After a week in the NICU, all we wanted to do was get to the Village. The Village was the part of the pediatric ICU where they moved the babies who were no longer critical but not quite strong enough to go home yet. One after another, we’d see a beaming set of parents say goodbye to the NICU nurses and skip happily over to the Village. Being there meant your baby didn’t have to be in an incubator anymore – and that you could stay in the same room with them twenty-four hours a day. We longed to be the next ones to go, but we never were. The Village became our Promised Land.
The days turned into weeks, and the weeks into a month. Virgil had stopped going to work on the Air Force base so he could stay with us, but his sick days and leave days had almost run out. Once they did, we’d have no money coming in at all. I told Virgil he had to go home and get back to work, but he didn’t want to leave me or the twins. And honestly, I didn’t want him to leave us either. We weren’t out of the woods yet; no doctor ever told us our babies were definitely going to make it. Every time we seemed to turn a corner, some test result was bad or some monitor went off, and we were plunged right back into the horror of not knowing. One day the babies would surprise us by bottle-feeding, but then they’d quit and go back on feeding tubes. They also needed several blood transfusions starting right after they were born. It was a non-stop roller-coaster of emotions. I didn’t want Virgil to leave us, but I also didn’t see any other choice. We were at the end of our rope.
That’s when we learned Virgil’s co-workers on the base had gotten together and donated their sick days and leave days to Virgil. He was going to be able to stay with me for at least three or four more weeks without missing a paycheck. That was incredible – just the thing we needed, just when we needed it. At the time, that seemed to me like a blessing born of the goodness of people – and of course it was – but there was more to it than that, much more. It’s just that it took me a long time to see what that amazing gesture and the word ‘blessing’ really meant.
And then, early one morning, after five weeks in the NICU, a nurse casually told us we were going to the Village.
We were finally those parents.
The nurse helped us give our babies their first baths in a little plastic hospital tub. Then we put their little preemie clothes on right over all their tubes and wires. Come on, kids, I thought to myself, we’re getting outta here.
Our room in the Village was small and simple – one crib, a twin bed, a recliner and a bathroom – but to us it was a palace. We got to spend all night with the twins and hold them all day long. The first thing I noticed was that it was a lot noisier. The parents and nurses were more cheerful and chatty; plus, you could hear the occasional squeal of a crying baby – something you never heard in the NICU. One day, when I was in the hallway, I heard a baby’s high-pitched cry, and I ran into our room to see if it was Willow or Micah. But it wasn’t; it was the baby next door. I remember thinking how happy I’d be just to hear the twins cry or make any kind of noise at all. We were looking for a sign our babies had turned a corner – that they wanted to be here on this earth, with us, as much as we wanted to be here with them.
Then one day, we got that sign.
After a minute or two on the bottle, Willow pulled away, squinted her tiny eyes, looked up at me – and smiled.
Okay, it was a quick little smile, but it was definitely a smile – her very first one! Luckily, I had a camera with me, and I snapped a picture. I keep that photo in a special place, to remind me how important a simple smile can be.
A week passed, then another, then a third. The babies were ever-so-slowly improving, but there were still scary setbacks.
In our tenth week in the hospital, the twins were finally feeding on their own. The only remaining test they had to pass before they could be released was the car seat test. They had to prove they could sit in a car seat for however long it would take to get them home – which, in our case, was two hours. If they squirmed too much or seemed in distress, they’d flunk, and we’d be staying. At least I didn’t have to worry about them having crying fits. Both the twins had started making little sounds, and when they got an immunization shot they let out these adorable little half-cries/half-mews, like two kittens. I hated that they didn’t like their shots, but I loved finally hearing them cry. Still, neither one was much of a wailer yet.
The day of the test arrived, and we helped strap Micah and Willow into their car seats. They were still way undersized, and the seat straps just swallowed them up. But, while Virgil and I watched and bit our nails, the babies passed the test with flying colors. The next day, a doctor came in and told us the good news.
‘Congratulations, you’re going home!’
The day we left, both Micah and Willow weighed approximately 4.5 pounds.
