ONE BABY IS SLIPPING through the leg of the high chair. The other has flopped forward in her seat and is gumming the dirty edge of the table. The café is full but we’re in a quiet corner, where I hope the waiter won’t notice the mess.
“Do you need help?” says a woman, passing us on her way out, with a look I have grown accustomed to over the last six months—part admiration, part you poor cow.
“No, I have it, but thanks.” With one hand, I grab the baby who’s slipping and yank her back into place, while jamming the other hand between her sister’s gums and the table. Thus balanced, I lean forward and take a slurp of my latte.
It is midmorning in late spring on a day I don’t have help with the babies and I am happy to be out of the house. For the first four months, I barely left my apartment. I watched a lot of TV. I napped when the girls napped and pumped so much breast milk the freezer is jammed with it, yellowing in hard plastic sleeves like the flavor of Popsicle nobody wants. I forced myself to acclimatize to getting by on our own. The Sunday the babies came home from the hospital, I called Phyllis and told her not to come in until Monday. “Are you sure?” she said anxiously. “I can come over now.”
“No, I need to do a night on my own or I’ll never want you to leave.” That evening, after spending the afternoon caring for the babies with L and her son, I sent them home, too. “Call me in the night if you need to,” she said.
“OK.”
“You sure you don’t want to come upstairs with us?”
“No. We’ll be fine.”
“OK.” She pulled a face of comic alarm, as if seeing me off at the edge of a desert. “Bye.”
“Bye.”
I returned to sit on the sofa, where the babies lay in their rockers before me. Cradled in receptacles made for babies up to four times their size, they looked like the victims of a bizarre science fiction experiment, in which human beings had been shrunk to the size of large earrings. Their onesies gaped at the arms. Their hats slipped over their eyes. While one baby slept, the other looked steadily up at me before flicking her eyes to take in the room. Then her gaze returned to meet mine. “Hello,” I said.
Women, particularly married women who have just had a baby, ask me incredulously about the math of one parent versus two newborns. I have no answer. I did it, and afterward I forgot how I did it. Terror made me nimble. I ate a lot of Milky Ways. After that first night, when I picked up the rockers one by one and carried them through to my bedroom, putting one by the side of my bed and one at the foot, I had Phyllis for the month, and after she left, although things were terrible at night, they were terrible within the realm of the manageable. That first night alone was the only time, with the exception of the mood plunge I had forty-eight hours after their birth, when I thought, this is too hard, I can’t do it. It was dark in the room save for the purple glow of the night light and I couldn’t get a grip on my fear. Every time I thought I had it under control, a new wave rose up to engulf me. At some point, after a stretch of high bleating cries that nothing I did would assuage, I got up to unlock my front door; clearly none of us would survive the night, and in the morning, the police would need to get in to recover our bodies. This habit continued long after Phyllis had left; I would take my chances with the burglars for the sake of not being locked in with my fears. Anyway, the real killers were here with me already.
They were so small for so long. No matter how hot my apartment, their skin always looked so mottled and cold. Even with Phyllis there, the onslaught of pump-feed-change-repeat was brutal, although her presence made that first month the easiest it would be for a long time. There is a comic novel to be written called My Month with Phyllis, in which a thirty-nine-year-old white woman and a sixtysomething Caribbean woman become unlikely flatmates and friends. It shouldn’t have worked but it did. She was kind, and funny, and eccentric in ways I found charming. We overlooked each other’s foibles. Phyllis overlooked the fact that I didn’t shower more than one day in four and that whatever I was doing with the lady upstairs probably went against the teachings of Christ, and I overlooked the fact that Satan visited her in dreams and that she gave all her wages to a diet doctor in Coney Island. I tried not to be bitter about this, but it was hard. Slowly, in weekly cash increments of twenty-five hundred dollars, I was buying Dr. Botkin a summer home.
“What are you doing, Phyllis?” I asked grumpily one night, catching sight of her on the sofa, head bowed, fiddling with something behind her ears. The babies were side by side on her lap, dozing after a feed.
