Babies, Three of 'Em

The day is etched in my memory forever in slow motion. Laying on a medical table in the dark room while an ultrasound tech scanned my skin. She had the screen turned away from my face and all I could see in the room was the blue black glow reflecting on her.

She was very quiet.

I let my mind go back to a day when I was told I had lost a baby. This was that day again. The sweet woman sitting here is trying to be sure that the baby is gone and she's trying to figure out if she should tell me or if she should have a doctor do it.

She cleared her throat and broke the silence. "Have you been taking anything? Or were you under the care of a doctor when you got pregnant?"

"No." This was it. she was prepping to tell me now... the baby is gone.

"Well, this is one of those days that changes your life."

I felt the tears start to brim in my eyes and I swallowed them back. I wouldn't cry here, I'd wait until I was alone.

"There's not one baby in there."

There it was. Said out loud. Gone.

"There's not two babies in there."

Wait, what? What does that mean? What are you talking about?

Chris standing at my head, speaks up and says, "You'd better stop at there's not two babies in there"

What was he talking about? What was going on?

"You have three babies in there."

Words came to me quick, "No I don't."

"Yes, you do. See?"

She tried to show us, turning around the screen to face us, but I was shaking so bad that the image was blurred. She sort of laughed and I suddenly wanted to hit her in the face.

"But this happens right, I mean people probably come in here all the time with multiples on scan and then one gets like reabsorbed or something, right? I mean this doesn't actually happen to people. At term we'll have twins. Right?"

She asked if I was scheduled to see the OB, I told her I was scheduled to see the midwife. "Oh no, you're high risk now. You can't use a midwife"

What? C-Section? No, this can't be real. A second ago I was ready to hear I wasn't going to have another baby and now you are telling me that I'm having three more babies and oh by the way, welcome to a scheduled c-section. I'm going to be huge. I'm never going to be the same. What about Hunter and Sage? How am I going to have time for them? My business? No one can run that without me. Where are we going to put them all? What about Chris? Is he looking for exit signs to make a run for it, no we drove together, he can't.

Crap, drove. I just sold my mini van for a small SUV that sits 5. Seven. I need something that seats seven. What?

Chris spoke to me again, "I said, are you okay?"

I forced a smile but when he went to hug me I couldn't stop shaking and it made me start a nervous laugh until they called us to the doctor's room.

I asked 57 times, "How did this happen." Each time the doctor looked perplexed, probably wondering if he needed to give me a basic education or if he should just keep talking. He always chose to keep talking.

Neonatal Specialist, Hospital, Bed Rest, C-Section, Selective Reduction. He used the words like he was ordering lunch and I felt the room spin.

This was the beginning of our journey. Over the following 26 weeks and 2 days (I was six weeks pregnant when we found out about the triplets) we got to know so many specialists and nurses by first name that they to this day are on our Christmas card list.

The physical limitations were horrible. The leaving one house and moving into another wasn't a picnic either. Chris came home to our new house shortly after we'd moved in and saw my large bronze wolf statue on top of the kitchen cabinets.

He looked at me, piecing together what must have happened in his absence.

"How did...?" Sigh.

I sold my business. Chris got a new better paying job. We finished construction projects on the house that wasn't finished when we bought it. We found gratitude and felt blessed each time those little faces came up on a screen and the doctor said we were good for another 7 days.

I had heartburn 24 hours a day once the extreme morning sickness went away. They were painful as they grew, sometimes kicking each other and setting off a crazed war inside of me. When it was time for the injections to start I was already so tapped out from blood tests that it didn't seem like a big deal. I didn't have a sitter so Hunter and Sage came with me as I showed them how brave Mommy was. No one told me how painful the steroid shots were going to be until I got them.

The nurse looked at me after the shots, once she was sure I wasn't going to swear in front of my children, "yeah, we usually try and get you to get a ride home because these are pretty bad, driving is going to hurt"

The hospital stays began when I started going into labor at random times. I missed my kids. Major guilt at not being with them set in as I sat alone in the maternity ward night after night.

