Frozen Hope

by Jacqui Cooper

Nobody expects to have triplets. My father’s side consisted mostly of singletons, but Mum’s side of the family was full of twins. There is one branch of her family back in Ireland that is made up of eleven kids, including three sets of twins. With her family history, she may have had an inkling that twins were a possibility, but she was stunned when she found out that triplets were on the way.

  There are three kinds of triplet combinations: the first happens when one egg splits into three babies, the second happens when three eggs become three babies, and the third occurs when one egg splits into two babies and another egg produces a singleton. My sisters and I are the last combination, which is the most unusual. Fiona and Sarah are identical – they’re from a single egg that split in two – and I’m a single-egg baby.

  Bearing identical twins is not a hereditary phenomenon, but Mum had inherited the ability to drop more than one egg at a time. With us, she must have dropped two eggs and one of those eggs just happened to split into two. It was a double whammy of luck.

  Back in the 1970s, triplets were a rare occurrence. My father was not a hands-on dad – in fact, he drove Mum and his three new daughters home that first day, unloaded us from the car and drove off to work – and Mum needed help. My parents approached an agency and employed a mothercraft nurse experienced with newborns for $50 a week. Glynis was great – expensive, but great. The average weekly income in 1973 was $146, and my parents needed to spend one-third of that on home help. Dad wasn’t home much to help; they needed the money he was making to pay for all of the babies.

  Thank goodness for Glynis! The woman was a lifesaver for Mum, and she showered care and attention on us baby girls. She had clear instructions from the agency that we were her only concern. This meant that she could wash and hang out our baby clothes, for example, but she wasn’t allowed to do anything for David, the non-triplet. Everything was to be shipshape and by the book!

  We also had some brilliant neighbours who took it upon themselves to be on standby whenever Mum needed. If one of them woke in the night and saw the light on at our place, they’d come over to give her a hand with feeding, changing and settling the babies. Mum befriended some fantastic families: parents from David’s kindergarten, and other mums with multiples whom she met in the early days of AMBA (Australian Multiple Birth Association). These people were happy to take on Mum and four kids for a play date, afternoon tea or a party. These events gave Mum a break and some adult conversation, while we busied ourselves playing with other kids.

  My dad ran a successful business and provided for us very well on a material level. I can’t say I have good memories of him though. He always seemed to be at work or down at the golf club with his mates. To be honest, Dad and I always clashed. He wasn’t comfortable having such a driven and energetic child and he definitely didn’t approve of my career choice. I always felt that he couldn’t wait to get me out of the house and off his hands, and I think he was probably pretty happy when I moved overseas when I turned eighteen.

  My parents split when I was twenty-one. These days, my father lives a few suburbs away, but my new family doesn’t see him. I took Madeline to meet him a couple of times and let’s just say he didn’t behave in a very grandfatherly manner. He’s never even met the twins. Sometimes people look at me strangely when I say that the kids aren’t missing out by not having a relationship with their grandfather, but believe me, they aren’t. They have two sets of wonderful and loving grandparents: my mother-in-law, Laura, and her partner, Ugo, and also my mum and her husband, Ken. My kids are loved by all four of them. There has never been any evidence that my father actually likes kids. I understand that suddenly being saddled with triplet daughters wasn’t on the game plan – it was a big shock for everyone – but my father never hid the fact that we were a burden and a nuisance to him.

  As a child, I was always going on about having my own twins one day: I wanted to recreate the relationships that I had with my own sisters. Mum says that as soon as I could talk I would sing out over and over again: ‘I want TWINS! TWINS! TWINS!’

  Even with all the help, my mum must have been totally exhausted with so many little ones so close together. At one stage she was juggling four kids under two! Luckily, she has a really big motor. Even now, in her seventies, she’s a powerhouse of energy and drive, so just imagine what she was like when she was in her thirties. She did whatever it took to make sure we had everything we needed.

  Ask my mum how she coped, and she’ll say, ‘You don’t know how you do it, you just get on and do it.’

