I have two wonderful lovely twin boys. They will be two in a month. There are times when they are so cute and precious I cannot help but love them more than I did the moment before. It surprises me every time it happens and it is often over something silly. Tonight at dinner one of them was rolling a truck back and forth on the table making train noises. I told him trucks don’t go woo woo. He didn’t listen. Then he burped and we said excuse you and then the other one made a noise that wasn’t a burp but sounded like what a burp would sound like if someone were trying to fake burp. We said excuse you to that one as well and then burst out laughing which got a hearty fake laugh from that one which caused us to laugh harder and that one to fake laugh harder.
I do not know what these boys are or how I was gifted with them. Earlier today while I was walking to get the mail and had just walked out of a house full of screaming children I wondered what it would have been like to have the chance to stop at one child and how we never got that chance. I am glad we never had that chance. I have wondered what the one child would have been like if that embryo had never split, but I don’t want an answer to that. Our boys are two unique and wonderful creatures that I love very much.
Then later on tonight, a bit after dinner, I saw a Facebook post from someone who had their baby four weeks early. It made me think of the boys birth. How one of them didn’t even weigh two pounds and wasn’t breathing when he was born. Had to be taken to the warming table to be brought back. I don’t like thinking about it. I kept thinking about it. How few people experience that. Thirteen weeks early. One not even two pounds and the other just barely over it. So tiny, so fragile. To look at them now you wouldn’t know it. You’d think they were normal almost two year olds.
I can’t help but feel that sadness in the bit of my heart. We lost nothing and gained everything, but we had to go through hell to get here. It is hard to think about it. I try hard not to. I don’t want to remember those NICU days. I don’t want to think about how small they were. How we had to wait to even be able to hold our baby. How having a baby wasn’t meant to be the nexus on which our lives turned but a happy event in a long string of happy events that make up a life.
I can’t help it. Those thoughts find me every now and then. I don’t ask them to, but they do. They lurk around every corner. Waiting for the right moment to attack. I think back to those NICU days and how confused people were at our misery. They wanted us to buck up and celebrate the birth of our children but we couldn’t because we didn’t know if we’d get to bring our children home. I think about how many people I know that prescribe to some brand of positive thinking and how if your brand of positive thinking is to pretend the bad parts of life don’t happen or aren’t happening then it isn’t positive thinking at all. The winds of the storm cannot be ignored. Only dealt with.
David Huzzard Writes 