I'd get to go home only to have to come back again weeks later.

The last stay I had the joy (yes that's sarcasm) of experiencing Mag Sulfate. The drug worked but it messed up my heart rate, made me faint, and generally made me feel like I should have been a child of the 60's. Followed up by Terbutaline, they gave me Ambien so I would sleep.

It was at this point on our roller coaster that Chris and I discovered that I can have an hour long conversation in my sleep when I'm on Ambien, I even called him at 6 am to do it.

Then on March 31, Chris stopped by to see me on his way home from work. I had an appetite for the first time in forever and I asked if he could go across the street and get me pie and some sun chips. He looked exhausted but since this was the one and only pregnancy food run I'd asked of him, he agreed.

Before he got back, I was in full blown labor. Contractions one on top of the other. As he walked in the room, pie and chips in hand, they were getting scrubs ready for him to change into. There was no time to take me by ambulance to Northside Atlanta, I would be delivering the first set of triplets ever at Northside Forsyth.

I missed my mother so bad, I was terrified.

I could hear when Brianna was born but they didn't show her to me. With the 20 or so people in the room for the babies teams and my team, it was hard to even hear. Mikayla was born and Chris said she stretched out like a little spider monkey, room to move after living her whole life to that point in the middle. Tristan wasn't as easy. He got stuck in my rib cage and the doctor apologized multiple times as I gasped at the pain in my chest. Tristan was out. Everyone was talking again.

Someone said, "let her see one". Mikayla was the most stable and they put her by my face for a minute for me to see her tiny little body.

Chris went with the babies to the NICU while I went to recovery alone. I had gone from having 4 souls in my body at once, barely room to draw a good breath, to totally alone. It was shocking. My heart started to have trouble stabilizing.

I wasn't allowed to go to the NICU until I could walk. The nurses told me not to rush it, that usually it takes a day or two. 5 hours later, with what felt like hot irons in my gut, I was beside them. I could only see Mikayla's face as Bri and Tristan needed help breathing.

Brianna was immediately in trouble with a pnuemothorax and that began 6 weeks of life in NICU. I learned to not panic when I was holding one of my babies and the alarms went off in every room that one baby in the NICU was in distress and I knew that was another one of my babies.

Through that time I struggled through my own complication with peripartum cardiomyopathy.

At home a year went by in a blur of no sleep, rocking one baby with a foot while feeding another, while still another was crying. Trying to accommodate the needs of a 4 year old and 2 year old who suddenly had their lives around a different schedule that I constantly felt guilty about.

To the whole world they were the triplets and something to see. We were stopped everywhere we went and asked the most idiotic questions humans can ask. They would stop me while I was pushing a triplet stroller with one hand, pulling a shopping cart with the other, while a 4 year old and 2 year old were on either side of me holding my pants pockets.

People would say things like, "I'm so sorry, I could never do that, I'd kill myself if that happened to me, did you take the drugs to get them". The stupidity of strangers tempered by the occasional, "What a blessing".

They weren't a burden or a side show. They were Brianna, Mikayla, and Tristan, the last additions to everything I never knew I always wanted.

Enough

A few weeks ago I found myself holding a wing feather from a hawk marveling at how lucky this piece of keratin was, of all the things in the universe it could be, to end up as a feather for a hawk. What sights and astonishing heights it must have experienced. Did it bathe in a mountain lake? Skim the tops of hay fields as it came down for a catch? How wonderful to have had a short existence as a part of something as heavenly as that, when it could have been anything at all in this big world.

Days later the popular commercial, featuring teens and older being told to do something "like a girl" versus how a young girl did something "like a girl" went around and we all were reminded that women are powerful.

It'll be short lived though. The wow factor will fade out of our day to day routines and women everywhere will again be forcing on themselves the fact that they feel often as if they are not enough, and only worth what they can give out to make the people around them better.

