I really need to remember, when I can’t get to sleep, watching late night TV is not the best option.

Last night I stumbled across the last in a two part series on ABC2 called ‘Help Me Love My Baby‘.

I blamed pregnancy hormones as I got all teary watching this mother of twins learning to bond with her babies. But to be honest, watching and hearing the babies crying in unison and seeing the look of shear exhaustion, confusion and fear on their mother’s face, I was right back there in the early days of our twin’s lives.

The show followed a young mum as she went to therapy sessions over a number of months to learn to respond to and bond with her babies, particularly one of them. Her beginning story was so familiar to me. She never thought she’d have twins and was still coming to terms with that fact when they were born, by c-section, eight weeks early. This Mum had other issues from her childhood that also played a part in her bonding issues but I could identify with her on so many levels.

I didn’t bond with my girls when they were born.

I would never had admitted it at the time, in fact I don’t think I had even a shred conscious knowledge of it, but looking back, it seems so obvious. I was detached from my girls even before they were born.

When I found out there was two in there it took me a long long LONG time to process that idea. (even now I still have moments of shear confusion when I realise it is part of my life). I was 25 weeks pregnant when things first started to go wrong. I had four weeks in and out of hospital before they were born with various procedures. medication, information and statistics of how likely our babies were to survive and what their outcomes might be like. Then 11 weeks early, they were born, in a hurry, via c-section.

I cope really well with stress, and disaster, because I am practical. I think through all the scenarios (ok I worry through them) and then work out how we’ll cope in a practical sense. On the emotional side I’m not so together. It wasn’t intentional, and I didn’t realise it, but I coped by making a little gap. Just a little space that would keep me functioning in case the worst happened. Then I dismissed the idea of loosing them and got on with being practical.

It was the same after they were born. They were both alive and fighting so perhaps I let the gap lessen a little, but it was still there. I needed that gap to get through all the crap that life with two prem babies throws at you.

Don’t get me wrong, I did love them… I just didn’t love them.

There was no rush of maternal love. There was no doey eyed moments like on the ABA poster in the expressing room. There was just lots of practical learning, and doing, and waiting. I was good at that stuff, so I focussed on the stuff I was good at.

When they came home I was still good at all the practical coping stuff. Hell, I’d been a nanny, I’d worked in childcare, I had a degree in this stuff. I knew how to do all the practical stuff, but there is more to having babies than practical stuff, and there was still a gap.

When they were both sleeping I’d often catch myself looking at them and suddenly realising they were mine. They didn’t really feel like mine. They could have been someone else’s babies, babies I was just looking after for a while…. but they weren’t.

As I watched the documentary last night and saw this mother learning to gaze into her babies’ eyes to make a connection, I really felt for her. When you have two unsettled babies there isn’t much time for eye gazing. When they get upset, you get upset and stressed, which makes them stressed, which makes you stressed… it’s a vicious circle compounded by a million other little things that I’m sure lots of mother’s go through. It’s just that some of us have that little gap…

Things got better for us when the girls were around six months old. It was a combination of things, like sorting out the right medication for their reflux, getting back on track with feeding, connecting with some wonderful like minded mums and finding one or two professionals who took the time to tell me I was doing a good job…. and just time.

I started to enjoy them as well as simply cope and the gap slowly disappeared.

I don’t have guilt over our lack of ‘bonding’ any more. I have plenty of hefty Mother Guilt over a lot of other things, but surprisingly not over this.

I was caught up in a cycle of crappy circumstances – A bucket load of stress while pregnant, a c-section well before my body even thought about giving birth, no happy post birth hormones, no babies to hold, expressing instead of breastfeeding, more buckets of stress and exhaustion while the girls were in hospital, early problems with breastfeeding, later problems with breastfeeding, reflux x2, failure to thrive x 2…..and the list goes on. Not exactly a balanced equation for building a loving bond with my first children. Given the circumstances I think the fact that we coped at all is pretty darn amazing.

I do, however, worry.

I worry about long term effects. I worry that Izzy’s melt downs and Zoe’s sensitiveness are somehow related to our lack of early bonding. I worry that their social choice to stick to each other like glue forsaking all others is because of our less than perfect start. I know it might not have caused any of these things, but I also know enough to know that it might have.

I also know there is no point in worrying, but I still do.
It’s what I do, it’s how I cope.

And for the record…. it took me ages to go to sleep after all that!

Related Posts:

• Wordless Wednesday – Fight For Premies.
• Too Soon.
• Tomorrow They are Six.

A while back I blogged about premmie babies for Australia’s Premmie Awareness Week. This time it is for the US based March of Dimes Fight for Preemies (I didn’t miss-type that, they just add an extra e in the US) supported by Bloggers Unite.

Zoe 6 weeks old

Izzy 6 weeks old

Of course our experience with babies born too soon is rather fresh in my mind, having just celebrated the girls’ birthday. It’s hard to believe that it’s been six years since they were born. If you look at them today, as two six year old girls, you’d never know that they were born 11 weeks early. You’d have no clue that they weighed 1.13kgs and 900grams each. You couldn’t tell how close we came to loosing them before they were even born.

