Part II: Challenges May Start Before Parenthood

In the surgery room, the doctor and team of nurses worked like a well-oiled machine. Everyone moved with a sense of urgency (not panic), and there wasn’t a lot of discussion as everyone already knew their roles and knew when to do what.

They set up a frame and hung a 6-foot-ish-tall vertical surgical blanket on it, putting it between me and my wife. It blocked everything from my view except her head, which is where I was seated; I could hear the nurses and doctor working on the other side of the curtain, but I couldn’t see what they were doing. And I was OK with that.

After a little while (as with most of my experiences concerning my kids, my perception of the passage of time distorted), the anesthesiologist asked me, “Would you like to see your child?”

“Yeah,” I happily replied. I stood and stretched my head to look around the curtain. I’m not sure what I expected to see, but this wasn’t it: My wife’s belly sliced wide open, and some of her bloody organs piled up outside her body and more still in the cut that had been obviously pushed aside, the rest of her torso covered by the same pale-blue surgical sheets (looking like a floor masked off for painting). I don’t get queasy easily (an artifact of being the son of a pediatric nurse; every childhood injury I’d had, no matter how bloody, was treated with a matter-of-fact simplicity. Plus, I have a longstanding, self-professed love of horror movies), and I didn’t faint or fall over, but the scene was a whole lot more graphic and bloodier than I had expected. I didn’t dwell on the sight and consciously focused on the pending appearance of our first child.

“Blond,” the doctor declared as he lifted a small body from the gaping hole in my wife’s belly. “Boy,” he added a second later.

Blond? I thought in confusion as I looked at my wife, whose hair was as dark brown as mine and whose skin tone was as naturally tan as mine. Boy?

My wife and I had intentionally not wanted to know the gender of our first child (which caused some frustration among friends who wanted to buy us gender-appropriate baby gifts; I was a little surprised at the amount and depth of resistance we met when we announced we didn’t want to know the gender. One friend even said, only half-jokingly, “They can tell you the sex before the kid is born. You know that, right?”). My wife and I had agreed to not find out ahead of time: “There are… too many things in life that have lost their mystery. I want a little mystery in my life. I want to be surprised,” I had said when my wife asked me if I wanted to know the gender. During the buildup to this moment, my wife and I had gotten the notion into our heads that we were going to have a girl with little, dark-brown ringlets for hair. By the time we had reached the operating room, this idea was so strongly rooted in our heads that it was a foregone conclusion to us both.

So “blond” and “boy” were not words in my vocabulary. It was like popping a piece of candy into your mouth and having it taste like a saltine cracker instead of syrupy strawberry: The taste is just fine, but it flies in the face of your expectations, and the shock of it not meeting your preconceived expectations causes you momentary confusion.

I thought the doctor might offer to have me cut the umbilical cord, but the offer never came, and I didn’t ask. Everyone seemed pretty focused on what they were doing, and I thought asking to do that would be like asking the pilot of a crashing airplane if I could take the yoke for 10 or 15 seconds as a New Age Experience for an over-entitled American. “Besides,” I joked with my wife later, “that’s what he gets paid to do.”

The doctor handed our blond son (?) to a waiting nurse and returned his attention to my wife (to, I hoped, put those organs back where he’d found them and then sew that gaping hole closed). I quickly followed the nurse to a table across the room (perhaps to confirm for myself that the doctor had gotten the hair color and gender right; I’ve always had that need to see a thing for myself. Sure enough, he was blond and a boy), where she gently placed our son in a clear plastic, square bowl. Then she set about clearing his lungs; I knew she was done when he released his first (and far from his last) cry. Then she weighed and measured him and cleaned him up while I (probably annoyingly) hovered.

I don’t think either my wife or I was able to relax until we’d had our turn holding him for the first time. And that experience—holding your first child for the first time—is as life-changing as you’ve ever heard (I can’t say it better than countless poets before me have). I just knew my life would never be the same again; I didn’t have a clue how it would be different (I had some thoughts how my life would change, but almost every presumption I’d held was wrong as parenthood has played out), but I knew everything had just changed.

Luckily for us, everything turned out just fine (the only one with any lingering ill effects at all was my wife, whose C-section cut was really sore), and the earlier scares amounted to nothing.

However, these scares were nothing compared to what we faced with our twins: twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), which I’ll address in the next blog entry.

The lesson: The thing about parenting is that all parental challenges exist independent of, and always in addition to, other, external challenges you already have. When you decide to become a parent, you’re essentially telling your life, “You haven’t given me nearly enough challenges. I’ve got way too much free time, way too much money, and am getting much too much sleep. Put more challenges atop my pile, wouldya?” Parenting is also—paradoxically and simultaneously—the most rewarding, satisfying, fun, and never-boring experience I’ve ever had. With twins, it’s never these things just multiplied by two; it’s exponential. And sometimes those challenges begin before your child is even born, which prolongs the anxiety and makes you feel absolutely powerless.

Part I: Challenges May Start Before Parenthood

“In Stereo” returns after an unintended hiatus.

In the best of times—when, after taking an careful and objective look around, you realize that the combined life of both you and your significant other could be a whole lot worse—parenthood is challenging. Sometimes those challenges start even before you “officially” become a parent (debate as to precisely when the label “parent” can be applied to person is pointlessly academic; from where I’m sitting, a person can be called by others, or call himself or herself, a “parent” the instant their first child is born and not a second before).

