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.