A monkey, a real live monkey, was riding on the back of the motorcycle, his little paws on the waist of the driver. Or at least that was what I thought I’d seen. Maybe I’d been inhaling too much exhaust. For a moment, we were suspended in silence. The singing had stopped.
“Was that a monkey driving a motorcycle?” I asked.
Someone nodded. And then my two little monkeys started screaming.
At those beach huts in Prachuap Khiri Khan, I relaxed. Our three-roomed air-conditioned hut was right on the Gulf of Thailand. I’d sit on the shaded porch while William and Vivian napped inside, and I’d think. Not about abandoning my children, but about nothing. Maybe I could do this parenting thing. Heck, I was doing this parenting thing.
After a quick swim where I played avoid-the-jellyfish, I needed to shower and change. Chris entertained our babes on the porch, juggling various squeaky toys to the delights of his audience. I went in. It seemed safe enough.
Ten minutes later, I emerged and saw three women swaying and cooing at our babies. Only William and Vivian weren’t on the blanket, but in the arms of two of the women. They were having the time of their lives and, judging from our twins’ smiles, so were they. I noticed their friend was holding three Singha beers.
I did what any responsible and concerned mother would do: I grabbed my camera and commemorated the drunken women holding my children.
They kissed our babies, placed them into our arms, and took a swig of their beers. All three friends wandered away, waving and blowing kisses.
“How long were those drunken women holding our babies?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Chris. “About five or ten minutes, I’d say. They were really nice.”
WE TRAVEL WITH OUR OWN DUAL AIRBAGS
Back in Bangkok, we put Chris’s parents on a plane and returned to our lives, which became routine. Fall—even though no such season existed in Southeast Asia—marched on. Soon, Thanksgiving arrived. We were celebrating it with American friends by cranking up the air conditioner and cooking a turkey.
Well, we weren’t cooking a turkey; we hadn’t even used our oven once in four years and weren’t sure if it worked, let alone if it fit a dead bird that wasn’t a pigeon who crapped on our balcony. We were getting our twins ready for the party. I was cutting Vivian’s nails, body parts which seemed eerily similar to her skin. She already had mutilated herself with numerous scratch marks, so I knew this clipping was overdue.
I sat her wriggly bottom on my lap, put one of her pudgy hands on the table, and began to clip. The first four fingernails were successful. Then I shifted her hand to clip her thumbnail. Pudgy skin was everywhere. I lined up the nail clippers and, like a batter eying a pitcher, determined my target. Then I swung. Rather blindly.
“#$%*, I cut off her thumb,” I screamed. Vivian screamed. We all screamed-together-screamed.
“#$%*, get me some Kleenex. She’s bleeding out.” Exaggeration is my specialty in a moment of crisis.
Chris deposited William in a bouncy chair and brought me a large box of tissues.
Vivian, of course, had discovered that warrior part of herself and was screaming bloody murder, which it nearly was. Chris inspected it.
“You just cut the top off,” he said, “that’s all.”
“That’s all?” I said through tears. “I can’t do this anymore.” I put Vivian in his arms, collapsed in the chair, and put my head on the table and cried.
“Can’t do what?” he asked. “Be a mom?”
I looked up. “I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?” Chris was now standing, bouncing Vivian around and using even more tissues to stop her from bleeding out.
“I don’t know what I don’t know.”
“Can you offer me any more information?” Chris asked, still bouncing Vivian, who was starting to swallow her sobs and her snot.
I sat up and wiped my eyes. “I know I can’t cut their nails anymore. That’s the only thing I know for sure.”
“No problem,” Chris said. “I’ll do it.”
“And William’s?”
“Yes, his too.”
“Here.” I gave him the clippers. “Her left hand still needs to be done.”
“Got it,” he said. “I’ll try my best to leave her thumb intact.”
I forced a smile.
Parenting Tip: If you maim your child, your spouse will help you out more.
I got through Thanksgiving with a weight on my chest, a weight that made me wonder who I was. I was supposed to be a happy mother, but I was a lump who breastfed her babies and then watched them play, day after endless day. I supposedly led a charmed life. I lived in one of Asia’s most exciting cities, and I had a maid who did laundry and cooked for us every weekday. All I had to do was look after two healthy babies.
Only they didn’t need much looking after. They didn’t even crawl yet. They weren’t getting into trouble. I just sat in the living room under the ceiling fans watching them and wondering, Is this it?
I rallied a bit in December. We’d decided to go home to Canada for a few weeks. In retrospect, it was an auspicious decision, given that our Plan B option was to fly to Southern Thailand and stay in a hotel that would be ravaged by the Boxing Day tsunami. Without the ability to see into the future, our petty, pre-Christmas concerns dominated our lives as we prepared to fly home to Canada for the holidays.
It was good to have something to do other than stare at cute babies day after day. My sense of humor even returned. I had started going to the Bangkok Twins-and-Triplets playgroup. Other moms with older multiples assured me that the first four months of raising twins were horrible, the next two months were difficult, but after six months it all became fun. Like the experts who predicted the housing bubble wouldn’t burst, they were wrong. A multi-day flight for four people in two seats was not fun.
