All our hurts are nothing compared to what our savior endured in this world. Let us remember that, and him, as we sit here this day. Let us remember that it is Friday.
But Sunday is coming.
The mystery of twinship
My twins have always been close, and it’s not just because they moved from the same womb to the same room, sharing a Moses basket and a crib in between. There’s something special about these two. How it happened is beyond me. Literally beyond me. It has to be God, because for the first two years of their lives, I existed in a daze, living in the spaces between feedings and changings and naps. By popular parenting standards, I was not a fabulous mom. I barely breastfed, had postpartum depression, never bought organic anything, and was thrilled when they watched TV.
Through their first two years, I wrote, emailing volumes of twin stories to family and friends. My mother recently sent them all back, and I as I read, I realized that most of my memories from that time are gone, save for a general feeling of hopelessness, exhaustion, and panic.
Yet the words seem strangely familiar, a reflection in a store window. Through their lens I can appreciate that what seemed like an utterly black time did contain moments of beauty and grace, and that I was a good mother. Now my twins are six, and I am so thankful to my mother for preserving those words so I can put it all together and marvel at the panoramic puzzle that is twinship, starting from the beginning.
The Morse code tapped out in my distended belly was communication, but not necessarily with me. In my lower abdomen, my son slumbered, and under my ribcage, my daughter, feisty and awake, kicked restlessly. Wake up, she telegraphed.
A blow to my kidney made me gasp and my son answered. No. I’m sleeping. Stop kicking me.
She responded with a series of jabs. I want to be born already. This is boring.
Well, just stop moving. I’m trying to sleep. There’s not enough room in here to even think about being born.
Naturally, my daughter got her way.
Swaddled and in the same crib, they found peace only when they found each other. Their foreheads pressed together as they slept, breathing together, dreaming together, already forming a trinity of him and her and them.
Babble turned to first words in their language instead of mine. Deep philosophical conversations, from the sound of it, conducted entirely in twin-speak, and comprehensible only to the speakers.
They are each other’s security blankets, covering all manner of hurts and needs. A mother’s hug might soothe, but only the other half can make things whole.
My twins are two people, distinct in every way. One boy, one girl. One light, one dark. Photo negatives of each other in thought and in action. Where one has shadow, the other rushes to fill the space with light.
Now, I watch as the threads that connect them multiply, weaving a pattern on an invisible loom, using an ancient craft that can’t be taught. The rest of us are blessed enough to watch it happen, and as outsiders, we only catch glimpses of this gossamer mesh that binds, moments that leave us struck dumb with disbelief at the beauty of this communion. In those moments, I see God through my children, around my children, binding them together with the sticky silk of love.
This mesh forms a beautiful interweaving of lives and space and thoughts and touch that I will never fully understand, even as their mother. The threads that bind aren’t restraints; they’re a web of love and language and unspoken thoughts. If one needs the other, they snap back; a rubber band released. I watch, and I marvel, but I see through a haze, knowing the details will never be clear for anyone but the two of them.
Parental guidance
Part 1: You’re never ready
I love it when friends ask me, “How do you know when you’re ready to have a baby?”
My response is usually to smile and say, “Oh, you’ll just know.” And that’s true, in part. My body was screaming at me to reproduce when we started trying to get pregnant.
The part I leave out though, is that (and I feel I should whisper) you’re never going to be ready. Not for parenthood.
Infancy
Nothing can prepare you for the abrupt transition from a self-centered life to one that spins around a small, squalling infant (or two, in my case). You’re never ready for sleep-deprivation, for first cases of croup, for that first call to poison control, for that first heart-stopping moment you turn around in a store and don’t see your toddler. Or trips to the grocery store that involve projectile vomiting in the produce section.
And how could you prepare for those first well visits to the pediatrician with all those shots and screaming? I knew what was coming and still sobbed along with my babies. Of course, that might have been the postpartum depression, and let me tell you, you can’t ever be ready for that, either. No matter how sure you were that you were ready for motherhood, if you find yourself in a full fledged sobbing breakdown in your pediatrician’s waiting room, as I did, you’re going to think you made a mistake. Especially when two other women come over, pick up your screaming infants and ask if there’s someone they can call for you.
There is no prep course, no manual, no boot camp, no basic training that covers this.
Believe me, I looked.
Post-infancy
Post-babyhood, I assumed it could only get easier. No more diapers. Constant reflux, finally banished. Regular (mostly) full nights of sleep.
I could not have been more wrong. The hard part was just starting. Infancy is about taking care of your children’s most basic needs. The rest of their lives they need you to help them navigate the minefield of the world. And it’s a lot more dangerous that it used to be.
Bullying
There’s plenty of advice out there for what to do when your kids are bullied, but it’s mostly aimed at high school students. When it happens to your four-year old, what do you do? I raced down to the preschool and scooped up my baby boy, ice pack clamped to his bloody nose, and cried with him. That night I was torn between reading him “Chester Raccoon and the Big Bad Bully,” yet again, and giving him my grandfather’s advice to “just knock the crap out of him.”