“I’m doing my ball bearings,” she said and explained Dr. Botkin’s method of implanting tiny silver balls behind his patient’s ears, which they were instructed to rotate every night to achieve weight loss. When that didn’t work, she went on a cabbage diet, infusing the apartment with the smell of a hospital kitchen. “Really? Phyllis? Cabbage?” When Satan visited her, she cried out, “Devil, be gone!” and he left. Sometimes I got up in the night and we’d sit side by side on the sofa, each feeding a baby, and sometimes I slept through, going into her room at five a.m. to collect the girls for their first feed of the day.
“Another rough night?” I asked when Phyllis emerged several hours later, startling in the hallway in her Victorian nightgown. “How’s Satan?”
She clicked her tongue. “You.” When I came downstairs from L’s one evening, upset after a disagreement, she gave me a hug and said kindly, “Relationships are hard.”
As I recall, the disagreement with L had been about Phyllis. If L and I thought we’d come up with a clever way to downsize human need, we were wrong. I should have known this from the jealousies I felt after the birth of her son, when I resented everyone else L looked to for help. Just because we weren’t doing this together didn’t mean third parties were welcome.
“Can’t you tell her to take five in her room when I come down?” said L.
“I need her. I don’t want to be rude.”
“Why don’t you just ask?”
This was the ghost of an old argument, as much about L’s directness versus my circuitous Englishness as it was about accommodating each other’s needs. In those first weeks and months, it was one of the few arguments we had. There were no fights about who should get up in the night because, once Phyllis left, that person would always be me. No one’s career stalled at the expense of the other’s and there was no bickering about who paid for what. And yet while “no one to resent” could be the unofficial motto of the single mother by choice, it isn’t really true. In my experience, there is always someone to resent—the stress and exhaustion has to come out somewhere—and if I wasn’t resenting L for leaving when I wanted her to stay, I was resenting Phyllis for taking too long when she went downstairs to do laundry, and L was resenting me for leaning on Phyllis. She had her own two-year-old; she was exhausted, too.
At the same time, I was aware that everything L did in those weeks was a gift, not a duty and I mostly received it as such. She ran around town picking up new bouncers and equipment that might help the gassier of the two babies sleep. She ordered boxes of preemie clothes that would actually fit and forced me to persevere with the smaller baby when she struggled to breast-feed. When I went upstairs to see her for twenty minutes in the evening, leaving the babies with Phyllis, we watched TV and played with her son, then she came downstairs to kiss the babies good night. She tickled Dee Dee’s feet and nuzzled Jane’s red hair. “She looks like me,” said L teasingly.
“She does.”
There are two versions of what happened in the weeks after Phyllis left and before the babies were stable enough to sleep through the night. One is an idyllic run of lazy afternoons, with snow at the window and a historical drama on TV, all three of us dozing to the whir of the breast pump. This was the bubble into which I was sometimes reluctant to admit L and that had occasionally made me happy when Phyllis took her days off. And there is another version of that time, which I have largely expunged from my memory. At four weeks old, the babies were still smaller than most newborns. Between seven and nine p.m. nightly but sometimes extending on toward midnight, one or the other of them screamed without pause. L would drop by to help, but had to excuse herself after an hour to put her own son to bed, after which it was like a scene from a horror movie. I would rock one baby in my arms until she settled, then put her down to pick up the other one, whereupon the one I’d put down started screaming again. This cycle rebooted over and over, until I lost all reason, putting down one baby and picking up another in such rapid succession that neither was soothed for a minute. I had a vision of myself rotating the babies like juggling balls, becoming madder and madder with each manic rotation. Occasionally, I got away with putting one baby in her bouncer and rocking it with my foot while sitting on the sofa with the other one. And sometimes I could wear one in a carrier on my front and cradle the other between my side and my forearm—the single advantage of their being so small—then walk around the room, jiggling them both. But neither of them liked these solutions, either being abandoned to the rocker or sharing my body space with her twin, and it tended only to prolong the agony. It was brutal and the worst thing about it was that it was brutal in what felt like a singular way. Just before the girls were born, I had joined a Facebook group made up of first-time twin moms in my area and, while Phyllis was still in residence, had been to the group’s inaugural monthly dinner, where we all had two sips of wine and were instantly wasted. I avoided the group after that. The other women were lovely and it wasn’t that I was ashamed of being a single parent, but they were all married, and once Phyllis left, my experiences felt so vastly different, they might as well have been twelve single men.
