Don't Lick the Minivan

by Leanne Shirtliffe

  You are community babies, in many ways. People who I didn’t even think were religious are praying for your safe arrival . I feel that we are so blessed already and you two are loved beyond measure before anyone has met you.

  Last night, our second last night alone, I had a few tears as I looked at your dad and said , “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

  He replied, “Neither do I, but between the two of us we have over seventy years of life experience, so I’m hoping we can figure things out.” It’s odd having children when you’re older and established in your career. You’re so used to being competent and experienced that it’s disconcerting to be a novice again, especially in this, the most important job we have. I hope we don’t mess it up. I hope I don’t mess you up.

  I’m going to miss your kicking contests, the silent companionship, but I know I need to let go of this stage to get to the next one. Perhaps that’s the big lesson of parenthood, or even of life: You need to let go and trust in the next stage, not holding (your kids or yourself ) back.

  I’m ready to meet you.

  Goodbye pregnancy books; hello baby books. And babies. Yes. Hello, babies.

  Love,

  Mommy? Mom? Mama? Crazy Pregnant Lady?

  PART TWO

  THE I–BARELY–REMEMBER YEAR

  PLEASE TAKE THESE CRYING THINGS AWAY

  We were in the operating room. It was 7:55 AM. The epidural headache had come and gone. Chris stood beside me, holding my hand. So far, everything was going according to my Caesarean Birth Plan, which was the length of a PhD thesis. The room was cold, bright, sterile, busy. A short blue drape sat on my boobs so I couldn’t see the doctors. They were joking in Thai.

  There are many things I love about the Thais, and one is that they love to have fun when they work. One anesthetist, two obstetricians, two pediatricians, and four nurses—more than I ordered—fluttered about, laughing.

  Before I could say, Did you cut off my legs because I can’t feel them, it became quiet. Dr. K, our ob-gyn guy, looked down and soon the other medical personnel took his direction and began the business of their morning: slicing open my uterus with a razor-sharp scalpel.

  I can’t remember if time passed quickly or slowly.

  At 8:00 AM, I heard a cry and saw Dr. K hold up a gray, goopy alien. “Your first child,” he announced, “is a boy.”

  I started crying. Might as well join my son.

  A nurse held him up to my face for a brief cuddle and then took him away for de-goop-ification. My stare turned to the doctors’ faces again. Dr. K appeared to be kneading my womb with his elbow or forearm.

  I glanced at Chris, whose mouth was agape. I remember thinking, This might be the part when husbands pass out.

  “Is he doing a wrestling maneuver on my uterus?” I asked.

  Chris rose—his posture and expression morphing to Supreme Alpha Male, his eyes flitting from Dr. K to my womb.

  One of the doctor’s sidekicks looked at us. “Go,” he ordered Chris. “Be with your son.” He gestured to the goop-off station. Chris backed down and staggered to a crying boy.

  At 8:02 AM, a seeming eternity later, Dr. K held up the second of my litter. “Your second child,” he declared, “is a girl.”

  A nurse brought her to me. I cuddled my goopy girl and sobbed. Chris joined me in tears and in closeness, cradling our slightly-less-goopy boy.

  After our babies were de-gooped and baked in incubators, we were reunited in our standard room, complete with fridge, balcony, and two babies. I tossed my breast near one of the babies’ mouths, seeing if I were indeed a mammal. Chris, meanwhile, hovered over our other baby, holding up a diaper the size of a cigarette package.

  A nurse in starched uniform and hat breezed in, clipboard in hand. I hoped she wasn’t grading us on technique.

  “What are the babies’ names?” she asked.

  “The girl’s first name is Vivian,” I said.

  “And how do you spell Vivian?” she asked.

  “V-I-V-I—” I stopped. I looked at Chris. “I don’t know how to spell their names. I never thought about it. Did you?”

  “Not really,” he said, putting down the diaper and covering the boy with a blanket.

  The nurse scrawled something on her clipboard. Likely an F, for Freaking. As in freaking horrible parents.

