DEBORAH SIEGEL
sOME PEOPLE THINK HAVING TWINS makes you badass. “Twins? Wow. Hardcore.” This is what people say to you. After a year or two of hearing it, you begin to believe it yourself. Until you meet someone more badass than yourself: The Triplet Mom.
I was shuttling my toddlers up the four flights of stairs to their preschool classroom, wondering why this world-class synagogue didn’t have an elevator. I was tired, very tired, from another night of interrupted sleep. My daughter had cried from three to five that morning with toddler demands. When the alarm clock went off an hour later, I felt faceless. By the third flight of stairs, my legs were weighty, my eyelids heavy. Earlier in the year, the climb seemed nearly impossible because my son had wanted to be carried. Not today. All things considered, we were making good progress.
Coming up behind me were Triplet Mom and her nanny. Between her kids and mine, we were half the class. I felt solidarity with this mother of three, the way I did with all parents of multiples, but thus far, she and I had said little more to each other than hello. I grabbed the moment in the stairwell to court her as a friend, desperate as I was for connection.
On many levels, I found her appealing. Maybe it was her nose ring, or her surprisingly Zen demeanor, or the way two of her three children held her hands as they marched up the stairs. What an amazing mother she must be.
That said, I’d harbored a love/hate thing for this woman I barely knew, ever since the first day of class when, during snack time, she pulled out bottled water and earth-friendly thermoses to complement the Annie’s Organic Bunny crackers she brought for her triplets. My kids, along with the only other two children in the class, drank New York City tap water out of plastic cups and munched on the generic goldfish the school provided.
Maybe it wasn’t solidarity I felt in my compulsion to reach out, after all. Maybe I needed to overcome my own petty jealousy and prove something to myself.
“How’s it going this morning?” I asked, flashing my eyes her way for half a moment, afraid that one or both of my toddlers might plummet if I released my gaze from their climb.
“Tired. But then, I always am,” she said lightly, as if it were no big deal.
“I know,” I related. Her three were doing an amazing job with the stairs. I marveled at the way two of them weren’t even holding the railing, just her hand. Their nanny was gently nudging along the third. I encouraged my two to hold the railing and keep their eyes ahead.
“So, are you home with them every day?” I asked, my default gesture at conversation. Having a similar or at least complementary work/life setup seemed to be my prerequisite for mommy friendship during those early days of working motherhood. You had to find times to get together for playdates when you were both available, and be willing to weather friendships through cancellations when work issues came up. But aside from logistics, I simply related to working moms more. I found comfort in struggles that paralleled my own.
Triplet Mom stared into the middle distance. She sighed audibly. “It’s different with triplets,” she said. “It takes two adults. All the time.” Was that a note of condescension in her voice? There was clear emotion behind the statement. I wondered if she thought I was judging her for staying home with a fulltime nanny. Maybe I was. Maybe I was just like the female resident at the hospital who, when I was a young girl being prepped for eye surgery, asked what my mother did for a living. When I told her that my mother stayed at home with me, the resident responded, Is that all?
As we rounded the landing for the final set of stairs to the top floor, I wondered why she seemed defensive. And did her answer mean she was a fulltime stay-at-home mom? Did having three kids at once mean this woman, by necessity, had to sacrifice her career—even with the help of a partner and a nanny? I found this notion threatening, the prospect of having so many kids that you couldn’t work. I was struggling to contribute to the family treasure and still be there for my kids, with just two. Suddenly, my part-time working arrangement felt like not enough and yet too much. I stumbled for a moment and tripped up a stair.
And then, the unthinkable almost happened. I lost my balance and righted myself by leaning on my daughter’s shoulder. She buckled just slightly from the pressure. I stopped in my tracks, took a deep breath, and tried to steady myself and my teetering self-doubt.
As we entered the classroom, my thoughts shifted from comparative work/life arrangements to competitive childrearing. This program required a caregiver’s presence, so Triplet Mom, her nanny, and I all followed the kids into the room. Two of the triplets started building a high tower. “Oh, so high! So high!” cooed Triplet Mom. My son and I were banging two cardboard blocks together. (“Can he stack six blocks?” his occupational therapist had asked me the other day. I lied and said he could stack three.) When it was circle time and the teacher, Michele, started reading a book about trains, my son started to scream. Circle time was not his thing. I took him out of the room. As we left, the triplets were busy calling out different kinds of freight cars—“Flatcar!” “Hopper car!”
I paced the hallway, cradling my son in my arms, and prayed that he’d stop screaming. As soon as he stopped crying, I started crying myself. When we both finished, we returned to the room.
Mercifully, class eventually ended. I took a swig from my son’s sippy cup and did a half-assed job wiping up some water I had spilled on the table, while trying to also keep an eye on my daughter and shove my son’s arm into his jacket. My son started howling again as Michele handed out our kids’ artwork from last week. Triplet Mom laid her kids’ paintings on the table near me, where I had spilled the water, and where I continued to wrangle children and water and coats. “Excuse me,” she said, maneuvering the pictures out from under my coat, where they lay dangerously close to the pool of water. “Ohhh, water,” she said, disappointedly. Yes, water! I wanted to say. NONORGANIC WET WATER ON YOUR TRIPLETS’ ART! I sucked in my breath instead and led my twins back down the stairs.