Neither was packing, which became the one task I had to focus on. How do you pack for a 120-degree drop in temperature? I tried to recall that algebra class I took a generation ago in order to determine just how many diapers are needed by two babies going on three flights that span thirty hours. I couldn’t even find X, let alone solve for it.
I went to find Chris, who was in our bedroom packing for himself.
“Are twenty-eight diapers enough for three flights that take over twenty-four hours?”
“Twenty-eight?” he repeated, pausing from folding his underwear into perfect squares. “For both kids?”
“Yes, for both kids. I’m not planning to bring fifty-eight diapers.”
“Fifty-six,” he said.
“What?”
“Fifty-six is the double of twenty-eight.”
“Never mind. I’ll figure it out myself. Do you think I should pack What To Expect in the First Year?” I asked. That book rarely left my side.
“I think we can do without it for three weeks,” Chris said. “Do you?”
“Umm, I guess so. It’s pretty heavy.”
“Look,” Chris offered, sensing my worry. “If we really need one, we’ll buy another at home.”
For a few nights prior to the departure of our transpacific flight, I had nightmares of passengers pushing my family out the emergency door, without parachutes. This was what I was thinking when a taxi dropped us off at the Don Muang International Airport amid the chaos of Bangkok.
Being parents, we boarded early so we could keep our babies cooped up in an enclosed space even longer. As we sat on the tarmac, we watched innocent passengers struggle down the aisle to our row, recheck their boarding passes in disbelief, and wonder what they did to get such bad karma.
“They’re twins?” they uttered incredulously. “Have they flown before?”
“Nope,” I answered.
“Guess you lost the seat lottery,” Chris added in a preemptive attempt to build good will. “Bet you’re sorry you requested the bulkhead now.”
Nervous laughter lessened the tension for a nanosecond, until Vivian tested the speed of soun
d. With eyes the size of SpongeBob’s, she let out a scream that had even me looking around, desperately pretending she wasn’t my kid.
William remained unfazed by his sister’s screams and opted to employ a more underhanded method of annoyance. He started a dramatic monologue that consisted of yelling the syllable “da” relentlessly at varying pitches. It was cute for the first four seconds.
A flight attendant approached us and demonstrated how to hold our babies for takeoff and landing.
“I think we got it,” I said, interrupting her.
She didn’t look impressed.
All this occurred before the plane even left the tarmac.
But depart it did. The other 546 passengers became aware of the elevation change meter by meter, thanks to our babies. For the adults, Vivian and William’s screams reached high annoyance levels, in the same league as having the Minipops’ version of the song “Let’s Get It Started” looping in your head. I managed to balance a twin and wrench my wrist to check my watch: one hour had passed since we boarded the cattle car.
Somehow time inched forward. We negotiated several diaper changes in cupboard-sized bathrooms, all of which were as easy as doing a gymnastics routine in a closed coffin. There is nothing like straddling a toilet, pinning a squirmy kid onto a cafeteria-tray table, and searching for diaper cream at the bottom of a backpack that is floating in urine on the floor. Then repeat with the second kid. How I escaped the cubicle without flushing a child down the toilet, I’ll never know. I’m pretty sure the Earth’s population would be over eight billion by now if numerous babies hadn’t accidentally been flushed down airplane toilets.
Parenting Tip: If you need assistance while changing a baby’s diaper in an airplane bathroom, light a cigarette.
Later, after three more hours of crying and a couple of episodes involving passengers and vomit, there was silence. Vivian and William had fallen asleep in their adjacent Cabbage Patch–sized bassinets, hanging from the wall like tents secured to Everest’s rock face. A quick glance at the video monitor revealed that we’d crossed the date line. Yes, that infamous Saturday stretched on, like Britney Spears’s career. A dozen diaper changes later and two more hours of screaming, we descended.
As the plane skidded to a halt, we managed to keep William and Vivian’s heads from smashing into the wall in front of us. The seatbelt sign dinged, we gathered our gear, and trudged up the aisle, whacking “passengers in need of assistance” with bags. If they didn’t need help before, they needed it now.
I could wax poetic about how our Dynamic Duo, whose body weight compared with that of an average holiday turkey, were a lesson in adaptability and resilience. But the truth was becoming clear: These two pieces of extra baggage were better travelers than their parents.
Getting off the plane in Winnipeg, one of the coldest cities in the world, was not a breath of fresh air, unless the air you were breathing was liquid nitrogen.
We took our baggage, including the nonhuman variety, and struggled to the luggage carousels where we were met by my extended family carrying snowsuits, car seats, and all other winter gear with the exception of portable igloos.
We handed our spawn over for cuddles, and then we spent an hour stuffing William and Vivian and their limbs inside snow gear, trying not to zip up their chins.
We repeated this charade multiple times over the next two weeks.
In fact, of the three weeks we were in Canada, we spent one week sleeping, one week talking, and one week putting babies in and out of snowsuits.
On our last Sunday at home, Chris and his mom left the house ahead of me, carrying our winterized children. I came out and saw Vivian and William lying on their backs, staring at the sky.
