Category — Ramblings

Rainy morning. The lack of sunlight in the windows meant the girls slept in. Althea was up first, mumbling and sucking her fingers to get our attention. Elise slept soundly by her side. I decided to forgo efficiency and nurse them one at a time, spending a rare few moments with them one on one.

I know and have read of twin mamas who feel a quiet and occasional resentment at having two babies to care for. If we had “just one” to care for, we could casually feed her, gazing down at one set of eyes, taking our sweet time to enjoy just one little body snuggled against our skin. If we had just one baby, oh! the free time we’d have to change only one dirty diaper, soothe only one crying infant, wash only one set of clothes, bathe only one wiggly little baby. Our child would be playing and babbling and sitting up and walking on time because we’d have enough time to devote to helping her learn and grow as an individual. With just one baby, we wouldn’t feel the guilt of cooing at one while the other stares at us expectantly, waiting for mom to pay attention to them, too. 

We’d go out more often without help because it’d be logistically possible to wander around the park or go grocery shopping with just one baby. We’d have a free spot in the backseat because there would be just one car seat. If we’d carried just one baby during our pregnancies, maybe, just maybe, we’d have a shot at wearing a bikini again in this lifetime. 

Do I have to quit my job? The cost of childcare for two is beyond our means. 

Althea’s little body breathing against mine. I nursed her casually, speaking to her softly and telling her how special she is, just on her own. How much I love just her.

I passed off Althea to Daddy so I could spend easy, slow alone time with Elise too. I love you, just you. These moments are rare.

I know it’s possible to love two babies with the same unending devotion at the same time. But how do we twin moms make sure that each baby knows how valuable they are as just one person?

We took the girls to the county fair today.

You don’t understand. I LOVE THE FAIR. I love it so much, only capitalized letters can possibly capture my love affair with fairs. Polish sausages with onions and peppers. Foot-long corn dogs. Multi-colored cotton candy in bags. Deep fried things on sticks. Airbrushed hats. Embroidery while-u-wait. Mechanical bulls. Teeny-boppers dressed skankily. Toothless rednecks with mullets. Carnies. The Zipper.

Yes, I love love love the fair.

Last year at this time, the girls were tiny balls of cells embedding themselves in my uterine lining. I didn’t know. I mean, I suspected. I kind of knew. But I didn’t think I’d be lucky enough to get pregnant again right away (I’d miscarried just two months earlier). So I drank a few beers at the Budweiser tent. Chris and I rode my beloved Zipper and the Egg Beater. I smoked. I smoked a lot, with the abandon of a woman who secretly suspects she’s pregnant but is so self-indulgent she hasn’t given up cigarettes just yet.

Tomorrow, Monday, marks one year since I found out I was pregnant. I woke up feeling hopeful. Maybe a little scared and guilty too. I had a stash of early pregnancy tests ready, two days before my period was even due. With the early spring sun streaming in the bathroom window, I ripped open the foil packet to my First Response Early Pregnancy Test. No need to read the directions — I was a pro already, having spent entirely too much time Googling pregnancy test result photos. Piss piss piss. I set the test down, went about my business, peeking out of the corner of my eye for that second pink line.

And there it was. Faint as hell, but there it was.

I often think about my past. The way I’ve treated my family. The dangerous situations I’ve put myself in. All the horrible things I’ve done and said to the people I love most. Sometimes, the guilt and shame make me want to stab my ears with steak knives. Honestly, that bad.

So, while stuffing my face with a pretzel dog at the fair today, I glanced at these two (two!) little beings who trust me and their father more than anyone else in the whole wide world and I wonder what the fuck I’ve done in my miserable life that has given me this incredible privilege of raising two (two!) painfully beautiful little people.

Happy first year together, little people.

Engorgement that wakes you up anyway. 3:45 a.m. and my boobs woke me up SCREAMING. They feel and actually LOOK like bags of frozen peas. Bump-eeee! Ow. Yes, I am committing a breastfeeding sin by pumping, but I am in So. Much. Discomfort. I can’t get back to sleep.

Okay, I am NOT EVEN saying that I look like this naked, but . . .

Seeing these photos of a naked, post-partum Naomi Watts kinda makes me feel better. You can see the fold of baby belly skin and how her stomach kind of protrudes outward. Her boobs also look especially maternal. Apparently, she had a baby in December. Oh, and she’s 40. She looks beautiful.

See, even celebrities can’t always undo the effects of mamahood right away! Embrace it, bitches!

It’s Friday.

A few years ago, Friday night meant PARTY. It meant booze and cigarettes and staying up till 4 a.m., gabbing with my girlfriends or throwing a party. It meant falling asleep to bad TV and waking up late, hung over in my hedonism.