We carefully put the twins in their car seats and strapped them into the back of the van. For the first few miles, Virgil probably drove twenty miles per hour. Honestly, it felt like we were driving with two big eggs in the back, and the slightest bump could crack them in half. Eventually, Virgil picked up speed – all the way up to forty miles per hour. I’m pretty sure he never once got anywhere near the speed limit. Hey, we’d just spent ten weeks sweating out every little detail of our babies’ existences, so we weren’t about to start taking any chances now.
That’s when another tornado hit.
Before driving back home, we stopped at Virgil’s parents’ home in Oklahoma City. We wanted them to see the babies before we brought them home. While we were there, a nasty storm rolled in. Virgil and I debated spending the night with his parents, but it wasn’t raining all that hard yet. We were really anxious to get home, so we hit the road, confident we’d beat the storm. But, like I said, in Oklahoma tornados can swoop in with almost no notice. We weren’t on the road more than half an hour when the hard stuff came. Remember the terrible tornado that caused rain to fall on Willow’s incubator? This one was even worse. The rain poured down in solid sheets, and the wind rocked our van back and forth. Suddenly we saw a bolt of lightning hit the ground two hundred yards away. It was so close we felt the heat inside our van. I put my body over the two babies in case the windshield shattered. Another bolt of lightning hit, and I really started worrying we might not make it home in one piece.
It got so bad, Virgil finally had to pull off the road. We drove to Love’s, a roadside country store and restaurant, and we sat in the car until the rain died down just enough for us to run inside. Mind you, both Micah and Willow were hooked up to baby monitors, these laptop-sized machines that alerted us if either of them stopped breathing. Not only did we have to run them inside, but once there we had to quickly find a place to plug in their monitors. We charged through the front door, each carrying a baby – and ran into a wall of big, burly truckers.
‘We have to plug in our babies!’ Vigil yelled, pushing through. ‘We have to plug in our babies!’
We found a booth with an electrical socket nearby, and we settled in to ride out the storm. Many of the burly truckers came over to coo over the babies and talk to us about their own kids. It was another one of those lovely moments that blossomed in the midst of sheer chaos. When things are hard and miserable, I’d been learning all my life, there’s an adventure in there somewhere waiting to happen.
Eventually, after the longest ten weeks and two-hour drive of our lives, we made it home. We spent the next few months making sure the twins stayed as healthy as possible. We practically made people scrub up before they met the babies, and we gave everyone within a one-mile radius the third degree: Do you have a runny nose? Did you wash your hands? Was that a cough I just heard? When we pushed them around in their strollers we covered them with a thin blanket to keep out contaminants, and when anyone tried to lift the blanket to get a quick peek, Virgil tugged it right back down. We must have looked like the weirdest parents, but, hey, we’d been through a lot. Virgil was trained in Kung Fu, and he kept saying he’d use it if he had to in order to keep germs away from our kids.
Slowly, their personalities emerged. Micah had big, sad eyes and a constant expression of terror on his face. In photos where everyone else is smiling, he looks like he just saw a T-Rex. He was the emotional one, the watcher, the worrier. Sweet as pie, but so serious. Willow, on the other hand, was calm and carefree. She just went about her business and giggled her way through life. One thing was clear: the twins were nuts for each other. Back in the NICU, the nurses bundled them together in the same blanket so they could feed together. They loved nuzzling each other, and one time Micah even started sucking on Willow’s nose. They’d gone through hell together, and they’d pulled through together. Now they would forever be connected at the heart. Heck, even in the womb their heartbeats were perfectly synched.
I’ll never forget their first birthday and everything it meant, that we’d made it through the storm after all.
It should have been the happiest time of my life.
It should have been.
One night in my first year of marriage to Virgil, I woke up sometime after midnight and looked across the bed at my husband. He was lying there still and peaceful, but something was wrong. His chest and stomach were covered in blood, and so were our baby blue sheets. I looked down and saw I was covered in blood, too. I shot out of bed and screamed.
Virgil bolted awake. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘What is it?’ Then he looked down and saw the blood and touched it with his finger.
‘Oh, sorry, babe,’ he said. ‘It’s only ice cream. I fell asleep eating ice cream.’
I saw the half-empty bowl of chocolate ice cream by his side. We had a good laugh, and eventually my heart stopped racing. I guess my point in telling this story is that sometimes things aren’t nearly as bad as they first seem. Sometimes the horrible stuff is just in your head.
