Today has been...hang on...let me think...yep. It's been the worst morning I can remember since the twins were born. There have been some bad ones. I've said this often and I'm sure that in the not-too-distant future something even worse will happen and that will be the worst morning I can remember, but today has been a trip.
I started blocking off a bigger and bigger area for the girls, testing them out to see how they handle the increased freedom and taking their cues in order to baby proof. I'm never sure what exactly I need to do and I figure I may as well let them be my guide, as baby proofing without an idea of what exactly needs baby proofed is...let's say...overwhelming. So they've graduated to most of the downstairs, with the kitchen blocked off unless I'm in it. They've been chillin' in the dining room for days now, so after bottles and our first diaper change this morning, I came to the computer to check email and - I'm not ashamed to admit it - play a little Farmville, since they were happily occupied and (I thought) everything was in order.
Turns out, no. Everything was not in order. Far from it. Because June managed to maneuver her way around what I thought were some cleverly placed obstacles and knock over a floor lamp. That in and of itself would have been okay. But the Rube Goldberg Death Machine that, apparently, is my dining room was activated by the falling of said lamp. Within seconds the lamp had landed its upper half on my kitchen table. Again, not disasterous in and of itself, but for the fact that I had put a giant glass fishbowl (about a five gallon glass container) full of matchbooks collected from around the world on top of the table, so that the girls wouldn't, you know, think it was a matchbook buffet. Because apparently their favorite food right now is anything that (a) is not food and (b) could potentially kill them.
So, to recap, lamp to matchbook bowl, matchbook bowl to floor in a million little pieces. Not the fake million little pieces, like on Oprah, but really. One. Million. Pieces. Of glass. Sprinkled all around the frozen bodies of my daughters. Who looked at me as I flew around the corner as if the world had just stopped. Glass breaking was a new sound for them. They did not like it.
Know what other sound they hate? Well, Harper hates? The vacuum. Which, obviously, I could not wait for backup to run this time. She screamed as I demoted them both to Stage 1 gate access (only the front portion of the living room). She screamed louder as I got on my hands and knees among the shards of glass on the carpet and picked up all of the matchbooks that had landed on the floor and chairs. She screamed louder still as I unwound the plug for the vacuum and I could hear her positively shrieking over the vacuum as it ground up chunk after chunk of broken glass. I would have left it but I literally could not have gone to the kitchen or the bathroom (or let the cats eat out of their dishes, for that matter) without cleaning up the glass.
It took her a good thirty minutes to stop screaming even after I shut the vacuum off and scooped her up (which I did the moment I was finished, scout's honor). Then it took a good hour of cuddling and another fifteen minutes of screaming after lights out to get them down for a nap. Of course, ten minutes into the nap June threw herself against the side of her crib, missing the bumper entirely and smacking her forehead against the rails. So that added another hour or so onto the getting-to-sleep routine.
All in all it's been a terrible morning and I have not been at my best. But as I sat here a few moments ago Googling things like "mother of twins in crisis" and "how to stay sane with twins" I realized that I am still - broken glass, cranky babies and all - a super lucky mom.
First of all, when you Google any combination of "twins" and "crisis," you're going to come up with some disturbing news results about mothers who have killed their (usually infant) twins. It's just headlines and you don't even get enough story to really know what happened, but it's hard to just skim over them and it's even harder to forget what you've read and what your imagination has come up with to fill in the blanks. While I can say with absolute certainty that I have never actually wanted to harm the girls, I can say with as much certainty that I understand entirely where that level of frustration comes from. My husband leaves the house at 6 in the morning and does not get back until 5. That's if he's on time. Many, many days of the week no one visits at all. If they do, it's usually my mother-in-law, but that's never before 4:30 or so in the afternoon. The sound of a crying baby may annoy you. It may drive you up the wall and make you think you are going crazy, but you don't even know the half of it unless you've spent a full week alone for 10 hours plus with two cranky pantsed infants. Anytime anyone wants to tell me how they know what I'm going through or remind me of my good fortune, although I usually smile and nod and thank them for their insight, I want to offer to let them live my life for a week and then tell me how lucky I am. Because I know that with 9 out of 10 well-intentioned people, I'm going to be scraping a quivering, blubbering mass of pulp out of the corner where it curled into the fetal position to die by day 3.
But the truth is that, despite all of the frustration, the isolation and loneliness, and the frequent urge to just get in the car and drive away, not returning for days at a time, I am so incredibly lucky.
My girls were 39 weeks (well, 39 weeks and 5 days) old before they were born. And the only reason that they didn't go the full 40 weeks was because I evicted them due to the fact that I physically could not endure them any longer. They got the best possible start in life, and for the fact that I was able to carry them for so long (edema and all) I am thankful.
They were healthy and not conjoined when they were born. Not only did we avoid the extended NICU stay that so many twins and their parents are stuck with, but we avoided any birth defects of any kind. The biggest abnormality with them was Harper's birthmark, which everyone tells me will disappear by the age of five anyway. I cannot tell you how many times I stop to thank whatever version of fate exists that my husband and I did not have to deal with these problems. We are strong, but I don't know that we could have been that strong.
My girls are healthy enough to scream, knock over lamps, and generally raise Hell on a daily basis. It drives me absolutely insane. I can't write often or deeply, and I'm not in an MFA program because of them. I can't go to work and I don't have any close friends that I see often enough. I spend most days without another human being capable of having a conversation not carried out in the language of raspberries and babbling. It's almost impossible at this time of year to even go to the grocery store without everyone being thoroughly disgusted with one another by the time we get home. Forget about clothes shopping, having a (relaxed) lunch out, or having a cup of coffee without the constant threat of being called back to work looming over me like Eeyore's black cloud.
But after a nap, when I go up to get them, they're sitting up in their cribs or standing up, chewing on the rails, smiling and squealing with delight to see me. They're still too young to be disappointed in me, to know enough to resent me. To pay a therapist one hundred dollars an hour to listen to stories about how awful I was. They can't babble, "I hate you mom," or slam a bedroom door (at least on purpose) when they aren't allowed to wear the clothes that Cosmo says they should. There are no boyfriends to meet. No calls in the middle of the night to worry about.
If my biggest worry right now is what to put my matchbooks in and where I'm going to store all my breakables for the next two years...yeah. I'll take that deal.
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