Sometimes I just can’t handle being the mother of twins

by Rachel Toalson | Wing Chair Musings, Wing Chair Musings featured

I walk into his bedroom, checking on him for the seventh time, interrupting my writing to do it, which means I’m already annoyed. Put out. A touch angry.

Maybe I waited too long to come in here, but there he is, sitting in the middle of a pile of clothes and their hangers. I feel the rage in my shoulders; haven’t I told him a thousand times to stay out of closets and drawers and his brothers’ beds?

My heart sinks to my toes, and I shake my head. His eyes stare wide, because he knows, he knows he’s in trouble for this, and then I see the worst of it: a wet spot on the pillow that no longer has a case because he stripped it off before he did his deed.

Did you pee on your pillow? I say.

Yeah, he says, and he doesn’t even look the least bit remorseful, just grins up at me like this is something to be proud of, this peeing on a pillow he’ll sleep on soon. It’s all I can do to pick him up and take him to the potty instead of throwing all those books across the room in a rage, because it’s every single day, every single day that I’m battling twins. It’s relentless and exhausting and, sometimes, way too much.

I’m already crying on the way back from the potty—from anger or disappointment or despair, I don’t know. I put him in his playpen without a word and close the door, because I don’t even want to know what happens next. All the way back to my room I can feel the dam breaking, the one that’s been piling for too long, the one that ends in I don’t want to be the mother of twins anymore.

I never asked for twins, and yet, there they are, in the next room, tearing everything apart.

Especially me.

///

It was three months after losing a baby that we got pregnant again.

The baby-losing had left a hole so wide and deep it felt like it could only be filled with a new baby. So when I took that pregnancy test and it said yes, my heart healed the tiniest little bit.

We waited weeks to even go to the doctor, because the last baby had died at nine weeks and we didn’t know it until the twelfth week, and I wanted to make sure this one lived before I got my hopes up. Except my hopes flew high the minute I saw a positive test. Tentative and yet solid.

My husband came with me for the first appointment, because I could barely lift my head I was so sick—but mostly because the last appointment, when the screen showed a baby had died, I sat on an examination table alone, and he did not want me to do it again, if this one was not alive. My doctor’s nurse practitioner brought that familiar, bulky machine into the bright-white room, and it only took a second to see the two where there had ever been only one. We were shocked and excited and terrified, all sorts of emotions fighting their way to the middle of our hearts.

We had no idea what we were in for.

///

No one does, really, when they’re having a baby. Babies are unpredictable beings. But this was different, because there were two. We really had no idea.

No one told us how hard it would be. No one told us there would be days we wished we could give one away, and we knew which one it would be. No one told us there would be whole months where we questioned our ability to keep on keeping on, where someone’s You’re such great parents. I don’t know how you do it, would make us burst into tears, because we knew we weren’t “doing it.” No one told us we’d live with those daily thoughts that sounded a lot like They’re so cute, I’m so lucky I get to have twins, What’s cooler than this? and also like I give up and Someone please take one of them and I wish I hadn’t had them.

We kept telling ourselves it would get easier. We believed it, too. After that foggy first year we hardly remember anymore, we told ourselves it would be easier because they would be older and could feed themselves. Except then they were mobile and there were two babies to keep safe and out of things and entertained so they didn’t tear the whole house down around us.

There were two drinks to pour and two drinks to keep on trays so they weren’t knocked to the floor where they’d make two big puddles of milk we’d have to clean up. There were four hands throwing food on the floor. There were two babies to change and two babies breaking into bathrooms to unravel whole rolls of expensive eco-friendly toilet paper into a now-stopped-up toilet and two babies turning on water faucets so they run for an hour before we even noticed. There were two babies tearing out the pages of books and two babies climbing out of cribs and two babies taking off diapers to play with poop. There were two babies getting into closets and drawers and pulling the stuffing out of stuffed animals and making holes in walls bigger and locking themselves in bathrooms.

Now there’s potty training and twice the accidents and twice the frustration and twice the I-just-peed-on-the-floor-because-I-felt-like-it-even-though-I-know-betters, and some days I honestly don’t want to do it anymore.

It doesn’t get easier the older they get. I know this now. There will always be two of them going through the same developmental stage, and, my God, I did not ask for this.

///

That first night home from the hospital, where they’d spent twenty days in neonatal intensive care for being born six weeks early, we tried assigning a twin to each of us, my husband and me. But then they both woke up at the same time for a feeding, and neither of us got sleep enough to take care of the three other boys who needed us, too.

The next night we parceled out shifts, with one parent taking the 11:30 p.m. and midnight feedings and the other taking the 2:30 and 3 a.m. feedings, and the first parent taking the 5:30 and 6 a.m. feedings. Except we’d start feeding one, and the other would wake up and scream to be fed. They were slow eaters, and the first one would take forty-five minutes to finish three ounces, and the second one would scream for forty-five minutes until he got his food, and neither of us slept, again. Every time I listened to those babies crying, my heart started crying, too, because it was already too too much.