In the months after my babies came home, I started feeling a great uneasiness in my life. Even though I had more stability than I’d ever had before, I felt like everything was unsettled and out of whack. Don’t get me wrong. I was so, so happy to be home with all my babies, and I was happy for a lot of other reasons, too. But, something was off. Something wasn’t right.
It’s painful for me to recall this period – because, again, it should have been the happiest time of my life – but the fact is, all those old feelings of anger and resentment were coming back. I felt a ton of stress and pressure, like everything that was wrong with my life was bubbling to the surface. I don’t know why I suddenly felt this way – was it partly postpartum depression and partly just being tired of the struggle? Either way, I wasn’t the easiest person to be around.
After the twins were born Virgil’s parents were extremely helpful, but along the way there were lots of little clashes. I couldn’t escape the suspicion that Virgil’s mom didn’t think much of me as a mother. When the twins came, she was even more involved, and there were times when her constant comments struck me as criticisms. ‘Are you laying Willow on her back too much?’ she’d say. I’d think, Are you saying I don’t hold my babies enough? Virgil’s mom is a kind and lovely woman and I’m sure she meant well, but I started feeling attacked. I didn’t want anyone thinking I wasn’t a good mother or a good wife. Virgil, of course, wound up taking the brunt of my feelings. I didn’t blame him for anything that was happening, but he absorbed a lot of my anger and insecurity. And bit by bit, I pushed his family away.
Virgil’s many great qualities as a father created another problem. I’d seen how he was willing to lose his job rather than leave our side in the hospital, and I knew how great and attentive he was with all the children. This made me realize, for the first time in my life, just how inattentive my own father had been. With my dad, his job always seemed to come first. And when the twins were born and teetered on the brink for all those weeks, my father didn’t even bother to come down and see them. I felt like I had a score to settle with my father, and one night I sat down and wrote him a six-page email listing all my grievances and telling him all about Virgil. ‘I want you to know what a real father looks like,’ I wrote.
I sent the email and sat around the next day waiting for his reply. Finally, it came, and it was all of ten words.
‘I can only imagine what you must think of me,’ is all he wrote.
I thought, You don’t have to imagine; I just told you!
But that was all he had to say. No apologies, no explanations. Looking back, I realize that was all he could say. He didn’t have the language he needed to truly convey his feelings about anything. That’s why he allowed me to beat him up over the phone and in my email and all the times I was angry at him, without ever defending himself or saying a single bad word about my mom. He took it all, because he loved me. And that was the only way he knew how to show it – by saying nothing. But at the time, his lack of a reaction to my great unburdening only made me angrier.
And so I was done with my dad too, and we stopped speaking.
Now, it wasn’t like my first year with the twins was one bad thing after another, because it truly, truly wasn’t. In fact, the more I started blocking everyone else out, the closer I pulled Virgil and the kids to me. And in that first year we had so much fun together as a family. Virgil was so happy with the twins, and I was thrilled to finally have my beautiful family. We laughed all the time, tickled by our great fortune. Most of the time I felt incredibly happy.
It’s just that, underneath it all, I couldn’t shake that feeling of unease. And suddenly I wasn’t willing to be pushed around by anyone; I was determined to stand up against everyone I felt had wronged me. And so I started burning bridges left and right. I fought with Virgil – which we’d almost never done before – with his parents, with my parents, with everyone. All my life I’d desperately searched for a safe place I could call home, and now that I finally had one I felt more lost and helpless than ever. Something was still missing – something big.
How could it be that I still felt so empty when I finally had the life I thought I wanted? Why couldn’t I let go of the anger and the self-hatred that made me push away those who loved me most? Our lives can sometimes feel like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and we’re always searching for those hard-to-find pieces that will make the puzzle come alive. But there is one piece that is key to making everything else fit, and if we don’t find it we’ll forever be frustrated by what our puzzle is missing. ‘He that finds his life shall lose it,’ it says in Matthew 10:39, ‘and he that loses his life for my sake shall find it.’
The piece that I was missing was God.
And the greatest gift God gave me – the gift that shook my soul and changed my life – was the gift of letting me see how much He loves me.
That first summer at home with my twins was when I began having those panic attacks. And just after they turned ten months was when I died.