Last year, when I was the parent of one child, I got tickets to the Cambridge Folk Festival. The plan had been to go en famille, but my husband was out of town. I considered throwing in the towel on the whole damn weekend. I booked a babysitter, then cancelled the babysitter, then considered ringing the babysitter and begging her to come after all, then finally took a deep breath, packed my picnic blanket, hauled my kid to the festival and hoped for the best.

I was so amped up when I got home that I sent the following email to a friend:

HE WAS SUCH A CHAMP I AM SO PROUD OF HIM IT WAS AMAZING.

I saw KT Tunstall and Glen Hansard, who I wanted to see the most in the whole festival, and in between sets he said ‘more music! Music, mummy!’

You know how when you first fall in love, and it just seems like an utter miracle? That this person exists, and they’ve consented to hang out with you? Having kids is, at its best, 1000x better than that. Theo was sitting on my lap, clapping at the end of every song and saying ‘another song?’ and I felt like my heart was going to burst.

We didn’t get home until after 10, which we’ve never even attempted before. He negotiated a couple extra stories, which seemed ridiculous because it was 10:20 by that point (inhaler, tooth brushing, offering him the potty, etc.) but then he jumped off my lap and marched to bed as agreed and I haven’t heard a peep. I am just so proud of him. He held it together the entire time we were there, the entire way out (it was a little walk) and the journey home, and then he was almost exclusively perfectly behaved once we got home.

We went to the festival Friday-Sunday last year, and while nothing was quite as magical as that first day, I booked our family tickets as soon as they became available this year, ready for Round 2.

So naturally Theo didn’t give a shit about the festival this year. He loved the ice cream van, and he loved the trampoline in the children’s area, but the actual music he could take or leave.

This year, though, the festival was very good for me. Ian took Friday off work, and so I was able to cycle over to see the She Shanties on Friday – an all-female sea shanty group. I love sea shanties (really. I love them.) so I made a special trip and stood surrounded by old people and teenagers, yet all by myself. The music was lovely. Later that night, I went back and met up with friends for the Indigo Girls. I sang Galileo and Closer to Fine and the Wood Song. I felt like a person with a life.

We hauled our kids to the festival all four days, too; it wasn’t just me sneaking out for an hour at a time. Theo was indifferent to the music but I loved being there. More than that, it was significant that there was an ambitious thing we wanted to do – go to a music festival – and we had done it, with minimal drama. The girls were great, the weather was marginal, Theo was disinterested, but I had a great time, and I felt like I’d taken a significant step forward as a parent of three children.

I went to see the Indigo Girls a week ago, on my first evening out since the girls came home. The whole thing particularly delighted me because my first arena-rock concert, in 1997, was Lilith Fair – Jewel, Indigo Girls and Sarah McLachlan at the Marcus Amphitheatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Almost exactly twenty years later, I went to see the Indigo Girls again. The experience sparked a major 90s lady music kick: I have been listening to Lisa Loeb, Four Non Blondes, and a whole bunch of other gems in the week since (sidenote: I am shocked/appalled at how many lyrics I remember. When I told my husband, he said ‘have you met you? of course you remember that shit’).

There is one thing that has made the Nostalgia Tour 100% better: my daughters seem to love it. They burbled their way through Donna Lewis’ ‘I Love You Always Forever’ (not a good song, by the way, but very good for singing to babies). We did three rousing rounds of Dixie Chicks’ ‘Wide Open Spaces,’ which will give any parent of daughters some Feels. I sat on the floor in front of their bouncy seats and sag the chorus with gusto. And also with jazz hands.

But the song that sealed the deal for me was ‘Wonder,’ by Natalie Merchant. The song was released in 1995, when I was 12 years old, on Tigerlily – one of the first CDs I owned (I didn’t remember that until I looked at the Wikipedia page, and the green and orange CD case brought it back to me immediately).

I’ve had a lot of anxiety about my daughters’ development, because preemies are at an elevated risk for behavioral and developmental disorders (the most likely are autism spectrum disorder and ADHD). Now, with the girls having hit all their milestones at nearly-four-months adjusted, I have relaxed substantially. But (as with any baby), there are no guarantees, and we will know when we know. To say that I have relaxed is more a comment on how tightly wound I was in their early days than how easy-breezy I am now. No one wants their kids to face a struggle.

And so in my heightened emotional state, Natalie Merchant gave me enormous comfort. The lyric ‘know this child will be gifted/with love, with patience and with faith,’ sung to a smiling Daphne on a Saturday morning as we danced around the kitchen, was more reassuring to me than any blog post or statistic I’ve read yet. She’s doing great, you guys. She rolled over today. And love, patience and faith – well, we aren’t the most patient household, but we have love and faith down. It feels like its going to be ok.

