by Laura Bush
We asked if she could tell whether they were boys or girls. She turned back to the machine and said, "I can tell that the top one is a girl, but I can't see the one underneath as well. I'm pretty sure she's a girl, but I'm not positive."
The next day I had the sutures, and I sat in my hospital bed that night watching the highlights of Prince Charles and Lady Diana's storybook wedding, dreaming of a happy ending of my own. George had a dozen roses delivered to my room and signed the card, "With love, from the father of twins."
When I first learned that I was pregnant, I had pictured two babies in my mind. My next thought was that it's greedy to want two babies, and I berated myself for even thinking such a thing. Now there were going to be two babies, if all went well. One of my friends in Midland was a midwife, and she told me that anyone pregnant with twins should lie down in the morning and again in the afternoon, and I did that. I took Lamaze lessons from my close friend Penny Slade-Sawyer, who was the mother of three boys. I went to the neighboring city of Odessa to see my obstetrician, Dr. Charles Stephens, every three weeks, and my father insisted upon driving me there each time. Then in early November, when I was barely seven months along, Dr. Stephens found the early signs of preeclampsia. My blood pressure was dangerously high. He looked at me with a worried face and said, "I'll never forgive myself if you don't get at least one baby." He wanted me to go to Houston or Dallas, where there were neonatal intensive care units, because he was sure the babies would be born prematurely and might need special care. I chose Baylor Hospital in Dallas because my uncle Mark was a doctor there and the neonatologist, Dr. Delores Carruth, was the mother of twins. George and I booked our flight.
In Dallas, I was admitted to the hospital and put on bed rest. I was determined to give the babies every possible day to develop and grow; I wanted them to have whatever chance I could give them. George was traveling between Dallas and Midland, tending to me, tending to his business, finishing his job as chairman of Midland's United Way charity campaign. But I was not lonely in my hospital room. Barbara Bush scheduled an event in Texas and came to see me, and so did my Dallas friends Pam Nelson and her husband, Bill, and Anne Johnson, the wife of Clay Johnson, one of George's longtime friends from Andover and Yale. Clay and Anne had seven-year-old twin boys of their own. Weldon and Robert visited me one day in my hospital room and soberly counseled, "We were premature and it wasn't that bad."
On November 24, George was back in Midland hosting the final United Way luncheon when my Baylor doctor, James Boyd, called him and said, "You are going to have your babies tomorrow." George asked him, "Are you sure?" And Dr. Boyd said, "Yes, unless you want your wife's kidneys to fail." My blood pressure was too high, and it was dangerous to continue the pregnancy. George rushed back to Dallas, and at dawn the next morning, I was wheeled into the operating theater for a cesarean section. George was standing next to me as they delivered the babies. Barbara came first at five pounds, four ounces, and Jenna second at four pounds, twelve ounces. They were five weeks early.
We had chosen to name the girls after our mothers, and we did it alphabetically and democratically. The baby who arrived first would be Barbara, the second would be Jenna.
Word was out that the vice president's daughter-in-law would be giving birth at Baylor, and all the television stations from Dallas were waiting at the hospital. One cameraman brazenly walked up to the maternity ward. As I was being wheeled from the operating room, he stepped from behind a wall with his camera. I was swollen with edema from the toxemia and my failing kidneys, and now my postcesarean face was flashed on the local news. It was humiliating. And what was even worse was that I smiled, trying to be accommodating, rather than simply telling him to go away and leave me alone. News photographers snapped pictures of George and the babies so that papers across the country could run the photo with the caption "The vice president's latest grandchildren."
Our girls were here and healthy, and we were thrilled. The country music group the Oak Ridge Boys sent tiny pink sequined jackets. And the jazz great Lionel Hampton sent three vases of red roses to my room, one for me, one for Barbara, and one for Jenna, with a note saying, "Welcome to the world. Lionel Hampton."
And we welcomed them. They were, quite simply, the answer to all our prayers.
I never saw Dr. Malini after that one visit in Houston, when she showed us the first images of our girls. Then on July 18, 2005, George and I hosted an official dinner at the White House for the Indian prime minister, Mahmohan Singh, and his wife, Gursharan Kaur. The State Dining Room was transformed into an Indian garden, with overflowing vases of orange and red flowers, saffron-hued silk tablecloths, and miniature trumpeting elephants fashioned from hot pink and green mums and roses. For that dinner, one invitation was particularly precious to me. I invited Dr. Malini. When she came through the long receiving line wearing a stunning orange sari, George announced to the prime minister of India that she was the doctor who'd told us we were having twins, that she was the first doctor to see our babies. Dr. Malini laughed and said, "Yes, and I've honored patient confidentiality for all these years. I've never told anyone that I was the one who saw for the first time that you were going to have twins." I sat her at my table, and nothing made me happier than to see her beautiful smile all through dinner. It was such a small thing to give back to someone who had given us so much on that hot and anxious July afternoon.
A few days after the girls were born, Mother and Daddy flew into Dallas to see the babies. Uncle Mark stopped by, and Daddy told him that he was having shoulder pain. Mark immediately went on alert. "I just had a patient who died of lung cancer," he told him, "and his first symptom was shoulder pain. When was your last X-ray?" Daddy hadn't had a chest X-ray in a while. Uncle Mark hustled him off to Radiology. When the films came back, the radiologist didn't see anything, but Uncle Mark did. It was a tiny spot, the kind of shadow that perhaps only a brother would have seen. He pointed to it and asked the radiologist, "What about this?" I had just given birth to twins, and my father was being diagnosed with lung cancer. He and Mother headed back to Midland to pack for a long hospital stay. Daddy's only hope of beating the disease was if surgeons removed part of his lung.