But there are things, little things, things only I notice that remind me.

They both have tiny lines of scar under their noses from the weeks and weeks of c-pap tubes wearing away their delicate skin.

Zoe has an asterisk shaped scar under her left arm from the chest tube used to treat her pneumothorax (hole in her lung) when she was three days old.

Then there are the other things…. things that may or may not be because they were born early. Things that make you wonder, and worry and wonder some more. The allergies, the asthma, the sensitivity, the emotional immaturity. Maybe those are related to being born too soon? Or maybe not.

In the early days I wanted to wish away the fact that the girls were born early. I was desperate for them, for our lives, to be ‘normal’. I wanted them to grow up and away from being prem babies and to forget it had ever happened.

Time has made me a little wiser though. Being able to watch them grow and thrive has give me a different perspective. I don’t wish away their difficult beginning because that is part of who they are. It is part of who I am.

If someone gave me a magic wand and told me I could change history…. I’d probably still do it… maybe….

But we have walked that path and made it through that journey… so I think I’d rather use that wand to change the future. I’d wish the path of the premmie babies to come to be a smooth and easy one, a short road to a happy and healthy baby.

If you are in the US you can donate to March of Dimes Fight for Preemies. If you are in Australia you can donate directly to any major maternity or children’s hospital in your state with a NICU. We donate to RWH NICU in our girl’s name each Christmas.

Related Posts:

• Help Me Love My Baby.
• Wordless Wednesday – Fight For Premies.
• Tomorrow They are Six.

It seemed to happen around me, to someone else.
It was not how I imagined having a baby would be. None of it was how I imagined it would be.

I imagined getting a huge round pregnant belly.
I imagined buying lovely maternity clothes.
I imagined being farewelled on my last day of work.
I imagined being so over being pregnant and wishing my babies would be born.
I imagined happily shopping for baby clothes and furniture.
I imagined feeling the pains of labour and the hard work of birthing my babies.
I imagined the rush of love as I gazed into my babies eyes for the first time.
I imagined thinking that my babies were the most gorgeous things in the whole world.
I imagined breastfeeding my babies.
I imagined leaving hospital with my babies.

I never imagined I’d spend the last weeks of my pregnancy trying to keep the babies in.
I never imagined making to my third trimester would be cause for celebration.
I never imagined they would be so small, so skinny, so…. ugly.
I never imagined it would be seven days before I would hold my babies.
I never imagined that the ping of a machine would instil such fear.
I never imagined I would breastfeed a machine.
I never imagined I’d rejoice about being able to express 30mls of milk.
I never imagined I would buy my first piece of baby clothing when my babies were eight weeks old.
I never imagined I would know and use so much hospital jargon.
I never imagined the prayers I would say, the crazy deals with the universe I would make, if only they would breath on their own.
I never imagined how lonely Christmas could be.
I never imagined I’d be so happy to hear my babies cry.

I never imagined I would be so lucky… to have two happy, healthy girls, to beat the odds.

I never imagined I would be so grateful.

It’s Premmie Awareness week in Australia. Share your story like these great bloggers have – Three Ringed Circus and Bad Mummy

Related Posts:

Since the Twinadoes turned five people everywhere are telling them how exciting it is that they will go to school next year. Well yes, it would be exciting for them, if they were going to school next year.

It’s not something I’ve blogged much about, partly because this journey has not always been easy for us, but mostly to give the girls some time to just enjoy what they are doing now, without the whole world focussing on what they will or won’t be doing next year. But now that the school year is over and this year’s kinder is all but done, now that the decision has been made and we are all happy and content that we made the right one, now that it is all settled I feel ok with shouting it to the world… The girls will not be going to school next year.

This year has been very up and down when it came to the girls and kinder (preschool). For the most part they have loved going to kinder and they have grown up in so many ways, but I would be lying if I said it was all a bed of roses. They have taken almost the whole year to settle in to being part of a group. They have had a really hard time making friends and coping with the social world of kinder. They both struggle with one or two little things and don’t cope well with set backs. They are still stuck together with glue and don’t cope well without the other one there to support them. None of these things are so terrible, none of them mean that they really couldn’t have gone to school, but when their teacher offered up the idea of a second year of kinder we decided that if we could get the funding we would take it.

I will admit that I struggled early on with making this decision. I’d come to the point where I’d almost forgotten how much of a struggle it was with the girls in their first year. I had pretty much been able to put all that prem baby stuff behind us. It was no longer something always haunting us, we were no longer always worrying about long term effects or looking for problems. There are a lot less people pointing to them on the street and exclaiming about them being twins and I thought we’d got to that point where they were really just like any other kids… Then all this came to a head and I was right back in that place of worry and wondering and hurting for them being ‘different’.

They’ve come so far from those tiny little babies who couldn’t even breath on their own and while kinder was a struggle at times they’d really blossomed and become so much more social than ever before… yet I couldn’t deny there were still some issues…

Maybe they are just generally shy kids, is that so terrible? Does everyone have to be out going and overly sociable and have heaps of friends? Maybe they’ll always need each other. Maybe they will be those kind of freaky identical twins who marry other identical twins and live next door to each other because they can’t bear to be apart? Is that so terrible? I am not a twin, I have no idea what their bond is like, how can I pass judgement on that? Twins are different, their bond is different… is that necessarily bad?