“You can’t just throw them in a snow bank,” I said to Chris.
“It’s for a purpose,” he said.
I watched as his mom took a picture.
“See?” Chris added. “They’re snow angels.”
I smiled. It was good to be home.
Parenting Tip: To entertain passersby or family members, place your baby in a snow bank. Then hide.
But good didn’t last long enough. It was time to go back to Asia.
I packed and repacked diapers.
“It’ll never happen,” Chris said to me, continuing a conversation we’d started earlier.
His parents were entertaining William and Vivian—no doubt stopping them from pulling the tinsel off the Christmas tree—while we struggled to pack our hockey duffels, also known as Canadian suitcases.
“I’m going to call the airline,” I said.
“Go wild,” Chris said. “But they’re not going to upgrade us. Like I said, it’ll never happen.”
I took his adult double-dog-dare-you, and I called from the other room.
I pranced back into our bedroom. “Can you believe it?
They upgraded us to business class. Do you think they meant the babies too?”
“You really think they’ll make us leave them in economy?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Did you ask the person you talked to?”
“Not directly. The kids are listed on our tickets and their seats are on our laps, so I’m pretty sure it’s OK,” I said. “Anyway, since the vouchers are good for just one flight, we’re only upgraded for the Vancouver–Hong Kong leg.”
“Isn’t that the thirteen-hour flight?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s the one that matters.”
One day later, we transferred from our domestic flight in Vancouver and joined business class with our babies.
All the suits gasped.
“They’re twins,” I volunteered. “We travel with our own dual airbags.”
I fake smiled.
And fake prayed.
Then the announcement came, the one that was worse than prepare for a crash landing.
“This is your First Officer Tyler. We are currently in line to have the plane de-iced. We estimate we will be delayed ninety minutes. Our crew will be around to offer you drink service.”
I pulled out a boob. I was the drink service for my kids.
Once everyone was drunk, the mood softened. Under the threat of sleeping in the overhead bin, Vivian and William behaved and slept. When they weren’t sleeping, drunk people in suits held them.
As long as they were content, I didn’t care.
I’M SCREWING UP OUR KIDS
Not long after returning to Thailand and adjusting to the twelve-hour time difference, it hit me full force: Postpartum Depression. Only I didn’t know it was PPD, because my twins were seven months old.
I couldn’t sleep. At all.
Or eat.
Or think.
Or find anything funny.
Google and a friend helped diagnose me.
More people helped me get better, including doctors and counselors.
It took longer than this page.
It took months.
I have very few memories of that time, except one enduring fear that I told Chris. “I’m screwing up our kids.”
“No you’re not,” he said.
He was right. It took months—and a team of people—for me to believe that.
When I emerged out of my dark cocoon, I tossed the rest of the parenting books out.
Parenting Tip: Everything is a stage. It will pass. Just like that penny your baby ingested.
WE’RE SCARRING THEM FOR LIFE
When Vivian and William were closing in on turning one and I had rediscovered some of my ability to laugh, we decided to go on one final family vacation in Thailand, mostly because we didn’t know any better. We boarded a plane in Bangkok and survived a one-hour flight to Chiang Mai, a laid back city in northern Thailand.
The week went well enough, if you consider the following facts:
° We rarely left the dusty room of our guesthouse.
° We were in bed by 6:30 each night, because that’s when our twins conked out.
° We
had five toys with us and had to entertain two kids with them.
° Guesthouses are not baby proof; they’re not even adult proof. They’re outfitted with lamp cords, electrical sockets and dangling wires, and bizarre hot water heaters that would send a certified electrician into cardiac arrest.
° A ten-month-old baby is mobile; ten-month-old twins are a roaming gang. One moment they’re there, the next they’re gone. It’s a magic show brought to you by Pampers.
I kind of coped. Maybe it was because I got a lot of sleep, something that had been rare in the past three months.
Everything went well enough, at least until we arrived at the Chiang Mai Airport.
After checking our luggage, car seats, booster seats, and three suitcases of soiled laundry, we wheeled our stroller to the gate. We collapsed into two chairs and freed William and Vivian from captivity. They crawled around the carpeted floor, weaving in and out of a multi-leg obstacle course.
Soon, I was chatting with people nearby, answering questions about twins, claiming that our first vacation had been a success.
Chris was talking to a California tourist who owned a weight loss clinic. The doctor was the color orange.
Eventually I remembered I had children. I spotted Vivian. Then I looked for William.
“God help me,” I said. “He’s sucking on the stroller wheel.”
Yes, the year after the SARS outbreak, our twins were not only crawling around a carpeted airport floor in a developing country, but one twin was sucking on the same stroller that, the day before, had been bumping its way over basketball-sized dung at the elephant orphanage.
The other passengers-in-waiting looked in horror at William lip-locked with the stroller wheel. I stumbled over, broke the suction, and picked him up.
I picked up a pacifier I found in the bottom of the diaper bag and plopped it in his mouth. And thus ended the days of sterilizing anything. Even my wine glass.
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