Birthdays, our own and our children’s, are useful moments in that they provide opportunities for us to stop and look back on the path we just traveled over the past four seasons. It’s an opportunity for reflection, contemplation, hopefully some synthesis, and maybe some insights that will help us gain wisdom.

            Wouldn’t that be nice! When I look back at my twin’s first year, it is difficult to get beyond a single thought: “Let’s not do THAT again!”

            People gaze upon us coming down the street with diaper bags, gigundo stroller and a multitude of waving hands and feet, shake their heads and say, “How do you do it?” When I look back on our first year, I wonder, “How DID we do it?” And the answer is, we did it in a pell-mell rush from one task to the next, mostly because we were too scared to do anything else. If we stopped for contemplation, we probably would have paralyzed ourselves with fear. How will we do this? But you keep on, and you do it, because like the lost swimmer, you don’t have a lot of options except to keep swimming.

            Really, it was the twin infancy that colors the entire year and that makes me jump to my negative reaction.  Frankly, I’m having a difficult time remembering the first six months of their lives. I have read that high levels of stress can actually inhibit the brain’s ability to manage short-term memory, and I’m pretty sure large sections of my brain were completely blocked off for months. Plus, it feels like there was actually too much stuff going on to remember it all. My body was healing, my going-on four year old was losing his mind, and these new little beings were here and they didn’t really care that we didn’t know what we were doing. 

            So what was the hardest part? The nursing took some doing, though I think it was simply getting used to having two babies nursing at the same time without smooshing anyone or letting babies get too much milk up their noses. Of course, eating enough to keep up with the nursing was a full time job in and of itself. And the diapers! There were days where I did nothing but feed myself, feed children, and change diapers. But the most difficult part was the comforting. It sounds so silly—you have two babies who want to be held, you have two arms, so what’s the problem? Well, my husband and I just got tired. They’re huge, for one thing. Who ever heard of nine-pound twins? There’s a reason twins arrive small—it’s so that mom and dad can hold both of them for hours at a time without developing tendonitis in their wrists.

For another thing, our children had LOTS of gas. How can babies get gas from the breast milk of a mom who just ate asparagus? Isn’t that like getting drunk by getting too close to the bottle of wine? And it wasn’t just the green leafy vegetable thing—they had problems legumes, dairy, the usual stuff, but I think they got gassy from me simply eating. And all parents know that there are days when your babies just cry and no amount of simethicone is going to take care of it, now matter how much you want to go to bed.

All babies do cry, but when one twin cries, both cry. I imagine some day I will appreciate their empathy for each other, but those first few months I was hoping for a little more self-involvement on their part.  We own an exercise ball, one of those big blown up things you’re supposed to do yoga and sit-ups on, and my sister discovered that if she sat on the ball, held a baby in each arm and bounced, they would calm down and even eventually go to sleep. We spent months bouncing on that ball, every evening, often for hours at a time. It kept them from crying even when it didn’t soothe them to sleep. It was great—until my daughter decided one day that she hated the ball and would cry when we tried to bounce her. Of course, my son still loved it… so now what? The problem was solved one day when my husband, bouncing Quinn for a nap, popped the ball. I wasn’t in the room, but I heard the outraged screams.

            And Quinn screamed a lot. He hated to be a newborn. He started scowling in the hospital, and his brown was in a perpetual furrow. We saw smiles for the first time when he was four months old and he could mostly sit up on his own and actually do stuff. I guess he was crying all that time from sheer boredom. Moia was a very mellow newborn, but once she could sit up, her brothers made her cry constantly through their terrible treatment… such as touching her on the arm. My completely compliant child turned into a sensitive, wailing complainer just when my complainer decided life wasn’t so bad. She calmed down eventually, but it made for another rough couple of months.

            And did I mention the older brother who lost his mind? We had spoiled him when he was our only child, all the while thinking that we weren’t, but it was clear once the new siblings arrived that our son was not going to take his loss of attention quietly. It wasn’t as if we were bedrocks of calm and serenity ourselves. We easily fell into the endless cycle of being stressed about doing the right stuff as parents, and our children picked up our stress and acted out on it, which increased OUR stress… It was a terrible spiral that took us months to escape. There are still days when we fall right back in.

            And then… it all got easier. I think it was when the twins started crawling, somewhere around the seven month mark, that they truly began to emerge from helpless newborn. Now I have two walkers who play with their older brother and each other. They eat food, they try out new words… I have children. I may whine and complain, but it was such a short period of their lives where they needed everything from us, and we despaired of giving it to them because we were wrung dry. One of the difficulties is you won’t really know if you did a good job till some distant future time, when you have happy, well-adjusted children, or you don’t. And we’ll certainly have new types of challenges as these three get older. Everything is relative, though—when I think my life is getting difficult, I just need to pause, reflect on those first six months, and remember that our lives are pretty darn good now.

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