Have your babies in a dramatic hurry at 29 weeks, the price of entry to a place people only
want to leave.
Deliver them in the t-shirt you went to bed in. You’ll be unconscious anyway.
Wonder why 20 people are in the OR—how many hands does this take?
Shake uncontrollably.Fear? Adrenaline? Cold? All of it.
Trust the surgeon they call a cowboy. Who better to deliver these wild boys
You’ve been separated from your babies, your almost two-year-old, your husband, yourself for
nearly a month already. Kept you here to save you all.
Wake up like it’s the worst vodka hangover of your life.
Demand to know every last detail of what happened last night. You are piecing history
together—yours and theirs.
Listen to the nurses chat about the famously sleeping husbands while yours snores beside you.
Call your brother who’s groggily tending to your toddler. He showed up still in his coat and tie
last night, the world’s most overdressed babysitting, so your husband could rush to you.
Picture your husband alone in a cab on the FDR.
Entertain frequent medical visitors who want to poke at your body. The cowboy surgeon is
your favorite—keen to tell you about Baby B grabbing her finger, demanding not to be left behind. Smart kid, you feel the same way.
Don’t see your babies for 24 long hours. You’re detained by the Bakri balloon in your uterus,
medicine’s most rudimentary levee.
You are all body and no autonomy.
Interrogate the neonatologists who bring fuzzy statistics and wait-and-see platitudes.
Send your husband to the NICU again and again, wanting pictures, videos, reports from the
front lines about these creatures you’ve yet to meet after their not-long-enough residency in
your uterine hotel.
How sick? How tiny? Who are they?
Feel ghastly. It’s the first day you don’t see your toddler. You’re too wrecked. Birth keeps you
from all three.
Meet your babies at midnight. The gatekeepers finally relent. You will make hundreds of trips
here, the 9th floor.
Long to hold them, to feel them on the other side of your body, but they are too
fragile, too dependent on their tubes and wires—forbidden for more than a week.
Take them in. They are scrawny, sleepy chickens attached to noisy machines. They are yours.
Beg to go home. You’re done; you hate it here. The hemorrhage risk is gone, and you want to
be too.
Bristle at the new floor and the chirpy nurses who draw pictures of twins on the whiteboard in
your room. They care about one thing only: are you pumping?
Sneak into the taxi, your getaway car, on day three postpartum. It’s nearly a month since
you’ve been outside. It was winter then, spring now.
Feel irrational rage at the cascading piles of clutter in your apartment and how nice everyone is
to you. You want only to hold your toddler.
Pump. Again and again. You are a cow disguised as a woman.
Dole out unsolicited advice to the other NICU mothers in the pumping room. Order this
hands-free nursing bra; crank the pump to full speed immediately.
Quietly defy the lactation consultants and sleep through the night. Your body is already
working overtime, making so much milk you’ll give it away, buy a stand-alone freezer to store
it, pour it into sippy cups for your quizzical toddler. Brag about your output to visitors—15
ounces in eight minutes.
Ferry back and forth to the NICU on the Manhattan Bridge, never not thinking about the
hemorrhage and how it got you here.
Show up for family rounds. Choke back the tears the postpartum hormone crash forces down
your cheeks. Sheepishly accept the residents’ tissues.
Pick names for these brand new boys who came so early you weren’t sure yet. Hard to get the,
NICU staff to drop Baby A and Baby B.
It’s not lost on you that you get to go outside again and drink wine. Do both.
Pay almost no attention to your healing incision; it’s the least dramatic thing that’s happened
to you this month.
Miss being pregnant, feeling two sets of everything kicking around. Feel a little robbed.
Download the preemie app with the twee drawings. What’s whimsical about this again?
Try and fail to befriend the fellow mamas. Your jokes fall flat, like 8th grade
Concede there’s no cross-incubator community here. All eyes on your own babies and their
incremental growth; grams are the only currency here.
Start to dress up for Rounds; it’s the only place you ever go anyway.
Notice how often your original OB—the one who delivered your first—comes by to check on
the twins, check on you. She knows their weight to the gram.
Attend a Cinco de Mayo party with toddler and husband in tow. Attempt normalcy. Fail.
Watch a lot of Grey’s Anatomy; it’s your thing now. They live inside medical trauma; you do too.
Toddler’s too young to visit the NICU. Handed off to grandparents and babysitters. Distracted
with stickers. Knows his way around the cafeteria.
Watch him press his face to the glass door as they try to distract him; you press yours to the incubators.
Separated from all your boys by the pain it took to get them here