Ok sure, I had hoped that the tantrums and outburst might have lessened a bit by now too. And sure I know that some of their crazy fears and idiosyncrasies were not doing them any favours. But I also know how stubborn they both are, how if they don’t want to do something they are not going to do it… no matter what… and how if you dig your heels in they will dig a hundred times deeper and they can scream louder and hold out longer than anyone I have ever met. As much as it drives me nuts every day, I can quietly admit that I like the fact that my girls have some spunk, that they stand their ground.

I can see how all of these things were not helping them easily be part of the group at kinder and how they could possibly make school just that little bit harder. I am not so sure that they are all negatives in the big scheme of things, but I can see how right now, they are making things a little difficult sometimes.

What clinched it though was merely the fact that another year of kinder could only be good, whereas sending them to school if they were even a little bit not ready had the potential to be really bad. In my mind there are very few negatives to another year of kinder. Another year of being home more than ‘at school’. Another year with more time for them to play in the sand pit, make mud pies, roam around outside. Another year of fun, hands on play and learning…. it kind of seems like a non-contest when you look at it that way.

I am not anti school. Every now and then I toy with the idea of home-schooling but the girls will most likely be going to a mainstream, all be it small and ‘progressive’, local state school when the time comes. But I also tend to believe that once kids start school they loose so much time to simply be kids, to follow their own paths, ideas and dreams and they begin to be expected to learn things that adults think are important and in ways adults want them to…. and I am not so much a fan of that, especially not for little kids.

So far the girls are not too bothered by the fact that their kinder friends are all going off to school and they aren’t. They wouldn’t have gone to school with anyone from kinder anyway, and it helps that we know several other kids who will either be home schooled, or who will start kinder a year later etc. They are very excited to start at their new kinder (one closer to the school they will go to) after a visit to discover they have budgies and chooks and all kinds of cool things. They seem to accept without bother when I tell them they will go to school when they are six and that everyone does what they need to do when they are ready to do it. Even with every man and his dog assuming they will go to school (and I understand that assumption, I am sure I have made it myself on many occasions) they don’t seem rattled, they simply reply ‘not next year, we are going to new kinder next year’, and for me that really clinches the deal… they are happy so we are happy.

I’ve lost some sleep over this, I am quite sure that we’ve made the right decision. The Twinadoes will do a second year of four year old kinder next year and we are so looking forward to

Related Posts:

In case you missed the news, the Twindaoes turned five yesterday.

It’s a momentous occasion in this house, not only because we had two very excited five year olds to celebrate with, but because according to the odds we shouldn’t have either of them.

The girls were born almost 11 weeks early due to twin to twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS). When things first started to go wrong when I was 25 weeks pregnant we were told that if labour couldn’t be stopped and if the TTTS couldn’t be slowed, the odds of having two live babies were very small. When things got bad again at 27 weeks the odds of two healthy babies were still slim… and when the final call came that they were better out than in at 29 weeks and 2 days, the odds of both of them surviving were not good. We were told to expect the worst. At best we’d have two very premature babies with lots of complications, most likely only one of them would survive and there was a good chance neither of them would make it.

We were lucky. We were very lucky. We had an awesome team of people looking after us, an amazing doctor who knew just when to deliver the girls to give them the best chance at life and an amazing paediatrician who looked after them when they were born… but really, we were just lucky. Since the girls’ birth, I’ve met, corresponded and spoken with lots of people who have been through the nightmare of TTTS and I know the harsh reality of how many babies don’t make it…. I know just how incredibly lucky we are.

When I first got pregnant the thought had never entered my head that I might have more than one baby in there…. That was something that happened to other people, so was having prem babies. It was at my first visit to our OB at about 10 weeks that he did a ‘quick scan’ and announced “definitely two, maybe three babies”. That was the first time I did a double take and thought “No really… seriously… that doesn’t happen to me”. But it did. In the five and a bit years since then I have had that thought almost every day.

“No… seriously…. those kids are mine???”

Those two crazy girls, that are so alike in every way, yet so incredibly different. Who love each other with a passion and bond that I can’t even begin to understand. Izzy, with her serious face that breaks into a crazy, lopsided smile. Zoe who starts off being shy but later will break out her wicked gappy grin. These two girls who exclaim with total sincerity after each ballet lesson “That is the best thing I’ve ever done in my whole life”. These two girls who love mermaids and princesses, hanging in the shed with their Daddy and jumping on the trampoline. Those two tiny babies who took only one breath on their own when they were born enough to let out a cry to prove to us just how stubborn they are. Those two girls are mine.

I look at them sleeping each night and get that familiar pang – a combination of fear, amazement and love. No way Universe… no way…. how did I get to be the mother of twins? How did I get to be so lucky?

Related Posts:

• Help Me Love My Baby.
• Wordless Wednesday – Fight For Premies.
• Too Soon.