 

A couple days ago I was walking over the cycle bridge near the Cambridge Rail Station with both girls when I passed a lanky, heavily tattooed man in his early twenties talking on his mobile phone. As I went by I heard the words ‘they’ve got her on a ventilator, so she won’t have breathing problems when she’s older.’

A few meters past the man, I stopped and did an awkward two step, then turned around and interrupted him.

‘I’m so sorry to interrupt,’ I said. ‘Do you have premature babies?’

‘I do,’ he said, undoubtedly alarmed that he was now being accosted by suburban looking mummies.

‘These guys were 31 weekers,’ I said, eager to be helpful.

‘Mine are 24.’

And this was the moment where I screwed up. I have the world’s worst poker face, and I knew my alarm and concern was washing over my face. ‘They’re doing well,’ he assured me, and I felt more like an asshole with each passing moment.

‘That’s so good.’ I said. ‘Good luck.’ And I moved on, leaving him to his phone call.

I’ve thought about that conversation a lot in the last couple days, for a couple reasons: first, I hope those babies are ok. I have thought about that guy, and his partner, sitting next to those babies’ incubators and watching the monitors the way I did. I have also thought about the ways in which I could have done better. Most of all, I wish I hadn’t put him in the position of having to reassure a stranger. That’s the thing I had dwelt on: I wanted to be helpful but I’m pretty sure I failed. But here is what I would have told him, had I done it right:

From the moment I found out, at about 16 weeks pregnant, that we were facing a particularly difficult pregnancy (even by twin standards) and that the girls would have a tough start, I hunted down success stories on th internet – and there are a surprising number, because the internet is a big place and people like to share happy stories. I joined Facebook groups, read memoirs and blogs, and even managed to talk to an incredibly kind mum of triplets, one of whom was born at 530 grams at 31 weeks and now, age 4, is cognitively just fine: bilingual and counting to 100. Someone told me yesterday about 22 weekers, now 3.5, who show no trace of prematurity.

I know, of course, that my case-study approach has limits. And I also know that my girls are still very much at risk, relative to the general population, of developmental and attention disorders. I relax a little with every passing development: Daphne started blowing raspberries a couple days ago, which hardly makes her a genius, but does seem to indicate that she’s learning and processing as she should. It’s a linguistic development.

Despite my own emotional post-NICU progress, I am still occasionally dismissive of people who had a more straightforward experience – when I encounter people who say ‘baby boy was FINALLY able to come home after two weeks in the NICU, ten days after his sister,’ my first visceral reaction is to blow a raspberry of my own. ‘You have no idea,’ I think – but of course, what do I know? A lot can happen in two weeks in the NICU.

So, to the Dad of Twenty Four Weekers: it is so hard, but you and your partner are not alone. You and I are reluctant members of a special tribe, the NICU Long-Termers. It is a larger group than I ever imagined before I became a part of it, and that is a good thing: we live in a world with many people born prematurely, who weighed less than a bag of sugar at birth but now lead rich, healthy lives: they are bike mechanics or cab drivers or Stevie Wonder, to name a few examples I came across shuttling back and forth to the hospital (I read about Stevie Wonder but I met the first two).

Someday soon, your premature baby will just be a baby, but in the meantime, I know something about what you’re going through, and it sucks, and I’m sorry. I hope your babies are okay, and I hope you are too.

After a rocky start, I breastfed my first kid for way longer than I ever intended. I thought I might make it to six months; then I thought, I will definitely be done at a year.

In the end, it was Theo who decided he was done: at 16 months, I went away for a few days. When I came back, I lifted up my shirt and Theo reached up and put it back down, like he was pulling down a blind. I tried a few more times, and the same thing happened. And that was it – that was the end of breastfeeding.

I’m lucky it happened that way, because breastfeeding was wonderful for me, but I definitely didn’t want to be the person still boobing her pre-schooler, and I goggled when women in my acquaintance said they hoped to cut their kids off by age three (because, I mean, to each their own. But that’s a whole lot of breastfeeding. No thank you).

This time around, both girls came out ready to go – some of my first interactions with each girl involved them smacking their mouths against my collarbone, desperate to get going. Babies don’t develop a coordinated suck-swallow-breathe reflex until about 34 weeks, and then our hospital has thresholds for how self-sufficient they have to be (high flow level 4 or below, to be specific). So I didn’t start the girls until a few weeks later, and then, the hospital deliberately staggered their feeds so I could do them sequentially.

