What is it like to plan for one child and get two or even three?
It’s not like getting a couple of extra burgers in your order by mistake; it’s another life or two to take care of for at least eighteen years. Nick, who was all of twenty-four and had never even held a baby before, was ecstatic we were having twins. I, on the other hand, was filled with complete terror and fear.
Maybe my first pregnancy was easier because I was eighteen and there was only one baby, or maybe my memory of pregnancy with the twins is just stronger because it’s more recent. But my second pregnancy felt like a hormonal grenade going off in my body. I knew the day we conceived because within hours I started to feel weird. Mildly nauseous and light-headed.
And I still had nine months to go.
I was not what you would describe as a happy pregnant person. Not surprisingly, I’m not alone.
I know many women who hated being pregnant, but they just don’t feel comfortable sharing that truth. There is a ton of mommy shaming that goes on, and it needs to stop. If you are someone who barely notices being pregnant, then I’m happy for you. But if you aren’t, that has to be okay, too.
Another suggestion: let’s rename morning sickness, as that can be quite misleading. During my first pregnancy, “morning sickness” lasted all day and night and ended at three months exactly. John, my then hubby, brought me all the foods I was craving and could keep down, mostly bread and cheese. I remember thinking, I must never do this again. But sixteen years later, there I was again.
For those of you who’ve never experienced a twin pregnancy, let me enlighten you on some of the finer points.
By the end of my pregnancy, I was so huge that I literally had to be rolled off the bed in the morning. I couldn’t see the ground two feet in front of me. With every step, I felt as if I was going to tip over and fall on my face. At six months pregnant, I decided to accompany Nick on tour in Scandinavia, which I had no business doing, as I was so enormous that I couldn’t fit in the bunk bed on the tour bus. I had to sleep in the back lounge—a problem because the back lounge is the place where band members retreat to play video games and smoke, which I wasn’t able to tolerate. One whiff of smoke made me vomit immediately. I’m sure they were secretly counting the days until I went into labor so I would leave and go back home to LA.
My biggest worry was that Nick would still be on tour and wouldn’t be in LA for the birth. I had gotten pregnant with him on tour, and he had been on the road for more than eighteen months. I was praying he would make it back on time.
On October 18, 2006, at 3:00 p.m., Nick returned from an almost two-year-long tour. He was bedraggled and exhausted. At 10:00 p.m. that same day, those babies, whom I had been begging not to come until their daddy was home, decided it was time, and I went into labor, delivering on October 19 at 8:00 p.m. after ten hours.
How it works with a vaginal twin birth is that once the first twin comes out, there is a limited time window in which to deliver the second baby before the cervix starts to close. My ob-gyn is a badass motherfucker who at eighty years old has seen more famous vaginas than Jack Nicholson. He’s an old-school doctor and one of the few who still deliver twins naturally, and he was the reason, when I got pregnant, that I moved from New York City back to LA.
I had a vaginal twin delivery, which in LA is so rare that literally twenty-five people came into the delivery room at Cedars-Sinai hospital to watch me push them out. Ella was born first. She was fully cooked and ready to go. Our son, Silvan, was breech and not ready to come out. He could’ve done with a few more weeks, for sure. It took both my doctors working expertly together to manually turn him inside my belly, and Dr. K., with his gloved arm inserted halfway up inside my vagina, grabbed what he later told me he hoped were two feet and not a foot and a hand, to pull my blue, baffled, and quiet-as-a-mouse son out into the bright, loud world.
He looked so different from his sister. He had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. He was four pounds and looked like a tiny alien. He spent his first seventy-two hours in an incubator just trying to get with the fact that he was now out of utero and in the world.
When it came to naming them, I was hell-bent on giving them their own identities. I’m not particularly into the tradition of naming babies after dead people. I know a lot of people do it, but it’s not for me. Also, how do you decide whose family member gets honored in the lineup, and what billing does that person get? First name or middle name? Just too many opportunities for a fight, if you ask me.