I know this is true because I hear my friends. I see the blog posts that are quickly reposted that speak over and over again about how overwhelmed we are and how lacking we feel alone with ourselves at the end of every day.

What if someone looked at you at the end of your days, the way I thought about that feather, and considered how lucky your body was to be a part of who you were in this life. Not the minutes that make the hours that seem to ever more quickly spend the days. But the moments of things you used it for.

My hands have written the letters that put my father's name forever on the wall in Washington DC. They have wiped the tears of people I love, petted tigers, made handprints in concrete of the house I grew up in, fed baby kinkajous, and bled under the stress of work.

My hair has blown back in the wind from long gallops in the open and I've seen the mountains of Wyoming from the back of a horse. I swam with dolphins, wrote a eulogy, and thanked God for the beauty of a star filled night as equally as I have the sunrise.

I've created some things and destroyed others. I've been wind burned from the breezes off the ocean at the top of a lighthouse and cat-fished by a lakeside when it was too dark to see where the ground left the water. My name is carved into a tree.

I know the way music sounds when it's played live on a summer night, how to make my babies laugh, and how to give someone else love even when I have run out of it for myself. I breathed in again after my mother's last.

Fear has knocked me on my ass and my heart fought back.

I've ridden motorcycles on the dirt tracks, hung out backstage with the lead singer, and made meals that created joy and fed tiny growing bodies. I saw the twin towers from an airplane, wrecked a car, and ice skated with the boy I had a crush on. I've broken bones, needed stitches, and went back to work. I made a snow leopard enclosure shoulder to shoulder with a famed biologist who taught me everything.

My dog and I ran in the dirt of 7 states, a racehorse licked my face, and I've saved approximately fifty turtles from highway death. Once I taught a bird how to call the family dog to it's cage, stroked a deer, surprised a moose, and worked with snakes. Even though I never went to college, I ended up spending two years teaching at one.

I can autoclave surgical packs, tell when a dog is mentally incompetent, read bedtime stories with funny voices, and teach a green thoroughbred how to jump.

I know Shel Silverstein poems by heart and fart jokes that send ten year old boys into fits of laughter.

To offense of the ears in the vicinity I've played piano pieces to an audience and sang karaoke. My mother used to delight that I could call the seagulls from anywhere and butterflies would land on me. I've caught the wedding bouquet, danced until the DJ closed down as well as in the rain, and eaten scallops and shrimp I just pulled from the water.

I know how to make snow cream, where the fairies like to hide, and what salt tastes like on your lips on an ocean pier at 2 am. I can french braid little girls and ponies.

I'll lead you to a dozen mountain waterfalls, show you how to shoot an arrow true, and make you some fried cornbread. I know the patience of a mother who has had no sleep, gently trying to soothe a colicky baby, and the fragile state that comes from a broken heart.

I've buried friends, given birth, and cried when a song came on. I've been arrested (nothing major, settle down) and blessed by a priest. I have tattoos I've never regretted and of all the thousands of things I can see both sides to, I firmly believe there is more good than bad.

Never could I tie a good knot, walk away from a justified fight, drive a manual, or climb a tall ladder. I've also been fairly poor at controlling having my thoughts immediately spew out in the form of words.

Many times I've said no when I wanted to say yes and yes at times I wanted to say no.

I've wanted and lost and loved and had the wind knocked out of me. I've seen sunlight hit a baby's hair in such a way that God himself could not have looked more undeniably beautiful. Only twice have I had shooting stars go across the sky I watched and only once have I thought the world would be better off if I was no longer a part of it.

I've tried for things so fiercely I was in danger of full destruction if they did not work out and loved people so much that I tried to rein in my emotions until giving into it just being my way, embraced as a gift instead of seen as a fault.

All of this. All of these moments and things I have tried to recall to remind myself of that thing that so many of us find time to pick a fight with daily, I am enough. I am enough. I am enough.

I hope when the day comes that I am done, my body will be like that hawk feather, blessed to be a part of who I was.