When Motherhood Begins With Multiples
Read Time: 6 Minutes
Words by Shannon Williams
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.
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Another afternoon, not long after they were born. In my head it’s around the two-week point, though it could have been anywhere from five days to five weeks postpartum. What I do remember was the light, mid-afternoon bright, dancing across the bedroom through the blinds as I collapsed on the bed to sleep.
When I awoke, the light had dimmed. I was sore; my breasts were full. I glanced at the time on my phone, bolted out of bed with an energy that bellied my exhaustion, and stormed out to the living room where my husband and my mom each rocked a baby.
“It’s been four hours since they’ve eaten! You should have woken me!” I admonished them, almost in tears.
“They’re fine, they’re tired, too,” they assured me, before offering up the babies to relieve my full breasts.
But the nurses at the hospital and warned me that they should be nursed every two hours, that I should wake them up to nurse. These barely-five-pound babies needed to nurse that frequently to catch up to their full-term, singleton peers.
I couldn’t keep both things in my head: that the nurses had warned me to feed these babies every two hours—the only concrete rule I had so far in parenting—and also that it had been four hours and here they were, perfectly fine.
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Another memory surfaces. We’re at a friend’s house. There is another couple with a baby girl, born six weeks before the twins.
The husband says, “I’m so tired. It’s hard when you’re getting only three-hour stretches of sleep, y’know? She’s had a hard time so we’ve been sleeping for three hours and then passing her off to the other person.”
I remember freezing in the kitchen, the chatter of conversation around me both dulled and sharpened as I tried to comprehend what he said. Because until that moment, it had never occurred to me that parents of singletons could hand off their baby to another person. Because in our house, the other person was already holding a baby.
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I don’t know if it’s having twins or my personality (I suspect it’s both), but I’ve been ready for a break since my motherhood began. When you can’t just sleep when the baby(ies) sleep, when you’re in labor pushing all night to end up with a C-section the next day, when you’re nursing so constantly that you can’t eat enough to keep any weight on, it breaks you.
If I could go back, I would tell myself to enjoy every sip of that vanilla hospital milkshake, to go back to sleep even though the babies hadn’t eaten in hours, and I would tell that nurse I needed a break that didn’t involve carting two six-week-old babies through a parking lot and up an elevator with my still-broken body.
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I’ve lost count of how many people have asked, over the past seven years, “What’s it like to have twins?” For a long time, I struggled to come up with any words. “Hard” was the only word I could muster. Compared to what? I wanted to ask.
People don’t ask me this so much anymore, now that my twins are older. I suppose when people see us now, they don’t see twins, despite the fact that they’re the exact same height and within a single pound of each other. They could just be siblings close in age. But now, years beyond the infant side of things, I can answer with more clarity, with more honesty.
“I wanted to leave,” I would tell them, “I welcomed any chance for someone else to hold a baby. I resented anyone with a single baby to take care of.”
Having twins is finding it difficult to participate in an ordinary conversation on pregnancy and childbirth, because everything is different when your body is carrying two babies, two amniotic sacs, two placentas; when your belly surpasses the 40-week mark before you’ve even hit the third trimester of your pregnancy.
Having twins is watching them share everything of significance in their little lives: a birthday, a classroom, a bedroom. It’s watching them grow up together. It’s watching them discover one day that the crib next to theirs has a baby inside of it, too. It’s celebrating one excelling in any area of life and then worrying about how—if—it will affect the other one.
Having twins is wondering how things would be different if you just got to ease into this whole motherhood thing a little bit more, like seemingly everyone else around you. How would it have been if you’d only had one baby, which is as incomprehensible to you as twins are to everyone else.
About the Author:
Shannon is a writer, reader, designer, Enneagram 1, and mom to three. She believes firmly in the power of iced coffee and pedicures. Her writing has been featured on Coffee+Crumbs, Kindred Mom, Motherwell, and SheLoves Magazine.