I vividly remember my first time tandem feeding (I mean, it was only a few months ago). I had a Boppy pillow, which allowed me to hold both girls, each of whom still only weighed about 4 lbs (Fiona more, Daphne less). Once I got Fiona started, a nurse with a trendy brown bob plopped Daphne down and kind of shoved her into me while I adjusted the nipple shield (damn nipple shields) and got her latched. And then we were off.

In the hospital, I usually used the Boppy across my stomach but didn’t worry about any type of nursing cover or modesty shield – in part because tandem feeding was enough of a challenge, and in part because our corner cubicle gave me enough privacy (and anyway, everyone there had seen plenty of breastfeeding). The NICU had folding screens that they could set up for shyer parents; one woman (well, girl, really) set up a breastfeeding fortress every time she nursed her daughter. I just went for it.

Since coming home, though, I have struggled a bit more. My Peanut & Piglet nursing pillow – a formidable piece of infrastructure I have taken to calling ‘the baby shelf’ – has been a lifesaver. But feeding twins is both time- and space-consuming, which makes leaving the house a different proposition altogether.. The parents’ room at John Lewis – which is a lifesaver for many other new parents – has small vinyl chairs that do not accommodate two hungry babies (it is also windowless and smells like poo, so there’s that). I have not figured out a way to feed the girls that does not involve a substantial amount of boob exposure, a couch, and at least 45 minutes of sitting.

The other day, hunched over to feed the girls in bed, one baby head balanced precariously on my thigh, I googled ‘Tandem Breastfeeding’ to see if I was missing a trick. Surely there is a better way – a way that would allow me to leave the house for more than three hours at a time. Right?

There is not a better way.

What I found is that there is a vibrant subculture of women who breastfeed their babies and their kindergarteners simultaneously, and occasionally take professional photos of themselves and their children dressed as wood nymphs with heavy mood lighting. There was not a lot of practical advice for women who want to breastfeed twins without flashing the barista or looking like an image National Geographic rejected for being too sloppy and pathetic.

My google search was ultimately a little frustrating. I am pro-breastfeeding – its been great for my family – but I don’t really feel like a FUCK YEAH BREASTFEEDING type (also, hopefully it goes without saying, Fed is Best). I’m FYB-adjacent. And as such, looking through the images, I felt a little discouraged. I want to breastfeed, but I don’t want it to be a Whole Big Thing every time I try to feed my kids outside the house.

So this is the reality I’ve reluctantly come to accept: there ain’t no way to feed two kids in public without a degree of public spectacle.

Tandem breastfeeding is weird. That is a fact.

 

My girls were born in February but were due in April. We spent a total of 9 weeks and 6 days in the NICU (Daphne came home a week after Fiona) and since then I have been trying to figure out the best response when people ask how old they are. If there was only one of them, just giving the adjusted age would do (i.e. they’re 11 weeks). But people generally ask ‘oh, they were on time?’ and then I have to awkwardly walk it back for the stranger in the checkout line/shoe salesperson/other parent at the playground.

When we went to the girls’ development checkups (all good!) the doctor we saw stressed that we needed to think of the girls by their adjusted age rather than their actual age. And I said ‘oh, we know – we have a hard time thinking of them by their actual age.’

The need to go by adjusted age is pretty obvious to anyone who has given birth to babies that looked as undercooked as mine did. They were pinkish and had ears that looked like ears and eyes that opened occasionally (none of which is a given with preemies) but it was clear that they were not normal newborns. And as they were not in my uterus, they also were no longer fetuses. They were somewhere in between. It has felt natural to treat the NICU as a sort of developmental halfway house because the girls came home right around their due date and we almost immediately started acting like normal parents. Within days, we were dropping f bombs when the girls woke up at night while fumbling around to try and shove their pacifiers back in their mouths. They came home with feeding tubes and breastmilk fortifier, but they came home mostly as normal babies: no oxygen, for example.

Preemie babies can be expected to catch up somewhere between the first and (at the extreme end) third year of their life – that is the point at which medical professionals stop correcting their age. In the meantime, I have been working to perfect my response when strangers ask how old they are, and the girls are acting like perfect three month old babies: Fiona discovered her toes this morning and Daphne’s eyes light up when you blow raspberries for her. She flirted outrageously when she met er first non-familial baby this morning.

As the girls get older, its easier to avoid the question of when they were born relative to their due date (already! At three months, it happens so much less than when they were three weeks). And hopefully, by 2019, no one will even think to ask whether they were early or not.