Later that morning, while pushing my kids home in their stroller, I found myself wondering about the intensity of my emotion and self-doubt. Why did I judge myself so fiercely? Why did I judge other mothers, in spite of my need to connect? While I found comfort in struggles that paralleled mine, the flipside was also true. I felt distanced by differences. The gulf seemed to widen whenever somebody mentioned full-time help.
As I bumped the stroller down the three stairs leading to our ground floor apartment, I realized that in my mental replay, I had muted a key tidbit of the conversation with Triplet Mom. Somewhere between the third and fourth flights, before we’d reached the classroom, she had asked if I worked. I told her yes, part-time and largely from home. She said that seemed like the ideal. Once her kids were a bit older, she hoped maybe she’d be able to work again, too. We were sisters in work/ life struggle, and all I could focus on in that moment was who was getting it “right.”
About a year earlier, just as my twins were starting to sit up, The New York Times ran a forum about “competitive mothering” featuring prominent novelists and memoirists, an anthropologist, a historian of childrearing practices, an editor, and an entrepreneur. The forum was titled, “Who’s the Best Mommy of Them All?” When the kids went down for their nap the next day, I pulled that forum up online, took a second look, and jotted down some gems in the Moleskine notebook I kept stuffed in my diaper bag, a remnant of my pre-motherhood self.
“Moms worry for a living,” wrote British novelist Allison Pearson. “If we screw up our job, it’s not a delivery of fruit that goes bad. It’s the next generation.”
“It’s as though our identities are on the line with decisions about the permissibility of dessert,” added Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. She dispensed salient wisdom about the contexts in which our criticisms take place:
“Our much-vaunted ‘choices,’ in an absence of family-friendly social policies, have largely proven hollow. For most mothers, the real freedom to choose how they live their lives remains a distant dream. Many blame themselves for falling short and then buttress themselves against self-criticism by critiquing other mothers’ so-called choices.”
Hollow. Real freedom. Distant dream. So-called choices. The words softened me enough to open my heart to what Triplet Mom’s reality might possibly be.
I wish I could report that we grew better acquainted over coffee. In reality, I Googled her. And in the blue haze of isolation, up late one night while the rest of my family slept, I learned that both Triplet Mom and her husband were filmmakers. Her husband had recently premiered a documentary about technology that featured their kids as newborns. I watched the online trailer. Actually, I watched it three times, taking in the miraculous images of three bug-eyed newborns with scrawny fingers and blue-tinged skin. I learned something profound about the triplets’ beginnings. Born too early, they lived in neonatal intensive care, dependent on machines, for the first several months of their lives. In the film, the babies had oxygen tubes tucked under their tiny noses and EKG wires running every which way along their delicate chests. In one still image, the forefinger of an adult hand caressed a forehead through an incubator. The infant’s entire head was no larger than a fist.
I learned something about their first few months at home. Once released from the hospital, their parents were cautioned to limit their exposure to any germs or viruses, lest they end up back in intensive care. Were I in Triplet Mom’s place, I too might have monitored their intake down to their Annie’s bunny crackers. And I sure as hell would have found a way to have two adults at home. All the time. No matter what it might take.
About a year later, I had a second perspective-altering experience, one that flattened me with all the subtlety of a freight train’s engine car. This time, it was even more humbling than before.
I was sitting in the community room with my husband in a circle of parents at my twins’ new preschool. We had moved across the country to be closer to family. The room was named for a child who had died of cancer when he was five years old. It was the inaugural meeting of the school’s Inclusion Support Group, a monthly gathering of parents with children who had special needs of varying order, led by the school’s Director of Child Development. My son had some sensory issues that raised flags and landed him an aide in the school’s inclusion program. We were still figuring out what he needed, but most of the others parents had kids who were autistic, and more.
Real freedom. Distant dream. So-called choices. The words came back to me in this sober setting, waking me to the reality that, depending on the hand we are dealt, parenthood can be nothing like what we expect it will be.
Some children are in need of special protection. Those needs are frequently invisible from the perch on which other parents sit and judge. Other times, our judgment of parents assumes a need for correctness or control on their part, when in reality, as in the case of Triplet Mom, they might very well be acting on fears based on harrowing experiences. Or they might simply be making different choices. Organic ones.
I’d like to report that with the passage of time, I’ve grown less judgmental—that I now practice sisterly motherhood, and motherly sisterhood. For the most part, I do—or rather, I try. And certainly, there is more room for empathy now that my toddlers are sleeping through most of the night.
There remain times, of course, when I revert to my old ways of thinking. At those moments, I hear the familiar cadence chugging down the track: Am I good enough? Am I doing this right? Are my children developing on target? Do I work too much? Not enough? Don’t I care?
The scripts inside our heads are relentless. The scripts are insidious. I want what all good mothers want: healthy and happy kids, with room for myself in the mix. With all the energy I spend locked in judgment, I could organize a stroller brigade. When I default to my old ways, I often find myself thinking how very different life might be if all of us good mothers realized the extent to which our climbs up the stairs were shared. If I were to meet Triplet Mom on the stairs again, if I could say one thing to her, I hope it would be: Wow, sister. What an amazing mother you are.