by Sara Connell
We could hear cheering and applause through the phone. I released my grip on Bill and put the phone back to my ear.
“Dr. Colaum wants to see you for your first prenatal ultrasound one week from tomorrow,” Tracey said, resuming a businesslike tone. I looked around for something to write with. “Whenever, anytime!” I said, drunk on the information we’d just received.
“We’ll see you at nine o’clock AM next Tuesday,” she said. “Remember to continue your medications. Dexamethasone in the morning and progesterone injections two times a day.” Right. I’d forgotten about the shots.
We were pregnant! I spent the rest of the evening after the call from Dr. Colaum’s trying to mentally tunnel down into my body to see if I could feel the growing life. Before we went to sleep, while Bill took a shower, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, turning my body to the side, then to the front, the way I would hundreds of times during the pregnancy—shirt up, belly exposed, awestruck that there was life inside me.
The next morning Bill and I discussed how we wanted to share the news.
We didn’t think we could wait until the three-month mark, regarded as the norm. We agreed to wait a little while, though, not to tell anyone yet.
“We can still celebrate—just us,” he said. He booked a table at Japonais, a mutual favorite. The maître d’ seated us at a table near the sculpted bonsai trees and dripping chandeliers made of branches. When the waiter asked what I wanted to drink, Bill said, “Just water for her. She’s pregnant!”
“We just found out,” I explained to the waiter. My face turned red, but I was thrilled. The pregnancy became more real each time we said it.
When I picked up my dry cleaning the following Monday afternoon, the couple who owned the cleaners greeted me with beaming smiles. “Congratulations, you. Your husband says you have baby!”
“I couldn’t help myself,” Bill said when I confronted him. “I want to be able to tell someone.”
Despite our pressing desire to share, we made it to the first ultrasound appointment without telling our family. Dr. Colaum told us we’d have an ultrasound every week, so I drove to this appointment on my own.
“Look at that!” Dr. Colaum said, her voice full of pride as she turned the ultrasound flat-screen toward me. After seven months of looking at follicles and eggs, I saw the wand now focused on my uterus, where even I could make out a white blob, like a bright star, up along the back.
“That’s the baby,” Dr. Colaum said; then, giving Tracey a pointed look, “or babies.”
I scanned Dr. Colaum’s face for information.
“We won’t know for sure until next week, but I think it might be twins.”
Tracey printed a copy of the image on the screen for me to take home to show Bill.
I felt stunned as I left the exam room. Having one baby already seemed incredible. Even knowing the likelihood of twins was high for us, I could hardly comprehend we could be having two.
I stood staring at the photo in the waiting room, my hand on the front door to the office, unable to leave right away. “Psst!” Lorelai was beckoning me from the reception counter.
“It’s twins,” she said when I reached her desk. She looked to both sides to make sure no one was around, and then wrote something on a yellow Post-it and slid the paper to me across the counter. In blue ballpoint pen she’d written two numbers:
194
633
“I heard Rachel talking,” she said, again looking behind her. “Those were your HCG numbers from your blood test. There’s two babies in there.”
Bill and I stood peering down at the photograph as though if we looked hard enough, we’d be able to discern whether there were two individual forms.
“It doesn’t really matter, right?” one of us would say. “Why do we care? We’ll know in a week. We can just enjoy being pregnant.”
We stuck the photo up in our kitchen, on the inner side of the refrigerator, where only we would see it. We’d leave it alone, and then one of us would pick it up again and we would laugh. Bill dug out a magnifying glass from the garage to see if we could make out better details with an amplified image, but the white blob was indecipherable.
The night after the appointment, we made an event of calling our parents. Bill went to the store to buy ingredients for a beef stew made with eleven kinds of vegetables. We pulled names out of a bowl to decide the call order: My parents were last. I stirred the onions in oil while Bill shared the news with both sets of his parents. Bill’s mother and stepmother cried. The mood was jubilant all around.