  “How about V-I-V-I-A-N?” I said to Chris.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  The nurse repeated the spelling. I nodded.

  William’s name was slightly more straightforward.

  Parenting Tip: Discuss the spelling of your baby’s name before an official lady with a clipboard corners you.

  “We will have the birth certificate for you shortly,” the nurse said.

  I fazed out, focusing on how not to breastfeed.

  “Is it in English?” Chris asked.

  The nurse smiled. “It’s in Thai.”

  “In Thai script?” Chris asked. We barely knew how to order beer in Thai; we certainly couldn’t read or write the curly-cue script.

  “Yes,” she smiled.

  “Can we get one in English?” Chris said.

  “Mai pen rai. You just have to go to an official translator.”

  “Well, I’m glad it’s no problem,” Chris said. “How do we find one of those?”

  “Someone else will tell you,” she smiled. “Mai pen rai.” She sailed out, clipboard in hand.

  Chris shrugged, and I went back to playing “Where’s the Nipple: the newborn’s Waldo-esque quest.”

  Part of my post-birth plan included the following: Don’t let the babies out of my sight. Ever. When the doctors removed my placentas, I’m pretty sure the part of my brain that reasons went too. I threw out psychotic mommy questions with the frequency of a pitcher warming up in the bullpen: What if someone took one of our babies? What if someone took the other one of our babies? What if the nurses snuck formula into them to shut them up? What if the nurses couldn’t shut them up? What if I couldn’t recognize them in the nursery amid all the other wrinkly blobs?

  So, I did what any overwhelmed, immobile new mother would do: I became Stalker Mom, vowing never to let my spawn out of my sight.

  This worked exceptionally well. For the first hour. And then the Law of Diminishing Returns went into effect.

  “Are you sure you don’t want us to take them to the nursery?” the nurses asked.

  “They’re fine here.”

  It didn’t matter that I couldn’t get out of bed with my Caesarean gash or that I had no clue how to breastfeed two babies, with or without tube socks.

  After hour twenty-two without sleep, I told Chris, nearly asleep on the adjacent cot, “I have to get these babies out of here.”

  He mumbled something. It might have been, “This bed sucks,” or “Shut those babies up.”

  I took it as assent and dialed the hospital’s version of 9-1-1.

  “Can you take my babies away?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Please take these crying things away. Now.”

  “Is everything OK?”

  “I wouldn’t be calling if everything were OK. I need sleep.”

  “A nurse will be there in a moment.”

  I didn’t hear a Code Red announcement, but I’m pretty sure maternity wards have another code for mommy-is-losing-it, remove-babies-at-once.

  Before more urine could dribble into my catheter, two nurses rushed in. They each wheeled out six-plus pounds of baby.

  I slept. Mercifully.

  Parenting Tip: Take full advantage of the hospital’s nursery while in the maternity ward. Those nurses aren’t going to be around to help out when the kid is three years old.

  FOLLOW THAT CAR. MY BABIES ARE IN THERE

  I had been warned about lack of sleep and sore nipples and nonstop crying, but no one told me about peeing. Once Vivian and William were ripped from my abdomen, urinating became, well, impossible.

  I had been catheterized. That little instrument-of-terror didn
’t come out until the next day, the same day my urethra curled up and went into Al Qaeda–like hiding.

  I already felt like I couldn’t walk or breastfeed or sleep for more than two hours. Now, in my de-catheterized state, I couldn’t even pee.

  A Type-A nurse gave me and my full bladder a how-to lesson on urinating.

  I sat on the toilet. She turned on the cold-water faucet.

  “Think of a waterfall,” she said. “You hear the water falling a long way—”

  “Can I jump?” I asked.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Never mind.”

  I shifted on the toilet seat, stretching to turn the tap off.

  “Leave the water on,” she instructed.

  Water shortage be damned, I left it on.

  “Just try. And relax.”

  She walked out. And I cried my own waterfall, tears that morphed into sobs. If you can curl up into a fetal position while sitting on a toilet, I did just that.

  Chris heard the commotion.

