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.
+++++
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.
+++++
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.