At nine o’clock eastern time, I dialed my parents in Virginia. My mother went to bed early; I hoped she would still be awake.
“Mom?” I said, motioning for Bill to turn down the heat on the stove so I could hear. “Are we calling too late? Do you have a minute?”
“We’re here, honey. It’s fine. I’ll get Dad to pick up.”
“Hi, Sara.” My dad’s voice was full of the evenness that made him a great moderator. My mother and I responded to things emotionally; there had been times when I was growing up when I hadn’t known where my feelings ended and hers began. I imagined she could hear my excitement through the phone. I gripped the phone with my hand until my knuckles went white.
“Hi, Dad,” I said, trying to control my pitch.
Bill came around the side of the chair where I was sitting and leaned his head near the phone. I looked at him and he nodded.
“We wanted to find out if you’re ready to be grandparents.”
“Oh, honey!” Mom’s voice broke. I could hear her crying on the other end of the line. She breathed heavily and managed to speak. “You’re pregnant?”
“We’re pregnant, Mom!” I said, rejoicing in being able to say those words. “And,” I said, pausing for dramatic effect, “Dr. Colaum thinks there’s a good chance it’s twins! We’ll find out next week.”
“It will be perfect whatever you have,” my mother said.
“Get ready, Bill,” my father said. “It gets really good from here.”
“You’re having twins,” Dr. Colaum confirmed in the exam room the following Tuesday. Bill sat behind the table where I was lying naked from the waist down.
“You should see Bill’s face!” Tracey said, trying unsuccessfully not to laugh. Dr. Colaum looked at Bill and, after several attempts to contort her face to maintain neutrality, broke into a laugh as well. I arched my back and tried to move my top half to be able to see him. The ultrasound wand was still inside me, and I didn’t want to disturb the babies. His face was ashen, and he looked like he was in shock.
“I knew it was likely, but—” he stammered, “I just. Oh my god. To see it—them.”
I looked back at the screen. Already we could see the amniotic sacs: two clear bursts of white life now, at least double the size they’d been the week before. My heartbeat accelerated, thumping hard in my chest. I raised my left hand to my abdomen.
“What’s the due date?” Dr. Colaum asked Tracey.
“We already have a due date?” I asked, arching back to look at Bill.
Tracey pulled out a paper wheel and started turning it while she talked. “Your due date is based on forty weeks from the date of your last period,” she explained. Tracey consulted her notes in our file. “So you guys are now technically four weeks pregnant, which makes you due on . . . January fourteenth.”
“Aquarian babies,” Bill said, “just like me.” I had been squeezing his hand so tightly during the calculation that the skin had turned white. “Ow,” he said. I let go. I felt as if light was being poured into my body. Twins. January 14.
Dr. Colaum told us she would monitor me weekly for the first nine to twelve weeks, at which point she would turn us over to our obstetrician.
Bill and I would need to find a new OB, having decided not to go back to Dr. Bizan and her overwhelmed practice, but we didn’t discuss doctors on the way home. Instead, we called our parents.
“Just think of the cute littl
e outfits and all of those little baby toes!” Bill’s stepmother, Gail, said. Bill’s dad sounded weepy. “We’re thrilled, we’re just thrilled.” Gail told me later how he’d been pining for grandchildren and imagined carrying a granddaughter on his shoulders, walking into town and having the neighbors say, “There goes Butch and Buster.”
“He thinks we’d call a girl Buster?” I laughed.
“It’s just his fantasy,” Gail said.
Bill’s mother, Nancy, meanwhile, hoped we’d be having boys. “I loved having boys,” she said.
His stepfather, Roger, had practiced as a child psychologist before creating his own consulting practice. “You’re going to have your hands full,” he said. “And the time of your lives.” Through their voices, I could feel the arms of the grandparents stretching out to the babies, their desire to pull out the baby clothes they’d been saving and cuddle new infants almost as strong as our own.