  “You OK in there?”

  “What kind of human being can’t even pee?” I yelled over the sound of the water.

  He came to the door. “Umm . . . the kind that miraculously birthed two healthy babies yesterday?”

  I sobbed louder as Bangkok’s canals filled with the sink’s water.

  “I can’t do anything right.”

  Great. A heart-to-heart on the toilet. Chris opened the door.

  I continued. “If I can’t pee, how can I possibly be a mom?”

  The nurse came back in. There were now two people watching me fail to urinate.

  “You’re doing just fine,” she said.

  “But I can’t even pee,” I said.

  “You will. I promise.” She assisted me and my full bladder back to bed.

  One hour later, there was a slow leak in the dam. My urethra uncurled, and I peed.

  I flushed the toilet, washed my hands, and emerged from the bathroom to hear Chris singing the Hallelujah Chorus. I laughed, my first one in forty-eight hours.

  Parenting Tip: Celebrate small postpartum miracles, like being able to pee and poo. Mourn the big realities, like having to leave the hospital with your baby.

  Now that I could successfully pee and poo, I was deemed competent.

  “You’re doing great,” Dr. K said on Day Three. “Your milk has come in. Your babies are healthy. You can go home tomorrow.”

  “What? Tomorrow? You can’t send me home with these babies. Not by myself.”

  “You’re all by yourself?”

  “Well, not really,” I said. “My mom and sister are here from Canada. And my husband. But . . . I mean . . . without nurses at night.”

  He sensed my panic and smiled. “You can stay longer if you like.”

  I had become used to my private room with a nurse available at the push of a button. Every night since the first endless one, I’d called the nurses’ station at nine o’clock, and they’d come to cart my twins to the nursery. Florence Nightingale would call me when my spawn needed to be fed and I’d walk the green mile. I wasn’t executed, though breastfeeding occasionally made me wish for it; still, I persevered because I’m a mammal and because I had two nurses as my handmaidens—more support than I could’ve wished for.

  “So, I can stay longer?” I asked my doctor.

  “Yes.”

  “How does two more days sound?” I suggested, forgetting that I didn’t have a medical degree.

  “Fine.”

  To celebrate, I called Starbucks and they delivered a Mango Frappuccino to my room. It helped me pee.

  In addition to enjoying swanky room-delivered beverages, I sampled udon and miso soup from the hospital’s Japanese restaurant, which seemed pleased to serve me in my pajamas.

  I loved the Bangkok hospital’s rooftop garden and my in-room fridge filled with calories, but some of the country’s practices seemed a bit, well, foreign. When the staff got my twins ready to send home, nurses swaddled them in blankets and knotted the ends by their toes. Vivian and William looked like cute caterpillars, but their cocoons weren’t exactly conducive to using car seats, which were not the norm in Thailand. Good luck finding any seatbelts in a tuk tuk, let alone on the back of a motorcycle taxi or in a cab.

  After the nurses bundled William and Vivian for their journey home, they put them in clear Rubbermaid bassinets.

  “We can just carry them down to the lobby,” I said.

  “Sorry,” one nurse said. “Hospital policy.”

  Then she took out the Costco-sized box of plastic wrap. I watched in amazement.

  She smiled at me and said, “Hospital policy when we transport them floor to floor.”

  At this point I called Chris, who was taking care of the hospital bill, which included the six-nurse package. “The nurse just covered our twins in Saran Wrap.”

  “She what?”

  “She covered their bassinet things with plastic wrap. Their heads aren’t covered, so I’m pretty sure they can breathe.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  We survived the treacherous trip in the elevator. Vivian and William were not inclined to test the plastic-wrap-rollbar and neither were we.

  We had enough Amazing Race roadblocks ahead of us.

  Moments later, I endured another sob-fest. This time, I stood outside of Starbucks in the hospital lobby. Chris was calling the driver he’d hired so we could actually seatbelt our babes in for the five-minute ride home, which featured crossing the world’s most dangerous, uncontrolled road. Each time I crossed that intersection in a cab while pregnant, I curled up on the backseat, closed my eyes, and hummed “Jesus Loves Me,” a technique that had helped me survive driving in India years before.