Nick and I both agreed on Ella Grace, but it took a few months to decide on naming our boy Silvan. We just called him “boy” or “him” for three months until the deadline approached when you have to legally register a kid or they don’t officially exist. Silvan is the perfect name for him. His dad came up with it. Silvan means “man of the woods,” and that is where my son is most happy.
True to their first moments in the world, Ella is a kid who gets up at 6:30 a.m., makes breakfast, packs the lunches, gets dressed, and then wakes everyone else up, including Silvan. Ella is the CEO of our home, and I’m not worried about anything not going according to plan with her in charge.
Atlanta has grown into the kind of girl whom, were she not my daughter, I would absolutely want to be friends with. I’m still navigating how to be a mother to an adult daughter, and she’s still navigating how to be an adult daughter to her mother. From the time she was two until she was ten, it was just the two of us. We were a small but mighty team. So when twenty-one-year-old Nick entered the picture, she told me, “Mom, this guy is like, ten years older than me. It’s just weird.” I guess it has been a unique situation for her having a stepdad who is a man the age that many of her friends date.
I wouldn’t say Atlanta and I have a codependent relationship, but it’s perhaps right on the cusp. When she was nineteen—the age I was when I gave birth to her—she informed me she was moving to New York. I had a moment of panic where I wanted to say, “I’m not sure that’s the best idea!” or “What about your little brother and sister? You’ll miss them growing up.” But I knew better than to clip her wings. At some point all parents have to trust that we raised our kids well, and they will go on to use the tools we gave them. Rather than say anything to stop her, I heard myself saying, “I trust your judgment, my girl. How can I help you make this move?”
That is years of therapy and recovery in action right there . . .
8.
Baby Chaos: The First Year of Motherhood
The media’s version of a new mom is a tiny bit frazzled but otherwise calm, happy, and fulfilled. You know her—she’s the perfect modern mother who shows up in TV adverts, rom-coms, and style blogs. She has lost her baby weight and is always holding a smiling, toothless cherub with a bit of photogenic drool on his chin. This couldn’t be further from reality, yet the fantasy persists. Babies are like this once a day, maybe. The rest of your daily life with a baby is a tornado of sleep deprivation, feeding, changing diapers, giant sore nipples, breast-milk-soaked bras, along with the most intense love you will ever experience—love so deep it verges on scary.
The perfect-mother scenario exists even in maternity wards, where everyone somehow expects you’ll just know how to handle the things that no one talks about. Practical things, like how to clean a baby’s belly button when the cord is still attached and looks like a burnt piece of bacon. Or how about your baby’s first shit, meconium, which is like greenish-black tar, evidence of the last supper inside your womb? No one told me about that. No one told me about the importance of regular burping. I didn’t burp Atlanta for the first three months of her life.
When you buy a new car, they put a lovely little book in the glove box explaining what all the warning lights mean. IKEA furniture comes with instructions. But you leave the hospital with best wishes and zero advice.
We go from not being a mother to being a mother in a very short period of time, and our main task—how am I going to keep this tiny helpless human being alive?—sounds si
mple, no more complex than taking care of a houseplant. Just add clean diapers and milk eight times a day. But keeping a child alive is not so simple. In the beginning, I checked on Atlanta every fifteen minutes to make sure she was still breathing. I imagined it would be different with the twins but no. All day long, whenever they were quiet, not moving, or sleeping for six hours, I was wondering, What the fuck is wrong with you?
Or they were screaming their heads off, and I was wondering, What the fuck is wrong with you?
Either way, I was paranoid and exhausted, which was not a good time for anyone.
Raising a child is the hardest job I’ve ever had, both physically and emotionally. Unlike my other jobs, in the early days there was never a time when I could unplug and relax for the day. I had no idea that I was signing up to be on call 24/7 for a minimum of two decades. Which, come to think of it, is probably why there’s no instruction manual. If someone wrote the truth about what we were in for, women the world over might be more likely to think even longer and harder before choosing parenthood.
