversation. But every time I heard, “I don’t know how you do it!”, it bothered me. It implied I had a choice.

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And what choice did I have? Quitting my job was non-negotiable, for starters. There was no money to put two babies into daycare when the cost of daycare would have eaten up my entire paycheck. Then there was the state of my mental health - I couldn’t wrap my head around working all day and coming home to (literally) take care of two babies all night. When you factored in the cost of formula, disposable diapers, take-out, and the value of both Tyson’s and my mental stability, the decision was clear.

At night when one woke up to nurse, so did the other. Neither Tyson or I had a choice then. He would rock a baby while I nursed the second. We were the definition of two ships passing in the night while we wore a path in the upstairs carpet, each walking back and forth with a fussy baby, sometimes for hours at a time. While friends of ours bemoaned having to trade shifts at night and couldn’t get more than a three-hour stretch of sleep with their one baby, I bit my tongue. The idea of “shifts” didn’t exist in our house. If one was up, everyone was up.

After the very early days of pure survival, I began to leave the apartment again. By the time they were three months old, this was a necessity. I couldn’t breathe in our tiny space day after day. “I don’t know how you do it!” people would say when I showed up to a social outing with two babies in tow. Do you really expect me to stay home all the time? I would think.

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Lest I sound ungrateful, I do realize this was intended as a compliment. It just always seemed so vague. “You’re such a good mom to those babies!” would have been more helpful - at the very least it would have been an easier compliment to respond with a smile and a “thank you”.

The thing was, I didn’t really want people to say anything to me when I was out with the twins. Anytime I was stopped I could only think this person was taking up the precious little time I had without a baby attached to my breast. What I wanted more than anything was help. I craved acknowledgement, to be seen. For people to understand that this was hard. That’s what they were saying to me after all. “I don’t know how you do it...because it’s so hard” is what was implied each and every time.

But I didn’t want them to wonder how I did it. I wanted them to let me go ahead of them in the checkout line. I wanted them to ask how they could help, not just wonder aloud at how hard my life must be with two small babies to care for.

I didn’t want them to wonder how I was able to nurse two babies. I wanted them to entertain one while I nursed their sibling at the library.

I didn’t want my friends to wonder how I got out the door for a playdate. I wanted them to pick up an iced vanilla latte for me on the way.

I didn’t want a stranger to marvel at my ability to get through the door. I wanted them to hold the damn door.

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Hearing “I don’t know how you do it,” taught me what I actually needed - what any mother needs in a difficult stage in her life.

She needs someone to give her a gift card for coffee when the toddler melts down in the middle of aisle 11.

She needs someone to watch her kids for a couple of hours so she can take a nap.

She needs someone to drop off dinner on Thursday evening, just because she’s a mom of young kids and it’s Thursday.

She needs someone to say “let me help you with that” while she loads bag after bag of groceries in the minivan while also herding small children to their carseats.

She needs someone to give her a nod and a smile, just a little bit of encouragement to get through the day.

She doesn’t need anyone to wonder how she does the work of nursing, changing diapers, sweeping up crumbs, tackling mountains of laundry, and getting up night after fussy night. We’re mothers.

It’s what we do.

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This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series on "Rewriting the Script."