I should probably have persevered. It might have been helpful to talk, even if our experiences diverged. As it was, within weeks of the birth, I started to feel I couldn’t justify dropping a hundred dollars on dinner once a month. I couldn’t believe I had worried so much about the cost of conceiving the babies—which had come to less than the cost of getting my green card in the end—and barely given a thought to the costs once they were born.
“Yeah, but it’s finite,” said Merope. “You’ll have no money for five years, and then they’ll start school.”
This might have been true in England. And while it was almost certainly true that, because of competition in the fertility market, the cost of getting pregnant had been cheaper in New York than it would have been in London, once the children were born, the American system felt staggeringly, punitively expensive. The monthly cost of health insurance for the three of us is half the cost of my mortgage again and won’t expire when the children turn five. Unlike in the UK, there is no universal free dental care for kids. There is no universal free anything. It is grindingly hard to raise two kids on a single income in New York, and I say that as someone who is relatively prosperous.
After the first month, I couldn’t afford Phyllis for twenty-four hours a day, but neither could I afford not to sleep or work, and so, until the babies got bigger, she agreed to come back for two nights and three days a week. That left me with five nights to manage alone and I moved out to the sofa during that time, the girls sleeping alongside me in their day cribs. I found this arrangement less isolating than being alone in the bedroom, and when they woke at one a.m., and two a.m., and three a.m., and four, I could kid myself that it was a less alarming time of night. No one ever died of fright at eight p.m. Only the darkness of the apartments across the street betrayed this lie and I would fixate on the odd light in a window—a shift worker, an insomniac, someone with a newborn, like me—and beam out signals of empathy and distress.
On Saturdays, I would take the rockers upstairs and spend the night on L’s sofa, while she slept in her room with her son. By agreement, she didn’t come out when they cried, unless the crying went on longer than the space of a feed. One Saturday, after a particularly bad run of sleepless nights when the longest either baby had slept was forty minutes, L came out at three a.m. looking alarmed. I was burping one of the babies so hard, she could hear the sound of the slaps through the wall.
“Give her to me,” she said gently.
Describing all this makes it sound pretty appalling. But if it was shockingly hard, it was also shockingly simple. The babies’ comfort was my comfort and I had no choice but to do it. When people say their kids give life meaning, what they mean, I think, is that this absence of choice, coupled with a love so huge it throws everything that came before into shade, can feel even on hard days—especially on hard days—a lot like destiny.
On the days Phyllis wasn’t there, Oliver looked in, bringing lunch, and other friends with freelance schedules came, too. My dad and Marion came for three weeks. “I’m here to see my American grandchildren,” said my dad proudly, when the immigration officer at JFK asked him for the purpose of his visit.
“They’re not American,” I said to L, later.
“Get over it,” she said, “they’re American.”
Slowly, I figured out how to do things alone: how to shower (drag both bouncy seats into the bathroom with me, or leave the babies in the living room and wash for two minutes to the sound of their screaming); take them on the subway (wear one in the carrier and push the other in the single stroller); feed them simultaneously (sit on the floor between rockers, with a bottle of breast milk in each hand); and do everything I used to do with two hands—load the dishwasher, clean the bath, make an omelet—with one, because I always had a baby clamped to my hip. (I’m kidding about the bath, obviously. I never cleaned it.) When they both clamored for care, I picked them up under the armpits, one in each hand, so that by the time they were one, I was able to bench-press two toddlers with relative ease. Above all, in those winter months, I figured out how not to leave the house. In the early days, I truly believe the key to being a single mother of twins is to have everything delivered to your door.
