It started with conception. Jake and I found out that IVF was our only realistic hope for a family one month before the Covid-19 lockdowns. What followed was a period of time that I largely blocked out. Only with deliberate effort can I recall what it felt like to wake up each morning, every day exactly the same, and picture a life without a family. My hobbies felt meaningless. My favorite shows brought me to tears with even a tertiary motherhood plot. I could take solace in no one but Jake, for the sake of social distancing. I went days at a time without sleeping or eating. It was one of the hardest times in my life… and pursuing IVF under the threat of a canceled cycle wasn’t any easier. I previously wrote about how it felt revisiting the fertility clinic for my frozen embryo transfer. I sat in the lobby, looking at photos of my babies as I fought off wartime-style flashbacks of an election day where Jake waited in the car while I underwent another solo egg retrieval, woke up alone and in pain, and finally broke down over the idea that I might never be a mom. So it goes that I became familiar with The Things We Block Out before I was even a mother. While the moments have certainly become less dramatic since my girls’ conception, I’ve realized that this selective amnesia is a staple of sorts among parents, even a survival tactic, because if we remembered everything, there would be far fewer siblings. For example…
The Fourth Trimester and The Newborn Phase
My best recollection of the newborn phase is of sitting on the couch or in the chair, while snuggling a tiny baby on my chest. Tiny they were, with Violet weighing 4 lbs 15 oz and Scarlett weighing 5 lbs 3 oz. Even Thomas, born at a scheduled 37 weeks only weighed 6 lbs 3 oz. When the girls were newborns, I’d lay on the sofa with both of them on my chest or trade back and forth with Jake. When it was just Thomas, I’d wear a robe and let him lay on my chest to skin to skin while Jake entertained the girls, with Christmas music playing in the background. It’s as undeniably sweet a memory as it is an edited one.
If I dig a little deeper into my recollection of the fourth trimester, I was an absolute wreck with the girls; terrified I wouldn’t live to see them grow up after their utterly horrifying delivery by emergency C-section at 35 weeks. Jake and I’d planned on maintaining a two-income household, not yet realizing how very much it sucked to do so. I cried every day, feeling like I didn’t see my babies at all, despite all I’d gone through to get them. When Thomas was born, I’d stay up and stare at him, consumed with anxiety, desperate to make sure he was breathing. Everything Jake said was wrong, though only half his fault. A week in, I burst into tears when he joked that our family Instagram seemed to be all photos of Thomas, after I’d spent months worrying that the girls would feel replaced. Idiot. Still, I loathed being so oversensitive and feeding a newborn every three hours did not make it any easier. I worried about everything from whether or not the girls were getting enough attention to Thomas’s weight. The surface memory might be sweet, but the actuality was indeed less so.
Illnesses
For the two months the girls attended daycare, it seemed they spent the majority of their time at home with various illnesses. Since then, however, I’ve been blessed to be able to report that all of my children have been relatively healthy. Regardless, illnesses come with the territory, more so for a mother who has never known life with just one baby. There was that first Christmas, when Jake and I were pretty sure we all had Covid-19, but tests were unavailable. We rode it out watching New Year’s episodes of our favorite shows, as our six-month-old twins fussed and cried. There were the twin teething days full of tears, fevers, and infant Tylenol. It seemed every time one baby finally cut a tooth, the other found she was getting a new one, too. There was the epic diaper rash that saw me, six months pregnant and unable to hold a one-year-old for too long, laying on the hardwood floor while singing and holding a naked and screeching baby. That one prepared me for the doctor’s visit two months later, when I lay on the table holding a sick Violet, my back sore from pregnancy and my desperately clingy daughter.
Folks, since the early days, I’ve championed the glory of twins. I love 99% of being a twin mom. My girls have always had someone to entertain them, to play with them, to comfort them, to keep them company and it hasn’t always had to be me. These days, I can do laundry while Violet and Scarlet play in the living room. If they don’t want to sleep during naptime, they can babble and put on performances for each other. Reports from moms of singletons have me feeling as though I’m not spread nearly as thin with twins. It’s not just for my benefit, though. My girls (and now by extension, Thomas) are never bored. They adore each other and have so much fun. It’s a beautiful thing to see their relationship grow… until they’re sick. Even if I’m lucky enough to have only one child sick at a time, the other is still going to start fussing just as the first is feeling better. If it hits them simultaneously, I cannot peel them off of me. Reminding them that I have to take care of Brother too, does not seem to help… though it’s still the case. While my children are blessedly healthy, just last week, Thomas showed signs of his first real cold, followed by the twins, who were both diagnosed with strep. Ironically, Thomas was spared simply for the fact that he doesn’t share their sippy cups or food, but I still had three sick babies in my house all week… and I’ve already blocked it out.