Now, it means time. Time to spend catching up. Time to spend with my daughters. Time to snuggle next to my husband under our clean, grown-up-people sheets. It means Chris asleep on the couch at 9 p.m. And tonight, it means staying up late to cry alone.

Tonight was bath night for the girls. I spoke softly to them in Spanish, gently soaping their tender baby skin. I quickly dried them to keep them from getting too cold. I slipped their tiny hands and arms through the tiny sleeves of their tiny clothes. I pulled them up close to me and nursed them, snuggling their little bodies closecloseclose to my sides. They hummed and breathed and swallowed the food my body worked so hard to make just for them. Their short little breaths went from an eager suck-swallow-breathe-suck-swallow-breathe, to the contented hum of a full belly, to the soft, rhythmic breaths of sleeping infants snug up against their mom. They were safe, happy, full, tired.

And then . . . 

And then I cried. I cried and cried and cried. I cried at the feeling of them close next to me. I cried at the sound of their peaceful little sighs. I cried at the realization that these moments will never ever happen again. Their happy little feet won’t dance while nursing at my breasts forever. Their little bodies won’t fit on my nursing pillow much longer. Their clothes are straining at the snaps, their pleasantly chunky bodies outgrowing everything they wear. 

Elise and Althea are going to be three months old on Monday. Is it significant that I’ll be 31 on Monday, too? That Chris turned 35 yesterday? The very thought of it makes me ache and hurt and bleed all over. I feel like screaming NO NO NO at whoever is controlling this whole thing. It hurts and it hurts and it hurts some more. And most of all, I hate the feeling that the everyday just happens and I can’t ever fill myself enough with the now to remember every detail, engage in every sight sound smell taste touch of these painfully perfect babies.

I’m terrified of forgetting today. 

I want to trap these moments in a bottle so that someday I can tell my daughters all about how smitten I am with them.

I can’t believe I ever said I didn’t want to get married or have children. My life has never been more complete than it is with them and my husband.

(This emotional breakdown is courtesy of this slideshow from Dooce and this post from Mommy Melee. Thanks, bitches.)

I have a confession to make. I don’t dress my kids in cute clothes.

I feel bad about this. I have two staggeringly beautiful daughters. Not just two kids, but twins. Most people in their right minds would take every opportunity to dress them in totally adorable outfits, even on regular old spit-up-blown-out-diapers-god-I-hope-the-neighbors-don’t-stop-by sort of days. 

I, however, do not.

The girls live in onesies, and not all of them are even that cute. Some of them are just plain white. From Ross. On sale. I don’t even put cute little pants on to make a complete outfit. I mismatch their socks — polka dots with flowers, cherries with stripes, Pooh with Cookie Monster. And some days . . . well, some days, they wear the same onesie they wore the day before. 

Honestly, I don’t know what people dress infants in anyhow. Dresses? Shoes and socks? Jumpers? Jammies? Where do people go with their infants that requires them to be dressed in anything other than a onesie?

I’ve tried dressing the girls up. Hell, I even dressed them alike. There was the day I took them to Target wearing matching pink dresses. 

Elise and Althea in matching dresses

Oh, you think that’s cute? The dresses were from Target. How tacky is that? The dresses didn’t even fit. They’re for three-month-olds. The girls were eight weeks old at the time. Tack-eee.

Then there was the time I showed them off at work. Again, matching dresses. Again, from Target.

Althea and Elise looking Elizabethan

Yes, they are totally cute and adorable. But those collars make the girls look like characters in a Shakespearian play.

So, I just keep them in onesies. Because when it comes to my girls, clothes don’t make the cute. They do it all on their own.

Really, people.

Elise's bath time

Althea's bath time

I thought long and hard about what to title this post. When it came down to it, the current title about sums up what I’m feeling. Pardon the post that follows – it’s among my more rambling, random and unorganized posts to date.

People, look at those little faces. Can you imagine having to leave those little babies?

Well, that’s what I’m going to do tomorrow. Because tomorrow I finally return to work part-time.

I’m pretty unhappy about this – an emotion I honestly didn’t think I’d feel this strongly. I thought I’d enjoy the opportunity to be around adults again. I thought I’d be sick of the crying and changing and feeding. But I’m not. The girls don’t cry that much, really. Since they don’t soil themselves every time they eat, changing them is hardly the chore it was at first.  And nursing is probably the single most amazing and beautiful experience I’ve ever had. The girls are finally showing a rhythm to their days. It seems like just as we’re feeling stable, I up and go back to work.

Oh, and I have to figure out how/where to (discreetly?) pump at work. Yuck. 

So yeah. Going back to work is making me sad, even if it is only five hours a day. (And I realize I suck for saying that because I’m incredibly, incredibly lucky to even have a job with the way things are these days.)

Tomorrow is also the girls’ two-month checkup. This includes their first vaccines with a new doctor I haven’t met yet. Mama’s going to be a sad, sad camper tomorrow. Tomorrow is, indeed, going to suck.