  Mum is proud to report that we were easy kids to raise and that all of us had good manners and were well behaved. We had to be. Our father was a man who barely tolerated children (even his own), and Mum warned us kids to be good so it would keep the peace. Naughty, disobedient, outspoken, rebellious children would spark rage and anger in him that could blow up from something as small as one of us sitting in ‘his chair’. My father ruled ‘his house’ with an iron fist. We (Mum and the kids) lived under his roof, always by his rules. A lot of the time we felt like unwanted boarders.

  My father, for whatever reason, needed to claim space in our house that was just his. There were areas in our home that we kids never went into, knowing that it would cause a massive flare-up. That was something we didn’t want, and something Mum didn’t want either. His personal space was so important to him that we weren’t allowed to have friends over when he was home; the house had to be ‘rid of the strangers’ before he drove into his driveway. Thank goodness we had each other to play with! We four kids had to make our own fun and we definitely did.

  Before she had us, Mum worked at the Cancer Foundation in the administration department. She’s always been a good organiser. She’s also a very tidy and houseproud person, and she likes to be surrounded by beautiful things. We always lived in nice houses, moving a couple of times until we ended up in a big property in a bayside suburb of Melbourne with a circular driveway and its own turret!

  My parents were avid collectors and they set about filling the house with beautiful antiques. Stepping into some of the rooms was like stepping back in time. Of course, we children weren’t allowed to play in these rooms, in case we damaged something, so we called them the ‘no-no’ rooms.

  Once we were old enough to take care of ourselves, Mum and Dad took themselves off to antique fairs on the weekends and left us to our own devices. This is when we really let loose and had the run of the place. We loved going up to the roof and clambering around. There were large flat areas where we could race and jump and play chasey like it was our own personal elevated playground.

  There’s no denying there was a huge power imbalance in our home, with my father, the traditional breadwinner, controlling just about everything. It’s never an easy conversation, but I can talk about it now with my mum. She was well aware that Dad wasn’t ever going to be a proactive and supportive parent to us and she worked very hard to compensate any way that she could. She just had to make it work, and she did. That’s what my mum does.

  Although she’s not the kind of mother to get out and kick the footy with us or sit in the sandpit and make mud pies, Mum was always there, supervising and making sure we had everything we needed. When we were in that huge house, she had a cleaner once a week and a gardener once a month but she did everything else herself. We kids had chores, too, on a rotation. We earned pocket money doing the dishwashing, dusting, ironing and vacuuming.

  Mum may have been houseproud, but she also loved getting out of the house and socialising, and she was happy to take us along with her. My mother always enjoyed hanging out with her children and she made a point of letting us know that. If one of us was feeling a bit under the weather, she’d say happily, ‘You can stay home from school today and keep me company!’

  Growing up as a multiple was amazing. It made everything so easy and safe. Just imagine the first day of school: all those unfamiliar faces, but I already knew two kids I could sit next to. There was always someone to play wi
th in the schoolyard and we never got bullied – no-one dared! If you didn’t like your sandwiches, you could swap them; if you ran out of clean socks, you could borrow your sister’s; if you didn’t understand what the teacher was going on about, you could just ask a sister to explain it at home later; if you forgot what homework was set, one of the sisters would know. How blessed we were!

  I have great memories from my childhood, and most of them centre around my siblings. For example, when we were learning to ride our bikes, we just chucked away the training wheels – after all, there were two sisters holding you up either side until you could do it on your own. We were a great little team. There was always an unspoken understanding that we had each other’s backs, and there still is. I don’t look anything like my sisters, and we’ve got very different temperaments, too. But there’s a deep connection between us and we love each other to bits.

  My siblings all grew up to have good professional careers: David is a payroll officer, Fiona has a creative role working for large multinationals and Sarah works in office administration. We don’t live in each other’s pockets, but we do catch up regularly. Sarah has two great kids, but sadly she’s based in Sydney and the rest of us are in Melbourne, so we don’t see enough of them.