We had tried to avoid it, because I wanted to hold my babies, but we finally, for the sake of sanity, caved to feeding them both at the same time in a swing and spent the rest of that year sticking bottles into mouths and counting down to when feeding time would be over, because we were overwhelmed and exhausted.

And then hard never left.

It didn’t take us long to know and understand that nothing about twins would ever, ever be easy.

///

Almost every time we take our twins out in public, at least one person will ask if they’re twins, even though they look exactly alike. Yes, we’ll say, they’re twins, and it never fails what they’ll say next:

So cute. I always wanted twins.

My husband and I will look at each other.

No. You didn’t, our eyes will say to each other. You want the idea of twins, but you don’t want twins. Trust us. But we smile politely and say, yeah, twins are really fun, because they are really fun sometimes, and then other times they’re maddening and crazy and way too much to manage.

A whole lot of the time they are crazy-makers.

Twins are the hardest challenge I have ever faced in parenting, and I would never wish them upon anyone. It sounds terrible all packaged like that, but it’s true.

People also like to tell me all the time that they had kids who were really close together—almost like twins. I have done that, too, with Boy 2 only fourteen months older than Boy 3, but it is not the same as twins. Not the same at all.

My twins beat me and break me and bust me all up inside, and sometimes I don’t even know how to handle all the hard they bring to a life. Sometimes I don’t even want to.

///

Last spring my brother and sister-in-law announced that they were pregnant with twins. I felt excited for them, of course, because they’d waited so long to have a baby, just one. But I also felt afraid, because I know how tough twins are, how tempers can fly and anger can follow one in and out of rooms for days on end, without explanation.

I knew that there are days when you feel strung so tight you know you can’t take one more thing because of the ringer your twins wrapped you around this morning, and then you’ll open a door to walls and a floor and two babies, who were supposed to be sleeping all this time, covered in poop. And there are days when you think it might be getting easier, and then a twin climbs over the gate barring the upstairs and pulls down half the books in the library before you can get to him, and you’re so busy picking up all those books you forget there’s another unsupervised one downstairs, and before you can make it back down, he’s pulled out the entire economy package of four hundred Band Aids and stuck them all to the bathroom floor. And there are days when one will run out the back door without shoes and you’re trying to chase him to get those shoes on and the other one will see his chance and run out the front door someone forgot to barricade-lock, and he’s halfway down the street before you even notice he’s gone.

There are days when, for a split second, you wonder if you should just let him go.

I couldn’t very well tell them all this, though, so I voiced my congratulations and then encouraged them to find help. I took pictures of poop walls and emptied-onto-the-floor closets so we could laugh about all those twinanigans that happen every other minute of a day and race a parent toward breakdown.

The day before Father’s Day, my sister-in-law went into labor twenty weeks early, and doctors couldn’t stop it, and she delivered them, two boys, and held them and watched them claw for breath they could not find because they had only the tiniest beginnings of lungs. And then she watched them die.

That night, I hugged my two babies a little tighter.

///

I know what a blessing every child is. I do.

I know what it’s like to lose a baby. I have.

I know how it feels to watch a child fall so sick he might die. He almost did.

I know what it’s like. I know.

I know the incredible gift of five healthy boys, the gift of another on the way, the gift of a home filled with wild, untamable boys. And I remember it all when they’re finally asleep and I can breathe again.

It’s just that during those waking moments, when a twin is pulling everything in sight off a counter because I haven’t had time to put away what his brothers stacked there, and another twin has found the pencil his older brother used for homework and is now marking all over the pages of a library book, I forget. There is not enough of me, and I forget.

I forget that one twin’s name means “swift and honorable,” how one day he will be strong and solid and mighty, how he is all of that now, bundled in a sometimes-unmanageable two-year-old boy. I forget that the other twin’s name means “God remembers,” because he was a gift in the losing, two blessings that took away the one curse, how he shows love’s nature in his very being. He is all of this now, bundled in a sometimes-difficult two-year-old boy. And even though mothering twins may be the hardest parenting challenge I’ve ever been given to date, I know, too, that they are tearing me apart every single minute of every single day.

They are the ones who pull those words from my lips: I just can’t do this life anymore.

This is a good place to be, I think—because it’s only when we can’t do this life anymore that we give an inch more to Another who can do it much better for us. I can’t do it is another door into surrender.

I can choose to raise these twins all on my own power and patience, and I will fail every time. Or I can choose to raise them on the power and patience of Another. I can drink from the well that will never run dry, and I will see victory every time.

I know what happens when I choose my own, limited power and patience. I think about how nice it would be to give one away, or I wish I hadn’t had them, or I see in a clouded way that covers all the sunshine they’ve brought into a mama life. Double laughter. Double joy. Double love, not just double trouble.

Clear eyes can see it better than clouded ones. So this day, I choose to see.

This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.