The Injuries
When I was pregnant with twin girls, all anyone could talk about was how much glitter would be in my life. Our house was going to look like the set of The Labyrinth just from the play dresses alone. I thought ‘Awesome! I love glitter!’ Then, I gave birth to two little bear cubs.
For about 10 days there, following an incorrect guess from my OB, I was certain I was having two boys. Though I felt horribly ungrateful for my disappointment, I just kept thinking of all the stories Jake told about growing up with his brother… the childhood wrestling matches, the revenge pranks, the wrecked pickups, the binge drinking… just the idea of all that comprising the entirety of my parenting experience was exhausting. I wanted a girl to raise and mentor the way my mom wanted to do with me but couldn’t manage… someone to strut around the house in plastic heels, sit on the bathtub to watch me do my makeup, let me paint her toenails… and so far, I’ve gotten all that doubled… along with so much rough housing doubled.
Despite the claims I hear from Boy Moms, I cannot imagine my life would involve any more injuries if I had had two boys. Why is everything they come up with so dangerous? Every week, my girls create a new game bound to end in bandages and tears. Violet will hardly go down the slide on her bottom, opting to for standing, sideways, or backward and upside down. When Scarlett joins in, she stands at the bottom of the slide so Violet can try to knock her over with her feet. When they’re bored of that, one of them lays on the couch while the other yanks her off by her feet as hard as she can. Even bath time is fraught with danger, because it is apparently the bees knees to purposely slip from a standing position in the tub and go flying into your sister like a rogue bobsled. This week, I told Scarlett not to rough house on the sofa, just 30 seconds before I heard screaming from the living room. The next hour consisted of singing, wiping away blood, calling Jake to tell me if X-rays were needed, and Googling how to tell if a toddler has a broken nose. As the bruise is fading, I’m glad I took photos, because it’s just one more blood-filled day I’ve already begun to forget as I repeatedly wonder where is my glitter, y’all?!?!
Potty Training
I fed newborn twins every three hours while recovering from a heart condition, pneumonia, and sepsis. I had multiple echocardiograms in my fourth trimester as a first time mom. I was 13 weeks pregnant on my twins’ first birthday, barely able to get out of bed before 9:00 a.m. as they were becoming more and more active. I was sick every single morning of my pregnancy with Thomas until delivery, yet still wrangled twin toddlers in the doctor’s office while massively pregnant. I recovered from a C-section with clingy 17-month-olds and their newborn brother, only to turn around a few months later and take on a frozen embryo transfer (FET) while managing all three… and none of that pushed me to the brink like potty training twins.
I don’t know what it is about potty training, but each time I tried to sit the girls down in the beginning, they would protest or get bored; I would hear Thomas crying from the other room, feel pulled in two directions, and just break down. Perhaps I’m just used to quick success, over-achiever that I am. Maybe I’m not accustomed to having goals that depend on the willingness of stubborn and not especially communicative toddlers. Surely, the hormones I began taking in June for the FET frayed my nerves and made me more emotional. Whatever the reason, just the idea of potty training two children completely overwhelmed me from the very beginning. This was something in which I had zero experience. I didn’t have a mom to consult. I couldn’t research my way to potty trained children… and it broke me.
Folks, I love my husband. He’s a good man. He is not, however, a perfect one. He can be bossy, patronizing, and dismissive. His assertiveness can cross the line into bullying. He says the wrong thing most of the time… but my stars has he come through on the feat that is potty training twins. Starting at 22 months, Jake has spent four or five intermittent weekends encouraging the girls to sit on their potties with stickers and M&M Minis. The first weekend, Violet was all for it. Scarlet was utterly traumatized by the idea. I was simply too post-partum to take on the task, emotionally. The next few weekends took place over the following months and saw Violet just as eager, but Scarlet just not ready. Though each time, it fell to me to intervene and declare that we’d need to try another time, Jake did all the heavy lifting until that point. Now, here we are, Violet and Scarlet not quite two and a half. We’re finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and I have to record somewhere that it has all been due to Jake… because I am already beginning to block it out.