  You’d think that growing up in such a rigidly ordered environment, one or more of us would rebel somehow, but we never gave our parents any cause to worry. Not one of us had a drinking problem or got wasted on drugs or developed a gambling habit or got caught shoplifting. We were all well-behaved kids, who grew into law-abiding, hardworking adults. The only one who rocked the boat in any way was me.

  When people find out that I’m a triplet, they’ll often automatically connect my children Grace and Thomas to this fact. You can almost see them thinking, ‘TRIPLET GIVES BIRTH TO TWINS!’ I could easily go along with their assumptions – a multiple parent having multiple babies seems to be an explainable, genetically natural phenomenon – but I’ll call them out on it every time. I’m very open about the fact that my children were conceived through IVF. I think it’s important that people know that. If we had left it up to nature, my three gorgeous bundles wouldn’t be here. You have to give credit where credit is due!

  2

  A Risk-Taker

  Mum would come and collect the three of us at the end of our afternoon kindergarten session. We must have been about four years old.

  The first time it happened, she walked into the big open playroom and spotted Fiona with her smock on painting a picture and Sarah busy in the dress-up corner.

  She searched around and finally asked the kindy teacher, ‘Where’s Jacqui?’

  The teacher pointed straight up at the ceiling and said, ‘Waiting for you on the roof.’

  WE ALL KNOW THAT LITTLE kids do silly things – they have no fear – so the many examples of my risky toddler behaviour were not hard to justify and explain away.

  When I was about two years old, Mum was driving home one day with the three of us in the back, strapped into our individual car seats. Somehow I managed to undo my seatbelt, crawl through the open window and out on to the roof rack! It wasn’t until Mum pulled into the driveway at home and got out of the car that she realised I was on the roof and not in the back seat.

  Several months later, Mum arrived home, looked up and saw me gripping the wrong side of the outdoor balcony railing like a little monkey. We had this fancy new dust extractor system, where you plugged the nozzle into the wall and the dust was sucked through tubes to a central catchment container. I was fascinated. ‘But where does it go?’ I had wondered. I just didn’t get it. So that day, I’d crawled outside to investigate for myself where the dust went. Mum looked up at me from the driveway, swallowed her panic and, as calmly as possible, suggested I might like to come inside for a snack. And that’s exactly what I did: I swung myself back through the balcony bars – no harm done!

  My mum developed a strategy early on to deal with my risk-taking and, to her credit, my antics never ended badly. By the time I got to kindergarten, there wasn’t a whole lot that fazed Mum.

  The local kindy was built on an awkward, sloped block of land. The building had to be designed with angular architecture; lucky it was all the rage in the 1960s. The kindy was built into the side of a very small hill; two sides of the building pushed up against a natural wall. Apparently, when the weather was fine, I would clamber onto the lower edge of the sloped roof and crawl up high enough so that I could see the road. There I would plant myself, waiting and watching for Mum in her car, coming to collect us.

  You have to remember that this was the 1970s, and people were a lot more relaxed with rules and regulations in those days. I’m sure the staff weren’t happy about it, and they did try to prevent me from getting up there, but I always found a way. In the end, I guess they decided it was safer to let me climb up there on my own terms, rather than scrambling around unsafely, trying to escape them. I was pretty confident and careful, and I never slipped or hurt myself. I loved it up there. I loved being able to see so far, and I loved the sense of freedom. But I know if I saw my own kid perched halfway up a roof, I’d have a heart attack. Different times!

  You could say I was very determined – some call it stubborn – but I maintain that risk-taking is a very positive trait. It’s lovely for a kid to discover through risk-taking that they can do something exciting. It’s not so easy for parents though. I’m finding that out the hard way!

  When I got to primary school, I was still seeking out high places and I would climb on the schoolyard dumpsters to get to the roof and check out the view up there.