When it comes to parenting, and especially motherhood, people have a lot of opinions. And that’s putting it mildly. But two areas where people seem to have the most and strongest opinions are childbirth options and breastfeeding.
Are you breastfeeding?
Did you have a natural birth? Because any other kind is just not safe for the baby.
How long are you going to breastfeed?
Do you pump?
Why didn’t you do a water birth?
Are you supplementing with formula?
You are? That’s not a good idea.
Listen to different opinions, but please never let anyone tell you they know the only way to do it, because what works for them may not work for you.
When my milk came in, my boobs stretched to the point where I thought they would pop. Suddenly they were filled with, I don’t know, a pint of milk each? They were a GG cup, which is a size I didn’t even know existed.
It was an insane amount of milk; my boobs were heavy and rock hard. Friends tried to be helpful, suggesting things like putting cabbage leaves on them to help relieve the pressure, or warm compresses to help the milk come out. But nothing helped except feeding the babies, which was pretty much all I did for the first year my twins were alive.
I tried to go back to work when Ella and Silvan were six months old. I remember photographing a well-known actor for GQ. By the time we got shooting, I was past due for a pump. I remember looking through the lens and seeing his handsome face contort in disgust and confusion. I put my camera down.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Um, something is happening to you . . . Something’s happening . . .”
I had milk dripping out all over my shirt and onto the floor.
I shook my head in disbelief and excused myself to hand express in the bathroom.
By that time I’d experienced all kinds of weird bodily fluids and excretions in new and horrifying ways—pee in my eye, poo in my hair, and explosive diarrhea all over me. I can’t tell you how many times Nick and I would be sitting together on the couch while I was breastfeeding and I would accidentally squirt him in the face with breast milk as if I were wielding a water pistol.
My life went from being fully focused on a career I loved to spending my days sitting in a god-awful-pink-corduroy-covered breastfeeding chair, wearing a milk-stained “pumping bra” with two holes cut out over the nipples where the pumps attach to my boobs. There is no way to NOT feel like a cow when you are attached to a milk pump, listening to the whirring of the machine as it relentlessly sucks your nipple into the plastic tube and squeezes every drop of breast milk into the bottle. Yes, I know it’s beautiful that my body was sustaining the lives of my babies, but I also experienced a monumental identity crisis and with it an overwhelming feeling of loss.
As the weeks turned into months, it felt as though my sense of self was also getting sucked into the milking machine, until I began to not recognize myself and longed for something, anything, familiar.
About the third or fourth month in, after I’d adjusted somewhat and my babies were sleeping for at least a few hours a night, I looked at these tiny people and was overwhelmed with these thoughts: I cannot return you. This is it. There is no going back. You’re mine, and I’m yours, and we are not going anywhere. If a pet is for life, then this is some other-level serious shit.
The moment that realization began to hit me with the twins was also when I was starting to experience the beginning stages of what would become some major postpartum depression. As much as I loved Ella and Silvan and wanted to be with them, I also wanted to get away from them. My general attitude became “Whatever, I don’t care.” I had a complete lack of interest in anything except sleeping. At first, I mistook my apathy for the normal shock of being a new mom. But soon I began to see that my low energy and lack of interest was a red flag that something was very off with me.
Fortunately, when I couldn’t function very well, Nick was there. He was an involved father from the beginning, unlike a lot of the men of my dad’s generation, who expected to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for changing a diaper. Men in Nick’s generation are generally more involved. I see these guys at playgrounds all over the city wearing BabyBjörns and sometimes shepherding multiple children. Nick was, and is, just as involved as I am, and I would never have been able to get through those tough first years (my PPD lasted for two years) without him.