I suppose the one golden nugget here is that we met a seemingly wonderful lady that will be taking care of the babies a couple of days this week. She came on a personal recommendation from another twin mama that I trust. Praise god, because I interviewed two other ladies on the phone that were NOT going to work out.

The first lady seemed great on paper. A South American who ran a daycare in Venezuela for years, she would have been perfect to keep speaking Spanish to the girls in my absence. But wow, was she brusque. Rude, even. Cultural, I know, but not someone you could have asked to, like, warm a bottle or anything extravagant like that. 

The second lady sounded like she was in a room full of dudes when she answered the phone. It was one of those instances where there was mayhem in the background and she said, “Hold on….” to someone else before she answered the phone “Hello?” It only took a few words before it became apparent that she was fucked up. Not fucked up in the head, but fucked up like she was on pills or drunk at 2:45 in the afternoon. Turns out she was an RN for 25 years who “was sick of working for everyone else.” Uh huh. Pill popper who got fired for stealing Valium, I’m sure of it. Now I understand why people covet their babysitters.

Anyhow. Wish me luck, dear reader(s).

Have you ever been to a chiropractor? Me neither. Well, not until now. And I love her. 

Starting at about 24 or 25 weeks into my twins pregnancy, I started having . . . issues with mobility. Basically, I sucked at walking. My coworkers commented that I was already waddling, and my perinatologist mentioned that I looked as big as a full-term singleton pregnancy. I started having nasty pain in my pelvis due to a separation of the pubic bone. Within weeks, my back started giving out. Etc.

As the pregnancy progressed, it got bad. Really bad. Chris often had to help me get dressed, get into bed, get off the couch, walk to the bathroom. He even had to help me pick up my foot to get my leg into the car. (On a related note, my husband is freakin’ amazing. What a man, to help his practically invalid wife pick up her freakin’ foot to get into a car. Thanks, babe.)

I assumed that it would get better after delivery. Wrong. The pain continued, just in different ways. My hips/pelvis/legs/knees/feet never learned how to cooperate with that whole walking thing. My back spasmed and ached every time I tried to get up from a seated position such that I was often bent at the waist, still compensating for a front-heavy weight that was no longer there. The weirdest thing was that my feet would fall asleep when I laid on my back in bed.

At my six-week post-partum visit at the OB, I rattled off my list of physical maladies to the nurse. She gave me the name of a chiropractor who has lots of experience with pregnant and post-partum ladies. 

A potential cure for the horrible pain? I called and made an appointment that same day.

Dr. T is a vivacious little thing with 30+ years experience popping and cracking and smashing people back into alignment. I was terrified, honestly, because Chris had had a bad experience with a chiropractor some time ago. Plus, the whole idea that they can snap your neck and paralyze you kind of freaked me out.

At my initial consultation, the doctor took X-rays of my neck, pelvis and lower back. Two days later, I was staring at my X-rays in horror. 

Several things:

• A healthy neck is supposed to have a gentle curve. Mine does not. It is stick straight, probably due to some car accidents I had years ago.
• I have a scoliosis in my lower back. My spine sways to the right near my waist.
• Rather than pointing upward, my hips are flared outward and are tilted forward.
• My tailbone is pointing out instead of curving down.
• My pelvis bone is still slightly separated.

With this information, the doctor went to work. She set me on her table, a contraption made up of a bunch of movable parts. First, I laid on my stomach. With her hand on my hip, she pushed down at the same time that she dropped a section of the table. BOOM-SNAP!

Woah wait. WTF is going on here.

I didn’t feel any pain. It was just totally fucked up and unexpected.

After popping my hips and butt, she flipped me over and went to work on my pubic bone. This was definitely scary, having this little woman balance her weight on my pelvic bone while dropping the table out from under me in order to pop my pelvis back into place. All the while, she is blabbering about all kinds of random nonsense. “Well, I had three babies in three years and raised them as a single mom” BOOM-SNAP! “I can’t believe you’ve been like this for five months, you could have come while you were still pregnant and” BOOM-SNAP! “See I don’t do that hocus-pocus stuff. It’s all biomechanics and science, really. We don’t need so much pain medication, we just need realignment” BOOM-SNAP! Probably the most whack thing she did was snap my neck while chatting about her daughter in college. 

$150 later and I was out the door, feeling that the treatment was a sham. The bitch had cracked a few bones and made a bunch of noise with the table, taken my money and sent me home, laughing at my stretch-marked ass the whole way to the bank.

But then . . .

But then, I went home and went about my day. And I had no pain. I could get up from the couch and stand up straight! My feet didn’t fall asleep when I laid down. This was a freakin’ miracle. 

So, do I believe in chiropractic care  now? You bet your dislocated ass bones I do.