  There I was, latte-less, and sobbing again. My mom rubbed my back. My sister tried to talk to me.

  “I can’t go home with my babies,” I wailed.

  “What do you mean?” my sister asked.

  “There’s not enough room. Chris is going to go with them. I’m not allowed to lift them when they’re in their car seats.”

  My Caesarean gash was still raw and my internal organs had been pushed around when the doctor did his wrestling move on my uterus.

  “We’ll just get a cab and follow them,” my sister said.

  I sucked up my tears and watched my sister—an experienced and calm mom of two—show Chris how to attach and secure the car seats.

  The hospital’s bellboy hailed a cab. We got in. I gave the address in Thai. We followed Chris and the babies.

  My crying fit was under control—until we got to deathtrap road, just 300 feet from the hospital’s doors. Crossing this street was like playing chicken in the Indy 500, blindfolded. To get across the five-lane road, the taxi driver had to nose the car out, one lane at a time, and pray that Buddha-on-the-dashboard was having a good day. Do this successfully through four more lanes, and reincarnation was delayed. Building a hospital beside this intersection was a sound business investment.

  I watched Chris and the babies edge through lane one. I cried, closed my eyes, and hummed Sunday school songs at a frantic tempo. Then our taxi driver turned right.

  I opened my eyes. “Go straight,” I shouted in Thai.

  The driver replied that he couldn’t. It wasn’t safe.

  “Follow that car,” I said. “My babies are in there.”

  He looked at me. “Maidai.”

  “What do you mean you can’t? Of course you can. The other car went straight.”

  By now, it was too late. My babies had made it across the deathtrap and we were going the long way. I could almost feel the remains of my imaginary umbilical cord being torn.

  And I’d lost my temper. In Thai culture, public outrage is looked down upon because everyone who witnessed the outburst loses. Defeated, I called Chris and sobbed. Again.

  Five minutes later, the taxi pulled up to our apartment building. I crawled out and apologized to the driver for my nervous breakdown while Chris paid him a we
ek’s wages in compensation. My mom hugged me and I looked at my two little post-goop balls.

  They’d slept the entire ride home.

  CAN YOU STOP SELLING BOOB-SHOW PASSES TO

  OUR GUESTS?

  After they changed 200 diapers in ten days, my mom and sister left the country. Round one of my mastitis meds kicked in. Vivian and William slept. Kind of.

  Chris and I sat in our Bangkok living room enjoying the silence amid sweltering heat, the kind that requires the Jaws of Life to unstick your thighs from each other. We waited, like soldiers in the jungle, our senses alert to any change in our immediate environment. I watched the ceiling fan slice at the humidity, until a newborn cry—a stark screech—shattered the moment. We jumped, startled by our own artillery fire. Crap.

  It was now only weeks into our biggest job, parenting twins, and neither Chris nor I had any experience that mattered. With four and a half university degrees between us, you would think we could figure out what was wrong with our progeny, two little squirts whose age was still measured in weeks. I mean, we could quote Shakespeare at length and tell you how the Library of Congress catalog system was organized (two facts that explained why dinner party invitations were scarce), but we couldn’t tell you why our kids cried. Plus, now that my mom and sister had returned to Canada, we were alone with these mewling, puking things.

  I can’t remember what I did to stop the wailing; perhaps I changed a diaper, removed a blanket, or stood on my head for the length of King Lear.

  When I emerged from the bowels of the bedroom, Chris asked, “Who was crying?”

  “Who was crying?” I repeated. “Well, one of the babies.”

  Sarcasm had become my postpartum specialty.

  “I know that,” he answered. “Which one?”

  “Oh, it was, uh . . . I think . . .” I wracked my short-term memory, which since having children had become the length of a text message. “It was what’s-his-name . . . the guy.”

  Parenting Tip: Strive to remember the name of your baby. Write it on your hand if you have to. Remembering your spouse’s name is optional.