Certainly, my wife and I have had pre-parenthood challenges before we had our twin boys. Our first child was born approximately a week early, after a final prenatal exam revealed that my wife’s amniotic sac was inexplicably empty of amniotic fluid, which meant our baby had to come out as soon as feasible. Obviously, my wife and I were both worried because neither of us knew how serious this news was or exactly what it meant; all we knew was that our doctor conveyed a great sense of urgency about it. Luckily, we’d had everything in place (the doctor, the hospital pre-registration, etc.), all of which made the situation unexpectedly manageable, and we checked my wife in that night to the hospital. They kept her overnight and monitored her. The next day, there was no change, and we were all still waiting. Lots of pitocin was administered via IV to my wife in an effort to move things along, but our yet-unborn child still refused to budge (turns out this was "foreshadowing"). Later that afternoon, after hours and hours of waiting, after breaking the amniotic sac, and lots of helping my wife walk the halls, it became obvious she wasn’t going to give birth naturally in a timely enough fashion, so a C-section was ordered. Several nurses wheeled her away in the bed to be prepped for surgery and I was told to tag along. Outside the prep room, the head nurse was very clear that I was to wait outside in the hallway until they wheeled my wife to the surgery room, when I could see her again. I was handed a pile of scrubs (with stylish hair net in the same faded green/blue shade as the scrubs) and had changed into them in the bathroom as quickly as I could and hurried back into the hall so as not to get left behind.

After 30 or so minutes (a person’s perception of time, when under stress, is that time distorts and lengthens; it may have been less time but felt like several hours), I got worried I had been forgotten. I’d like to believe I’m a fairly progressive, modern husband who wanted to be there for the birth of his first child; we’re all human, and I imagined I would be easy enough to overlook in the push to prep someone for an unplanned surgery. But I was unprepared for how long the prep would take; if any of the nurses or doctor had told me how long, it hadn’t stuck in my head—my fault, not theirs (more on this in a later blog entry). So I pushed the door open and wandered in, armed only with my self-righteous determination to not miss my son’s birth. A couple of things immediately caught my attention:

·         My wife, sitting up on the wheel bed, her back to me;

·         A long needle (which looked more like a spear than a medical instrument) that the anesthesiologist had just started to insert into my wife’s spine;

·         Every person in the room (except my wife) turning to look at me.

Someone (to this day, I’m not sure who) yelled, “Get him out of here!!!” I backed out the door as quickly as I could and mumbled an apology. I meekly waited in the hallway (no chairs to sit in, by the way) until everyone came out another 30 or so minutes later, and I did what I was told the rest of that hospital stay (and I was especially grateful none of the nurses felt the need to further reprimand me; perhaps I was emanating an appropriate level of contriteness). The surgical team didn’t want me to see an epidural being administered, and I sure didn’t want to see one being administered. Whatever the nurses or doctors tell you to do, just do it; they’re the experts, and you cannot unsee certain things.

This entry will be continued in Part II: Challenges May Start Before Parenthood.

Introduction: Finding Out

“You don’t know, do you?” the ultrasound technician asked my wife, Melissa, and I in early 2004. “You’re having twins.”

I want to say I handled this news with my usual flatness and that I produced a list of pertinent and probing questions for the technician (I’ve always prided myself on being able to spot early, and then roll with, the many sucker punches life has thrown at me). But I didn’t; I didn’t hear a single word the fellow said after hearing “twins,” and my brain went abruptly blank. My wife later said my face turned white as a sheet; all I know is that I went clammy all over, and I’m pretty sure I stopped breathing because I could not speak (anyone who knows me knows I always have a sarcastic comment or topic-appropriate quip to toss into the mix). The word “twins” echoed around in my head and circled back each time the previous echo had started to fade. And my ears suddenly started ringing louder than they did following that one Rush concert when I forgot to bring earplugs.

The scene, for me, instantly turned into a silent, super-slo-mo movie. I saw the technician looking at me, his lips moving to form what I can only assume were words (doubtlessly communicating important information to us); I saw Melissa looking at me, her lips moving as if forming words (doubtlessly trying to get me to start breathing again). But the remainder of the appointment played out in complete silence, with nary a subtitle in sight.

My hearing didn’t start working again until I climbed into my car alone (Melissa and I had met at the office after work so had brought our own vehicles) and started the engine. Then the pendulum abruptly swung the other direction: Not only was I finally breathing again, but I was borderline hyperventilating (a new experience). Not only was my hearing working again, but it was hyper-acute; I swore my car was making noises that I just knew would be really expensive to repair (turned out it was all in my imagination). And I had no problem speaking again: The entire drive home I spent humming to myself, Asperger style, “Ohgawd, ohgawd, ohgawd…” And my brain was finally working again: The only image I saw in my head were dollar signs, with madly flapping wings on their (green) backs, soaring out of my wallet (they may have been laughing at me too; I can’t be sure). And I sensed they were flying away twice as fast as I would ever be able to cram new ones into that wallet.

When I pulled into the drive, my wife was already standing outside.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she half-chuckled. “I was afraid you would just keep driving.”

“Mexico is nice this time of year,” I said after finding the majority of my sense of humor again. “I don’t know that I’m ready for this, but I think I’m ready to try. Oh God.”

The purpose of this blog ("In Stereo," the reason for the title will become apparent) is for me to share my own experiences as a father of twins (identical boys, now 7 years old), as well as sharing the experiences and insights of my network of other fathers of twins, so that fathers of twins won’t repeat my mistakes; mostly, it’s so that other twin fathers will realize they’re not alone.

If you have any questions or experiences you'd like to share, feel free to add a comment below, or simply e-mail me at instereoblog@yahoo.com

The lesson: Even if it’s completely unexpected news, take the time you need to process it, and process it however you’re able. Then man up.