Push, Panic, and Postpartum: Navigating the Twin-Birth I Didn’t Plan For
I held up the tiny baby bottle to eye level to inspect the quantity of soupy, yellow milk inside.
A pathetic 20 ml.
That’s not enough to feed one starving newborn let alone the two of them.
I slumped back down on the edge of my hospital (trundle) bed, dejected. It groaned, as if empathetically. The colostrum syringe was still poised in my fingertips, at the ready but my blistered, throbbing nipples cried out for mercy. The nurse came round to inspect my bounty and smiled at me, merrily: “Great job, mum! We’ll just top the rest up with some formula.”
We both knew I hadn’t done a great job but I appreciated her for being gentle with me.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, I lamented. My mind was keeping tally of all my shortcomings and kept feeling the need to list them off. What’s that saying, ‘kicking a dog while it’s down’? My mind, oh my mind! It delighted in taking me back to my less-than-picture-perfect birth –
First, I chickened out of my natural vaginal birth (well, I wasn’t dialating). Then the second baby was born silent and blue. I held my breath for what felt like an eternity before I finally heard him let out a sputtering cry. I couldn’t hold them, to let them know I was there. Instead they were both immediately wheeled off to the special care nursery on oxygen. I lay there on my back, naked and useless while the far-too-good-looking surgeon sewed me back up, wondering whether I just dreamed the whole thing up.
I suppose that’s to be expected when your body spits out your little half-baked babes seven weeks too early though, isn’t it? And to top it off, now my tits won’t work. A few days’ delay for your milk to come in is expected, but ten days?!
So here I sat, on my little Harry-Potter-like trundle bed, holding back an avalanche of tears and manually squeezing and syringing the colostrum from my blistering, angry nipples like a bloody cow: I felt like one too with my swollen pooch of a belly.
At least I’m here, I conceded. I do what I can and I hug my babies close to me when I’m allowed (three-hourly thank you very much). This place is clinical and lonely and frightening but at least they can smell me near and know that they’re loved. Albeit by a far-underqualified-sleep-deprived-mother-in-training.
Sometimes I caught myself hovering over my weary little body in that room, as if watching from above. I felt strangely detached and trance-like at times. Like I was floating around the room, performing for the nurses. When there was nothing to do, I slept — and when it was feeding time I mechanically came to life. I’d never experienced such a separation of my mind and body before and actually marvelled psychotically at myself, a quirky quiver in my eye.
One morning in those long ten days, I remember glancing down the hospital corridor, wondering when the boys’ real mother was going to come back. I was just minding them for her in the meantime. I needed only to peer down at my swollen, sore tummy and throbbing nipples to realise I had in fact birthed these mysterious little creatures and I was their mother.
I was their mother. I was their mother. And my babies were loved. They know that they’re loved. Not like the baby across the way, the down syndrome baby, who was abandoned by his distraught mother a few days ago.
The mother and crying little baby arrived the day after me in this ward. You could feel the tension radiating from the three little walls of their ‘room’ which of course was only sectioned off by a curtain (there are no doors in the special care nursery in case of an emergency). The parents spoke in hushed whispers to each other, while the nurses skirted around efficiently to do their checks, their sneakers squeaking on the shiny, sterilised floors.
At times I woke to see the woman teetering at the edge of her room by the curtain, observing her baby from afar. A day or two later, the mother had vanished and the baby remained. He cried continuously while he was awake as gentle nurses cradled him in their arms. The hospital was a constant chorus of baby cries and beeping machines. We were the two longest standing patients there, everyone else seemed to come and go in a few days. I assume that’s why one of the nurses confided in me about the poor little darling across the way. Whispering that the mother was having trouble adjusting to the shock and that ‘down syndrome is seen to be devastating in their culture’.
So, yes, at least I’m here with them. I reassured myself that no matter how much I feel like a failure already, at least they can feel me here with them. And if I could just get my tits to work and these babies to latch, we could be discharged and away from this strange limbo-land too.
I am their mother. I am a mother. And my babies are loved. They know that they’re loved.
X Rebecca
IG and TT: [@] Thatachellesgirl