There were a few things I couldn’t work out. I worried endlessly about what to do in the event of a fire. Could I carry the two of them safely down seventeen flights of stairs on my own? Would I have time to put on the carrier, or is that the kind of thing that costs a woman and her babies their lives? Then, incredibly, there was a fire, smoke billowing in through the cracks of the elevator one morning as I traveled down with the babies to the lobby. When the doors opened, black smoke poured in and both babies began screaming and retching. I made a split-second decision: to go back up a burning building rather than expose their tiny lungs to one more mouthful of smoke, and as the elevator climbed, I called 911. Within minutes, half a dozen fire trucks were parked round the block. “You’re OK, you’re OK,” said the operator, over and over, until a fireman banged on our door and said it was a blaze in the laundry room and they had put it out.
I was radioactive with tiredness, but in those early days I wasn’t particularly lonely. This had as much to do with the babies as with L and my friends. Before they could talk and assert themselves as separate human beings, it sometimes felt as if the three of us functioned as one. When I had stomach flu one night and puked roughly every twenty minutes for eight hours, both babies were eerily silent. They understood.
Harder, much harder, was the period when they got older and combined the needs of babies with the complicated emotional needs of toddlers. At six months, we said an emotional good-bye to Phyllis and welcomed Jeanette, who’d care for them during the week so I could finally get back to working full time, and it was then, during the long evenings and weekends, that I was so lonely. Some days I wanted to run out into the street, throw myself at the first maternal-looking woman in late middle age, and demand she take me home and look after me. The girls were early talkers, and before they turned one, we entered the period of strict toddler religious law: “mummy hair” (down), “mummy shoes” (off), “mummy sit” (there). Spoons had to be the right color and placed on the right side of the plate. Different pacifiers were required for different times of day and night. There was a whole subsection concerning lids; if I forgot myself and ripped the lid off a yogurt rather than tearing it halfway, so the dictator-toddler could rip off the other half, that yogurt was rejected or hurled to the floor. On the other hand, if I didn’t twist on the lid of the sippy cup with sufficient force, that cup was poison to their lips. Sometimes I was good-natured about this and sometimes I lost it, and I think I lost it more because there was no one else there.
L cut my girls’ nails. I played endless games of cars with her son. As the girls got older, she taught them how to eat pizza like a New Yorker (hold it in one hand and curl it up at the edges), rather than a British person (fold it over or tear off individual bits, which makes L actively angry), and to drink seltzer with as much enthusiasm as milk. We were both reluctant to babysit for each other—after a long day, refereeing two toddlers and a three-year-old feels like the enactment of a medieval curse—which meant going out was expensive and hard. But we would sometimes swap kids for an afternoon for a change. And while we weren’t parents to each other’s children—the relationship was less intense than that, less inclined toward overprotection and free of the encumbrances of being the last word—as a result, we were often more fun and less cranky with each other’s kids than with our own. My girls are part of me in a way that makes it very hard for me to imagine an alternative life in which they hadn’t come to exist, but L’s son is something else—an unexpected gift, a rare joy, a love I couldn’t have foreseen.
He calls the girls “my babies,” and sometimes, “my best friends.” The girls call L by her name, as her son calls me by mine, and then something interesting happened. From the time she first spoke, my daughter Jane called me “Mummy-ya,” and out of the blue one day when she was eighteen months old, she affixed the suffix “ya” to the end of L’s name. It doesn’t require a Ph.D. in linguistics to understand what she had done here. In the absence of a word for who L is in her life, she has intuited a family connection and come up with one. A year later, it’s a linguistic rule she reserves for the three things she loves most in life: mummy(ya), L(ya) and the iPhone(ya).
To my amazement, my children are richer in people than I had been as a child. My dad and Marion are the grandparents I didn’t have, coming over every few months and, when Jeanette was away for two weeks, filling in as babysitters. My girls love L’s mum and idolize L’s sister’s daughters, in that way only two-year-old girls can of nine- and twelve-year-old girls. “You know,” said L’s mother to me during Passover dinner this year, “your girls are going to turn to you one day and say, what do you mean we’re not Jewish?”