I went with Chester. Invite the bully to play. Be nice. It’s a new era of parenting, after all.
But a few weeks later, when my daughter came home crying because of the same bully, I’d had enough. My grandfather’s voice came out of my mouth and I actually told her to hit him back. And she cried harder, and said, “I can’t do that, Mommy! I can’t hit him!”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not a bad girl!”
You can never be ready for this.
Finding the right words
How could you ever prepare for tender pieces of your own heart to walk around outside your body, finding a new way to get trampled each day? My daughter asks me if she’s fat, and what the numbers on the scale and her clothing tags mean. My son is left out of a game. Both have been taunted and teased. It’s normal stuff; childhood stuff. But it hurts so much more when you’re the one trying to make it better, and you don’t know what to say.
My children are the most priceless treasures I’ll ever have, and I can’t so much as insulate them in bubble wrap before sending them out into the world. They come back with bruise, cuts, and scrapes, but what really worries me are the wounds I can’t see. The times when my daughter curls her knees to her chest and whispers, “Mommy, I’m stupid.” The times when I know something is bothering my son and I can’t figure it out because I grew up in a house full of X chromosomes and don’t speak boy.
Lord, help me find the right words to comfort them, I pray. Help me find the words.
Words have always been there for me, but the right ones for parenting are not easy to find. How do I explain to my kids about their friend with a mommy and dozens of donor siblings? Or that some children have two mommies or two daddies, and that’s ok?
The new “talk”
Having fielded a number of questions about how babies get out of their mothers’ stomachs, I was mentally prepping for the initial sex talk with my twins a few months ago. They’re six and in kindergarten, and honestly, I’m a believer in the free flow of information, the accurate naming of body parts, and that they should learn what they know from me, not from rumors and whisperings on the playground.
But then we got home from a lovely day and turned on the television. The tragic shootings at Sandy Hook happened that day, in a kindergarten class. I began to read news stories online, and as my kids ate dinner, I started to cry. There they were, safe at the dinner table, and several states away, children their age were dead.
“Mommy, why are you crying?”
I told them. Simply, yet truthfully. “I’m crying because a bad man went into a school today and did some horrible things. It was far away from here, but he went into a class full of kindergartners and shot them.”
What I couldn’t say is “I’m crying because now I’m going to have to tell you about things you shouldn’t have to know for years. You’re going to learn about lockdowns and places to hide and security procedures, and that’s not what I wanted for you. I wanted ABCs and library time and unlocked school doors and dodgeball. I don’t want you to know which tree is the place where you hide on the playground, and where all the closets are in the school.”
I wanted to wail and punch pillows. We weren’t even the victims, yet that night, my children’s innocence fell like scales from their eyes.
There is no being ready for this. No being ready for, months later, the random morning when your daughter calls from the bathroom, “Mommy? What do I do if a bad guy comes in while I’m in the bathroom?”
We still haven’t had “the talk.” I’m trying to talk them through bad guy scenarios when I don’t know if the answers I’m giving are even right in the first place.
So to my friends who ask, the real answer is this. You can never be ready to be a parent. You may be ready to have a baby, but it’s not the same thing. Not at all.
Valentine’s Day. Not a fan.
Valentine’s Day is ridiculous.
Before you go getting the wrong idea, it’s not because I’m single and own 42 cats and resent anyone in a happy relationship. Nope. I’m all about love. Love it!
And I’m not going to get preachy about how it’s a purely commercial holiday. (Though I could go on at some length about how it is a holiday designed exclusively to guilt people into buying flowers, cards, candy, and dinners that have been marked up by hundreds of percentages over their usual prices. But that would be a digression.)
But this isn’t why I hate the heart-shaped, sickly sweet holiday. I hate it because it can be poison for relationships, especially for married couples. We run the risk of falling into the trap that love is something we only need to practice once a year. That thoughtfulness and kindness and putting your spouse first are deeds reserved for a special occasion.
No wonder we hear people talk about “falling out of love” all the time. Who can keep up that first love inertia of love letters, breathless kisses, flowers, and romantic dates? Only people on reality shows with producers handling all the details, and look how well that works out for them.
I don’t claim to be a marriage expert, but Mark and I have been married almost ten years, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this:
Love is not a feeling. Love is a verb. Love is something you must deliberately, consciously, intentionally do each and every day. It is denial of self, putting your spouse first. It is not always comfortable, and certainly not easy. It is work.
And not the kind of work you can cram into one day of the year, put together hastily with spitballs and scotch tape and covered over with red roses.
It’s the daily work of caring for your wife when she has yet another migraine, and not holding it against her. Of accepting your husband’s insane work schedule and supporting him in it, because that’s what he needs: support, not a shrewish voice wondering when he’s coming home. It’s taking care of each other all the time, in body, mind, and soul.
Valentine’s Day has taken on prom-like expectations for adults. It’s advertised as the best day of your life, when really, it’s just another Thursday night. Here’s the challenge: don’t make February 14th exceptional; make all the other days of the year just as full of love. Then you’ll really have something to celebrate.
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