Category Archives: Creating a Family

‘Tis The Season…….Writing with Twins

05 Thursday Dec 2013

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I may have written this 6 years ago, but funnily enough, much of what I said then still holds true today – the distractions and business, the predictable and unpredictable parts of my day- those haven’t gone away.  The thing that has changed is my expectation that being the mother of twins will ever be anything different than filled with a wonderful sort of chaos and lots of joy….and never enough time:)

                                        Writing With Twins

  •                               “…….and that common arbitrator, Time.”
  •                                                                      MacBeth
  •                                                                      Wm. Shakespeare
  •                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Yes, that’s right.  It is indeed the afternoon before the evening I’m supposed to read a piece I’ve written.  And yes, I did sign up eight days ago to do it.  Since then, I’ve visited Santa at Macy’s, taken Jack and Olivia to three rehearsals for the church Christmas Pageant, gone to the pageant itself, been to ballet classes, a birthday party puppet show, bought a Christmas tree and trimmed it after having a fight with my husband (I’m surprised we were able to fit it in!)  I’ve wandered around to several banks and two different Duane Reade stores to find a gift card for my daughter’s teacher, gone to an extremely tense class parent meeting with the principal, taken Jack to OT (occupational therapy), gone without sleep because Jack threw up twice in the middle of the night, which happened to be the night before my last writing class where I was to have at lease three pages written and ready to be read in class.  This writing I managed to squeeze in after school pick-up, ballet and OT, but before Jack threw up.  Whew!
6 years ago - Choosing a Christmas tree

6 years ago – Choosing a Christmas tree

  • I’ve organized the school Holiday Breakfast and been to the first grade Holiday Celebration where I heard a play/poem about Salt Marshes (they’ve been studying them since September).  I’ve been out on a date night with my husband (an every Sunday night occurance).  I’ve stood in a long line in the American Girl store to buy the VERY LAST light-skinned, fair-haired “Just Like Me” American girl doll with blue eyes in the store (who knew there were so many blonde-haired, blue-eyed children in New York City who wanted this doll for Christmas?). I’d like to say that these past eight days were an anomaly or just the usual chaos of the holiday season, the exception and not the rule.   But I can’t.  This is my life, how it truly is – filled with lots of kid things, planned and unplanned.  But in between all of the predictable and unpredictable parts of my days and nights, I write.
  •                                       “…..for she’ll be up twenty times a night,
  •                                             and there will she sit in her smock till
  •                                             she have writ a sheet of paper.”
  •                                                                  Much Ado About Nothing
  •                                                                  Wm. Shakespeare

Recipe for a Family

18 Monday Mar 2013

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Recipe for a Family – Take two happily married people, one from New Zealand, one from Ohio, see if they can endure 6 years of frustration, uncertainty, doubt, disappointment and tears, mix liberally, cross fingers (and toes), pray a lot, hope for the best, believe in magic, be brave and try one last time and then, voila……a family is born!!

I never knew how much I wanted to be a mother until my children were actually here.  Even though it took me over 6 years to finally conceive and hold a pregnancy to term – well, “almost” term, during those years I was so focused on the details of getting pregnant, I hadn’t spent much time thinking about what comes after.  My life was full of numbers – lab results, FSH – too high, HCG – high and then dropping precipitously as another miscarriage ensued, counting days to ovulation, luteal phase, optimum time for IUI (intrauterine insemination), numbers of eggs encouraged to be produced each month, doses of medicine – Estrogen, Progesterone, Clomid.  The minute details of how to become pregnant filled my mind to the point that the complexities of this process made me marvel that it ever happened at all!  Practical matters took up what little room was left to be filled in my addled brain – $2000 per cycle for medications not covered by insurance.  What could we afford?  Should we skip a cycle to give our cringing bank account and my aging body time to rest, to catch its breath – take time to work harder at more jobs to save up for another round of treatment – trying to see if I could outrun my loudly ticking biological clock speeding on towards 50?  No.  Not much to time to think about motherhood.

And then it happened.  Not long before I turned 50, pregnant with twins.  After the frenetic years of the past, a wonderful calm seemed to drape over me and I settled into being pregnant.  That’s when motherhood began for me.  That’s when I had time to think about it. Me at 50 & 5 months pregnant with twins

The years since then have been jam-packed – a sort of whirlwind of activity as our babies grew from tiny premature infants in the NICU to the giggly, sweet 12 year olds they are today.  But those tough “getting pregnant” years never really leave me.  They are ever-present, lingering at the bottom of my thoughts, sitting silently, informing and influencing the kind of mother I am and serving as a constant reminder of the two remarkable gifts I’ve been given.

 

That’s me 5 months pregnant with twins, not long after turning 50.