And then there is this. A few months after I moved to Manhattan from Brooklyn, the family next door moved out and a single woman moved in, so that with one exception, every apartment on my floor is occupied by single women. This is a lovely thing for us, not only to have neighbors who shower the girls with attention and care but because of what it does to the shape of our world. “Don’t you wish you had someone to drink wine and watch TV with after the kids have gone to bed?” said a (married) friend recently and I felt myself prickle with the old defensiveness. Then I thought about it some more. So much of the fear I had about having children alone was a case of comparison-induced anxiety, just as having kids at forty-two was a very big deal to my mother and is not such a big deal today. When I collapse alone on the sofa at the end of the day, I’m at ease. Living where we do, it feels as if the girls and I are one expression of a majority trend, rather than an example of a failure to get married. Psychologically, this makes a big difference.
And then, shortly after the girls turned one, Oliver’s girlfriend Heather got pregnant, the kind of gift I could have hardly dared hope for. Now he and I are on the phone to each other even more than we were before, two people raising babies far from the place they call home. “I’m going to offer you advice on your two-year-olds based on social psychology research and no practical experience whatsoever,” says Oliver, “and you are going to offer me advice, based on zero experience, of what a newborn does to a conventional relationship.”
Occasionally, I worry the girls don’t see enough men. In a single week recently, one or the other of them identified Ariel Sharon, the late Israeli prime minister whose photo she saw in a newspaper, the bus driver who hangs out on the corner of our street between shifts, and Jim Broadbent as he appears on the cover of the movie tie-in book of Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? as my dad, shouting out “Grandad!” at each of them and clapping with glee.
“I think all white men look alike to them,” I grumbled to my dad on the phone, and that was before they yelled “Oliver!” at a Pakistani man in the street.
“I don’t look anything like Ariel Sharon,” said my dad, sounding wounded.
I also worry I’m spread too thin. When Oliver’s baby was a week old, I visited him and Heather and felt fleetingly smug. The energy that two parents put into arriving at a mutual decision—does he need changing? Is he hungry? Should we take his temperature? What do you think? No, what do you think?—is catnip for single parents. Then, a few Sundays ago, the girls and I went to Brooklyn to have lunch with them all, and after the table was cleared, I watched as Heather handed the baby over to Oliver and went off to the gym. Just like that. An hour off. On the weekend. With a six-month-old at home. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.
One day, I receive an e-mail from a friend at the hospital, telling me he is sorry but he has some sad news. Dr. Y became ill shortly after the girls were born and he thought I’d want to know he had died. To my surprise, I start sobbing at my desk. I call L, who is sympathetic but baffled and then I call Oliver.
“I don’t know why I’m so upset,” I say. “But he was there on the most important day of my life. He brought them safely into the world.”
“Well,” says Oliver gently, “I would think that’s enough.” In all our years of friendship, he has never heard me cry like this. “It’s good,” he says. “You should do it more often.”
It’s true, I am softer now. I am grateful for absolutely everything. If the girls see a cat in the street and it makes them both laugh, I am happier than my happiest day before they were born. I find their arts and crafts unaccountably moving—although in duplication, they threaten to overwhelm us. The other day, when Dee Dee greeted her sister with the salutation “Hello, poop,” I thought it was as funny as she did. And while I haven’t sent Christmas cards featuring a photo of the three of us, it’s only because I’m too lazy to send Christmas cards at all.
And yet I am still fundamentally me. When I have a bad writing day, it can’t be salvaged by having a nice time with the kids. A good writing day, on the other hand, can make a rough time with them better. Sometimes, I think, if the girls hadn’t happened, my life would have been void, and at other times, is this all it is? Not them. They are everything. But on the rare occasions I can separate the general “it” of motherhood from the specifics of mothering them, I can see the outline of how things might have been. Had it been possible to know how it was without actually doing it, I think I would have been fine. The thing I couldn’t stand was not knowing.