When we called my parents, my mother wanted to know if I’d had any food cravings or aversions. “When I was pregnant with you,” she said, “I could not bear the smell of fish. And I was obsessed with Hostess cupcakes—something I am sure horrifies you to hear, Ms. Holistic Medicine.” But I relished receiving these unmentioned details about my own gestation, the intensely intimate time I shared with my mother, of which I had no memory. I wondered if I could transmit to the babies the excitement their larger family felt about their being here.
My mother and I started talking once and then several times a week. She told me about BabyCenter, a website that would send me a weekly update with illustrations depicting my children’s development, comparing their size to pieces of fruit. We signed up, and on Mondays my mother would go to the grocery store and send a photograph of the comparison fruit in an email: a pea, an apricot, a lemon, and, later, a pear. Another day, my mother called to ask if Bill and I wanted my grandmother’s rocking chair for the nursery. “It’s polished dark oak, with a carved back and a cushion that she needlepointed herself. She left it in the will for you girls and your children.”
I told her I would think about the rocking chair. I felt anxious projecting too far into the future. We were only five weeks pregnant.
At our six-week appointment, we saw the babies’ heartbeats. Dr. Colaum had me hold still as she guided the monitor over the center of each baby. They now looked like two more delineated blob-circles. In the grainy picture of the screen, I could see what looked like the flickering image of an old black-and-white projector movie. “There it is!” Dr. Colaum said. She pressed a button on the ultrasound keyboard to freeze the image, and then the computer calculated the babies’ heart rate. “Baby 1: 140. Baby 2: 141.”
The ultrasound appointments were the highlight of my week. Dr. Colaum pronounced the babies “perfect!—in growth and appearance.” Tracey and Rachel, like my mother, delighted in hearing about my pregnancy symptoms. The calls with our parents and visits with Dr. Colaum’s staff were times when I could talk freely about the part of my life I was thinking about most. It seemed strange to feel so radically different and yet not be showing it on the outside. Any fatigue I felt (my primary symptom so far) would disappear the moment I had the opportunity to share.
“I was exactly the same in the first trimester!” my mother told. “Bone-aching, ridiculous tired—and I wasn’t even working. Your father would come home from work, and I’d be slouched in the same chair I’d been sitting in when he left in the morning, a book half-open on my lap. I’d maybe read a page. It went away by twelve weeks or so.”
I hadn’t experienced any pronounced nausea, but I continued to feel as if I were on a barge, the ground beneath me moving and shifting at times. The breakfast of organic yogurt, dry cereal, and apples I’d eaten almost daily for the past five years now turned my stomach, as did fresh spinach and other raw vegetables.
I became spacey in the mornings. Bill thought my behavior was funny, as I was typically so disciplined and devoted to my routine. He cooked broccoli smothered in cheese and made vegetarian pizzas so I would eat some greens. He sent texts from the grocery store to inquire if I had any particular cravings.
At our eight-week appointment, Dr. Colaum approved me for exercise and, even better, travel. The twins had strong heartbeats and were growing in their own amniotic sacs, something physicians find very reassuring. Ever since I’d told my mother we were pregnant, I’d wanted to see her. I wanted to run to her and put her hands on my stomach, which had not yet begun to swell outwardly but held the growing lives of our babies.
I flew to Washington, D.C., the second week in June. “When you get back, we’ll have your week-ten appointment,” Dr. Colaum said, “and you can stop taking the injections.” I marked the date on my calendar with a star. I’d been on shots steadily for over three months, and my backside was marked with purple and blue bruises. One night, the week before, the needle had gone in at an odd angle and hit a nerve. I had been up most of the night with pain radiating down my legs and back.
I brought my last batch of progesterone injections with me to my parents’ house. My mother gasped in the kitchen when I pulled down my pants and she saw the punished skin. I’d also lost weight—something I didn’t know could happen in a pregnancy but frequently can in the first trimester of a twins pregnancy. My jeans fell over my hips, and the back pockets sagged where my body had previously rounded them out.
