by Emma Brockes
“Yes,” I say. “It sounded awful.” Her baby, who was born at twenty-four weeks and has a host of life-threatening complications, had gone into cardiac arrest, but they had managed to revive him. “A bad day,” she says. She looks at Dee Dee in my arms and smiles faintly. “I just hope they don’t remember any of this.”
Mostly, we don’t talk about the bad stuff. “Lovely name,” says one mother to another. Or, “So much hair!” Or, “She looks bigger today!” There are social lunches in the meeting room, and classes on how to care for your preemie, and a breast pump room where, after pumping, we mark the bags of milk with our babies’ names and put them in a fridge in the ward. When someone brings in a car seat to take her baby home, everyone cheers, but the truth is we all have mixed feelings about leaving. I am simultaneously desperate to get my babies home and terrified of being alone with them, without the safety net of monitors and a room full of doctors down the hall. How will I know if something is wrong if there isn’t an alarm to inform me?
One afternoon, a nurse brings in a violin and goes ward to ward, playing tunes for the babies. She does “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and Pachelbel’s Canon, and Dvořák’s New World Symphony, and “Danny Boy.” Here and there she hits a bum note, which I tell myself off for noticing. At the end of the set, she has her revenge. The last tune in her repertoire is “Over the Rainbow,” and as she draws to a wobbly conclusion, every woman in the room bows her head over her tiny, wire-covered baby and gently, comprehensively loses it.
When I get in the next day, the nurse tells me someone rang the ward that morning asking after my babies. “He said it was ‘Dad,’” she says.
“What?”
“Yeah. I didn’t think that was right. I went generic on him and said the babies were beautiful and got off the line.”
“British or American?”
“American. Could it have been your father?”
“No, he wouldn’t call here. And anyway he’s British.”
I have a sensation of jump jets firing up in my brain. Whoever he is, I will find him and eliminate him, even if that means paying the ultimate price. (Not jail, obviously, but being depicted by Shannen Doherty in a made-for-TV movie called something like A Mother’s Revenge.)
“It was probably a mistake,” says the nurse. “Men occasionally ring in not knowing the names of their own babies. And we have a lot of twins.”
“Well, whoever he was I’m glad he’s not my husband. He sounds shit.”
It never does get resolved. I let it go, along with every other concern outside the growth of the babies. They are fed on a three-hour schedule, and as they grow stronger, so I grow more presentable. One day, I even turn up at the hospital in clothes I haven’t slept in. Development is measured in hours and days, so that when a new dad comes sprinting through the double doors, chasing an incubator, wild with terror and what I imagine to be his wife’s words ringing in his ears—“Follow that baby!”—it seems to me to be a scene from a previous life. When I pass women in the corridor just down from the labor ward—sockless, shoeless, blasted, insane—I look at them with the fondness of someone recalling ancient history.
There had been a moment, on the second night after the babies were born, when I had sat in my hospital bed looking out of the window. Across the East River was Roosevelt Island and beyond that the power station in Long Island City. It is an arresting view; the river, the expanse of sky, the cooling towers in the distance. L had come and gone for the evening. I’d had my dinner and would be alone until a nurse came in at three a.m. to give me more pain meds. The night before, I had felt my mood crash in just the way my lawyer had warned me, a dread so vast—what had I done? How would I manage?—I could only turn my face to the wall and hope it would pass. The next night it was gone and I sat looking across the water, the sky darkening while somewhere two floors beneath me, doctors looked after my babies. After two weeks in the NICU, the babies would be discharged with a clean bill of health and L would come to drive us all home. Phyllis would move in, and a month later, move out. I would cry from lack of sleep and frustration. On nights like this, I would lie looking out at the apartment block opposite, wondering if dawn would ever come and if the babies, both still under five pounds, would ever get any bigger or sleep for more than three hours at a stretch. During the day, I would watch TV while they slept, and cry at the slightest hint of cruelty or violence on-screen. I would produce too little milk, then too much. My dad would fly in and hold the babies for the first time and the joy of his joy would be one of the great moments of life. L’s son would come down every day to kiss the babies, and on the weekend, the three of us would spend two nights upstairs. Oliver would come, Dan would come, and Phyllis would come back three days a week, but there would never be enough hands. I would love the feeling of being in a bubble with my babies and occasionally fear I’d go mad from it.
People would go overboard remarking on how much the girls looked like me, something I enjoyed but also sensed was an awkward effort to obscure the fact of the donor. In fact, one did look like me and one looked to a startling extent like my mother, with the same hair and eyes and planes of her face, although they both have dimples and long lashes, neither of which comes from my side. More than anything, they look like themselves.
There would be moments of the purest, whitest terror; when one seemed to be choking on her spit-up and the other slipped from my hand in the tub. I would blame L for not coming downstairs enough and blame Phyllis for coming in late. Then I would go upstairs and long to be home alone with my babies and breathe a sigh of relief when Phyllis left for the week. I would watch in utter shock as my children fell in love with L and my love for her son tangled up with my love for my babies and lost the last of its tentative air. There was no word, still, for what we were to each other, but it felt solid, and implacable, and real.
Across the river, the lights in the apartments of Roosevelt Island went on and I felt a baseline within myself rising. There would be hard days and harder nights. There would be a million decisions to make, large and small. But that night, looking out from my hospital bed, I felt only the certainty of the room and my stillness within it, the future pressing in with a force I returned. At six a.m. the next morning I went downstairs to see the babies. I was still shuffling at a forty-five-degree angle, my smock open at the back, huge hospital pants poking out and gray hospital socks pulled up from my sneakers. As I walked in, the nurse looked up and smiled.
“Hey, Mamma,” she said.
Epilogue
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.