What do I tell the children? On the train to Baltimore recently, I gave this more thought. I didn’t travel much in the first year—a work trip to L.A. and another to Denver, both times Jeannette staying overnight with the girls—and the work trip to Baltimore is the first time in ages I’ve had a few hours to myself. I look out of the window as the New York suburbs bleed into the approach to Philadelphia and then the surprisingly rural scenery just outside Baltimore. After the failure of the first Facebook group, I had joined another, Single Twin Moms of Manhattan, made up of forty-seven members who, if I had to characterize them, I would say are not women crippled by low self-esteem. Most of us are too knackered to meet up, but it is a useful resource, discussing how to preempt Father’s Day celebrations at preschool, or deal with two children and one pair of hands, or save money because, although many of us enjoyed a good lifestyle before the advent of twins, most of us are now chronically broke.
Some of the mothers on the site have shared experiences of using the donor exchange network first to identify, and then to meet up with, their twins’ half-siblings through the donor. I admire the boldness of this, but I can’t imagine doing it myself; the connection feels empty to me. On the other hand, my children may feel differently. They are lucky enough to be mirrored in each other, but the lure of a DNA connection that promises to fill in missing parts is probably much stronger than I think. I won’t object if, one day, they want to go in search of their “half siblings”, just as, if they want to find the donor when they’re eighteen, that’s fine with me, too. As they get older, the amount of space he takes up, so huge at the beginning, gets smaller and smaller, crowded out by the fullness of life, and as the train speeds along I realize I am looking forward to their asking the questions. I am excited to get it right and I am excited for them. They will have to think about identity earlier and in more sophisticated ways than some of their peers, and while I will tell them it’s OK to be sad they don’t have a dad, I will also point out that everyone has something about them that is different from others. As parents do, I find I am making a case for their exceptionalism. I chose this life, for them and for me, and there is power in that, too.
I knew I’d love them, of course. That was the whole point, to experience that love. What I had overlooked, along with so many other things, is that they would love me back. When my mother died, I thought no one would ever be as pleased to see me walk through a door again. Now, when I see the girls at the end of the day, they are so overwhelmed they can hardly cross the floor fast enough. Sometimes, Dee Dee simply drops to her knees and wails, “MUMMY.” It’s insane that this happens on a daily basis, the violence of it and what it does to my heart. Every time I see them I think, of course, you two; all my life I’d been wondering when you’d come along. I look at their faces and I’m at home in the world.
It is still hard. Someone always has a cold or is going through another sleep regression. There is never enough time, money or kitchen towel. Even two years in, the last diaper change before we leave the apartment—usually the third or fourth of the morning, which typically comes to light only once the girls are buckled into the stroller—nearly breaks me every time.
But it is summer again and we go to the beach as we did last year, loading up L’s car and unloading it while the children fly out over the sand. They don’t call themselves siblings but they fight as siblings and she and I yell at them indiscriminately when they do. “They’re hers and he’s mine,” says L when anyone asks, which is the truth on which other truths lie. It is a long hot day and on the way home we sing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and a song L made up years ago for her nieces and which is still going strong, a tuneless number called “Sideways Seagull” that makes everyone howl when she sings it. When we get back to New York, we all go up to L’s and while she makes dinner I give everyone a bath. Then we say good night and come downstairs.
It takes us a moment to settle. “Mummy, squash me,” says Jane, as she says every night, and I lean back into the sofa to squash her. Then for ten minutes, they both shout, “Mummy, squash me, Mummy, squash me,” and after I’ve squashed them we settle into the cushions to read. My dad and Marion bought the girls a collection of classic fairy tales and we read “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” and then I start reading “Rapunzel.” I find myself hesitating at the part where the princess is rescued by the prince, but the girls cry, “Mummy, read it!” and I do. They will understand it’s one story among many.
There is a thud from upstairs as L gets her son ready for bed and I tell the girls to choose one more book. Shortly, we will go to the bathroom, and while one of my daughters stands on the toilet, I will hold the other while cleaning their teeth. Then I’ll put them in their cribs, and after they’ve called for water, or milk, or whatever else they can think of to try to lure me back in, they will give up and go to sleep. For now things are quiet. Tomorrow is Sunday; I’m in no particular hurry. The girls lean into me, one on either side, and we read one last book and one more after that.