“We’re going out to eat right now,” my father said. “We have to feed you and those babies.” We went out to dinner, and in the mornings my dad bought bagels from the deli nearby, which we ate with cream cheese and soft butter.
At fourteen weeks, my stomach popped. Bill took a picture of me against the white of our kitchen door. I hadn’t bought maternity clothes yet and was wearing a loose-fitting turquoise sundress. I pulled the material tight over my belly and stood sideways, facing our deck garden. I held up four fingers of my right hand, and Bill snapped the shot on his phone. We had reached the four-month mark.
Kaitlin and I had kept up our semimonthly call, every other Tuesday, since I’d moved back from England. She and her husband had been trying for over a year to get pregnant and had had two miscarriages, at six and eight weeks. The first week in August she told me they were pregnant again—just barely. I prayed for her baby daily. It terrified me to think about either of us experiencing such a loss, and I was grateful that Bill and I were well into the second trimester.
At the second-trimester mark, BabyCenter had sent an email that said: “Congratulations! Your risk of miscarriage has gone to less than 10 to 20 percent.” We still had one final appointment left with Dr. Colaum when we met with our new OB.
Bill’s business partner and his wife got us in to their OB-GYN practice with their doctor, Elsbeth Baker. Even though we’d done weekly ultrasounds with Dr. Colaum, Dr. Baker asked us to come in for an ultrasound. By week twelve, the twins had all of the important body parts and the doctors sent us home with photographs: crisp black-and-white images of little faces, hands, and feet.
At our final appointment at RMI, Baby A did a scissor kick right to camera and I was sure I saw something between his legs. Dr. Colaum saw it, too. She checked my face, presumably to gauge my response. “Was that—” I started to ask.
“Did you want to know the sex?” she asked. I nodded.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“I think I saw a penis.”
“I think so, too,” she said, angling the wand to see if Baby A wanted to reveal himself again. “That baby is a boy!”
To find out about Baby B, we’d have to wait until the twenty-week ultrasound. Bill said he’d wait for the technician to confirm the sex of both babies, as he did not trust my ultrasound reading and seemed offended about not having been there to witness it himself. Our appointment was scheduled for a Monday toward the end of August. We were five months pregnant now, and my belly amply filled out the stretch maternity tops I’d bought at Target and the Gap.
We’d dressed up for the appointment and
planned to go out to lunch afterward. I wore a green wrap dress and liked being undeniably pregnant now, and the way my body rounded and curved. The twenty-week ultrasound appointment took place in a special suite several OB practices shared. The exam bed was covered in rich leather. The lighting was dim, like in a theater, and the walls were painted a soothing brown. Mounted on the walls were two fifty-two-inch plasma TVs. A dark-haired female technician wearing a lab coat entered the room. Without introduction, she invited me to the bed, switched on the ultrasound machine, poured gel onto a roller, and dimmed the overhead lights even more. “Enjoy the show,” she said.
Bill and I watched as our babies were projected on the large screens. Having seen them weekly, I felt they were familiar now. I recognized the way they moved, the shape of their heads, the swimming motions they liked to do with their arms and hands.
“Ten fingers and ten toes,” the technician said. “See?” She angled the roller to show us each baby’s extremities.
She moved to the heads. “The brain looks good; skull bones are all forming nicely.” She took us on a tour of the noses, lips, throats, and teeth. We saw the babies’ kidneys and adrenal glands and even Baby A’s bladder full of liquid. The technician zoomed in on the four beating chambers of the heart. Then she shifted to look at Baby B, who sat lower in my uterus. As the technician measured the femur bone, the baby stuck a thumb in its mouth.
“Is he?” I said
“Sucking his thumb,” the technician affirmed.
“I used to suck my thumb!” I said, gobsmacked by the undeniably real infant gesture.
“I did, too!” Bill said.
“Hold steady if you can,” the technician asked. The appointment took a long time. The technician had to do close to a hundred measurements for each baby.