Postpartum depression is quite common—one out of eight mothers experiences some form of it—but moms often tend to avoid talking about it because it’s distressing and horrifying to think we’re already messing up motherhood. Unfortunately there is still so much stigma around PPD, which needs to change.
PPD is thought to be caused primarily by what I believe is a clusterfuck of hormonal changes and the general upheaval of life as you once knew it.
PPD is a tricky thing to self-diagnose. It ranges from mild to extreme. Like alcoholism, when you have it you tend to be the last to know about it. Someone in the throes of depression, especially a new mom, often can’t bear the thought of having to deal with yet another impossible-seeming thing. If a friend suggests a new mom might be depressed, our knee-jerk reaction is likely to say, “You think I’m depressed? What the fuck do you know? I just had a baby. I’m just tired.”
But a trusted friend or in extreme cases a doctor really can help you discern whether you are just tired or dealing with something more serious, like PPD.
Here’s a trick I’ve learned from my girlfriends who’ve survived it and come out on the other side to tell the tale: If you suspect you might be prone to PPD, ask a few people you trust to keep an eye on you after you give birth. That person watching out for you might not be your partner or husband. It might be a best girlfriend. Tell your friend, “I’m asking you to pay close attention to my mental health because if I’m down the hole, I won’t be able to see it.” To your partner, family, and friends, your PPD symptoms may seem as if you’re just suffering from lack of sleep, or maybe you’re just going through some hormonal changes. But it could be way more serious, as it was for me.
When the news reports heinous stories of women microwaving their kids or driving them off a bridge, my first thought is to wonder whether the women had PPD or any mental illness, which pregnancy and postpregnancy hormonal changes can often trigger.
When I was in the throes of PPD, the only thing I wasn’t apathetic about was my career. I began obsessing that I would never get hired again and that my life would be nothing but sitting in a stained old pink-corduroy-covered breastfeeding chair. A wise friend tried to reassure me. “But, Amanda,” he said, “talent doesn’t expire. And you are very talented.” I held on to that sentiment for dear life, and thankfully, even though my depression made me feel doomed to failure, my friend was right.
I think part of the reason I became hyperfocused on my career was that I just wanted something that felt familiar to me.
I wanted so badly to feel normal again. I didn’t feel like myself. I didn’t look like myself. My life in no way resembled what it had been before I gave birth, and I missed myself and my previous life, like crazy.
Regardless of the fact that PPD is common, most women suffer in silence. There’s still so much shame around not being the joyous and natural mother that we are “supposed” to be. Our culture conveys to us that being in love with our newborn should be all it takes to make us blissed out. But we’re complicated human beings who—guess what?—can be in love with our babies and still feel anxious, numb, sad, and restless. We can still wonder what in the hell we’ve done by having a baby. I can’t imagine my life without Ella and Silvan, and I can’t imagine one without the other. Ella without Silvan or Silvan without Ella doesn’t make sense. So many times I’ve thought, Thank God I’ve got them both.
And still, I was depressed.
It’s no wonder mothers are reluctant to admit they’re struggling. Even the pros don’t seem to fully understand all the influences that can make a woman vulnerable to PPD. The Mayo Clinic’s website, for example, offers a list of risk factors for PPD that barely acknowledges a new mom’s socioeconomic circumstances. At the very bottom of the list, after such factors as a history of depression, bipolar disorder, PPD after a previous pregnancy, family members who’ve suffered from depression, “stressful” life events (complications during the pregnancy, job loss, illness), the baby’s health, difficulty breastfeeding—after all of these come “weak support system” and “financial problems.”
It seems odd to me that having a family member who’s suffered from depression is a greater risk factor than solo parenting or being broke. Even the professionals minimize it, leading moms to feel that—despite the hard realities of how they’re going to actually feed this baby once he’s off the boob, or how they’re ever going to have time to take a shower or a nap with no family or friends around to watch the baby for a few hours—they should be filled with maternal joy!
It's Messy Page 8
