An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  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 g
irlfriend 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 princ
e, 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.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Ann Godoff, Zoe Pagnamenta, Merope Mills, Oliver Burkeman, Heather Chaplin, Sarah Larson, Kate Fawcett, Tiffany Bakker, Janice Turner, Jat Gill, Niall Stanage, John Brockes, Marion Smith and those friends and family whose names have been changed, all of whom render absurd the notion of having a baby (and writing a book) “alone.”

  It is safe to say that without Judith Casimir or Annette Bougouneau not a single word of this book could have been written.

  To those whose stories intersect most closely with my own: love and gratitude to fill one hundred more volumes. I promise I won’t actually write them.

  About the Author