  One windy day I took an umbrella to school. I thought I could open it up on the school oval and fly away like Mary Poppins! I ran around waving that umbrella at the sky, expecting to lift off at any moment, and I was bitterly disappointed when it didn’t happen.

  Then a new obsession took hold: trampolines.

  These days there are a huge variety of sizes and safety options, but back in the 1970s the backyard trampoline was still a bit of a novelty. Trampolines were comparatively expensive and didn’t have any of the safety features they have now, but I was crazy about them and I’d be up there throwing myself around every chance I could get. To me, a trampoline meant adventure and freedom.

  I would have loved to go to acrobatics or gym classes, but with four kids so close together, it was tricky to coordinate. The reality was, if Mum said ‘yes’ to one of us doing classes then she would have to say ‘yes’ to the others, too. So it didn’t happen.

  I had to rely on locating my own trampolines, and I got quite a good little system going. Basically, I would find out which of the kids at school had trampolines and I would buddy up with them so that I was invited to their place and could get my jumping fix whenever possible.

  Another source of trampoline action was the annual school fete, which always had a trampoline set up on the school oval for the day. It was $2 for ten minutes. I would save up all year so that by the time the school had their fete I had enough money to rent the trampoline for most of the day. Heaven.

  Once I’d turned twelve, I was considered old enough to get myself around by bike and I started classes at a gym club, cycling four kilometres each way and negotiating a major freeway. I didn’t actually want to be a gymnast, and I wasn’t particularly good at it, but I was desperate to do acrobatics and it was the closest I could get. The rest of the time I hung around at the Brighton Recreation Centre. They had two Olympic-sized trampolines, which were a huge improvement on the backyard bouncers at friends’ houses.

  At school, I was the kind of kid who put my name down for every sport. I had terrible coordination and was generally pretty hopeless, but I wanted to have a go at everything. Luckily, I had a fantastic PE teacher, who gave me loads of encouragement and has continued to support me over the years. Cini Sharp was a great person to have in my life. Every kid should have an inspiring teacher like her.

  So much of my childhood had been about jumping and trampo
lines. I was a kid with high spirits and heaps of energy, and I had a thrill-seeking soul. Up in the air was the only place that I felt truly free.

  And then one day in May 1989, when I was sixteen years old, everything changed. I was seen jumping around on the Brighton Rec Centre trampolines, and I was offered an opportunity to participate in an aerial ski program at Mount Buller, a ski resort about three hours away.

  The invitation to join the Mount Buller training squad came from Geoff Lipshut, a mogul skier and instructor and huge freestyle skiing enthusiast. He was always looking for new talent. He wasn’t a scout or a recruiter, just a guy with a sharp eye and a good ear. He could pick future champions by looking at raw acrobatic ability and by listening to the way a person spoke. He said he knew I would be perfect for aerial skiing: he knew I could somersault and he said I spoke with passion. The way I spoke told him that this skinny sixteen-year-old schoolgirl had a whole lot of drive, determination and desire. He thought I was perfect. Just what the sport was looking for.

  There was one big problem: skiing. People often presume that I was a good skier as a child, but the exact opposite was true. Our family had taken a couple of snow holidays, but we had only done some beginner stuff – some tobogganing and general snow play for the four of us. When I did finally strap on some skis, I was particularly wobbly and uncoordinated.

  So, that skinny little schoolgirl didn’t even know how to ski beyond a snowplough, and she wasn’t a great acrobat, but Geoff saw potential. As he said later, he didn’t care about what I couldn’t do; he was interested in the things that you can’t learn, instincts you’re born with.

  Geoff liked the way I spoke about my passion for trampolines and how, from an early age, I’d sourced places to jump. It was his experience that most young children don’t enjoy doing the same thing every day; they want variety and lose interest in single activities. I was the opposite. I’d been seeking the same thrills since I was a tiny girl. Geoff believes that the only way to be expert at something is to work at it every single moment that you possibly can, despite any disappointment and tedium that comes with it. He recognised that champion potential in me, and picked me out of the crowd. I’m forever grateful that he did.