Joey O'Neill's dad offered to send his private plane to pick George and me and the girls up when we were finally released from the hospital, in mid-December. It saved us a six-hour drive or a commercial flight with two premature babies. When the plane left Midland for Dallas, my mother and daddy were onboard. Daddy was coming to Baylor for his surgery; I was leaving to return home to Midland. I don't remember what we said to each other; I was too overwhelmed. Life and death were balanced on the span of those two aluminum wings.
George and I arrived home, and we were on our own. While I had been at Baylor, my friends had hosted a baby shower for me and had set up the nursery. I hadn't even decorated a room or shopped for baby clothes because I was afraid to prepare for a future that might not come to pass. Now I had armfuls of diapers and tiny clothes and bottles, and I was completely overwhelmed. George and I had no experience with babies, and suddenly we had two, who seemed to cry all the time. I longed for my own mother, but she was with Daddy, first in the hospital and then for his long convalescence at home. Friends came over to help set up our Christmas tree.
For months, I had secretly daydreamed of sitting under the Christmas tree with George and our two wonderful babies, like some storybook tableau. Instead, we were bleary-eyed and nervous, trying to soothe howling twins. Some nights, we put them in their cribs and literally ran to the other side of the house, hoping for an hour of quiet. Eventually, driven by exhaustion and inexperience, we hired a baby nurse to help us get up with the girls in the middle of the night and to give us a chance to ever so briefly leave the house. After the girls were in their cribs, we would take long walks around Midland in the chilly wintry darkness, arm in arm.
Christmas came and went, and we adjusted. We got the girls on a strict routine. We fed them both at the same time, even in the middle of the night. W
e put them down early, and they woke up early, and I had them nap in the mornings and afternoons. I believe very strongly in the importance of sleep for all children, but especially for premature babies, whose brains are still growing and developing. After the initial crying and the trauma of us trying to adjust to them and them simply trying to adjust to the world, both girls became happy babies. And George and I discovered a wonderful symmetry in having twins; there was always a baby for one of us to hold. Every morning before dawn, George would get up to make the coffee, as he had done from the start of our marriage; then he would go get the girls and carry them into our bed. We'd each hold a baby and drink our coffee while they drank their bottles, with the morning news droning quietly in the background. The start of the day was reserved for just the four of us. Those early mornings were some of the sweetest times of our lives.
In the afternoons, even in the frigid winters or broiling summers, I would push the girls in their stroller around the sidewalks of Midland. I adored those walks through the daytime quiet in the same neighborhood where my family's "Big House" had been, where each yard or square of sidewalk held a childhood memory of my own. At the end of our walks, we passed a large, frosted globe light planted atop a post on a neighbor's front lawn. One afternoon Barbara lifted up her little hand, pointed, and said, "Moon." We had been reading Goodnight Moon at bedtime, and she thought this white orb was the moon rising on her street.
I still worried, though. The doctors had told me that many premature babies have eye problems, so when they were around six months old, I took both girls to an eye specialist, who waved a penlight around the room and had them follow it with their eyes. He told me they were very alert girls, and I breathed a relieved sigh. They crawled early and walked by age one. But I still remember the couple of days when Barbara acted listless. I bundled her off to Dr. Dorothy Wyvell, who had been my pediatrician and who had treated the Bush children. Every child in Midland seemed to have been poked, prodded, and tongue-depressed by Dr. Wyvell. She had gray hair now, and she remained strikingly blunt. She did an exam, ordered some tests, and looked at me. "I know why you're worried," she said. "It's to be expected." With that, she pronounced Barbara fine. Dr. Wyvell was the one who had diagnosed George's little sister Robin's leukemia when she was three and had told Barbara and George Bush that there was nothing they could do but make her comfortable. Leukemia was fatal, Dr. Wyvell explained, and she would slip away in a matter of weeks. Robin spent most of the next six months in Sloan-Kettering in New York, pumped full of transfusions on the slim hope of a cure before she died.
At home, I bought a baby food grinder and made all the girls' meals from scratch. Later, when we went out to eat Mexican food on Friday nights, we would bring the girls, and they would sit in their high chairs eating beans and rice. After those years of living just the two of us, I was happy to have a home with baby toys strewn across the floor and crawling and toddling twins, exploring every nook and cranny of their world.
Daddy recovered from his surgery, and he and Mother began to drop by all the time to see the babies. Daddy's favorite time to arrive was right after lunch, just when I'd put the girls down for a nap. He would knock on the door, open it wide, and loudly call, "Laura, are the babies awake?" They invariably heard him, and once they could pull themselves up, they would be standing in their cribs beaming when their grandfather opened the door. He loved to hold them on his lap, their two little bald heads and his big one bent over together. We spent our Christmases with Mother and Daddy, and the girls clamored to go to Mother and Daddy's house on Halloween, to trick-or-treat there first. Mother brought pink-frosted cupcakes on Valentine's Day, and we set up Easter egg hunts. Barbara scoured the grass and bushes and found the most eggs. She was a young collector, with mounds of colored eggs clutched in her hands and pressed tightly against her chest. Jenna was our homebody. When we were selling the town house on Golf Course to move to a larger ranch-style house on Harvard Avenue, she got on her tricycle and pinned one prospective buyer inside our little concrete backyard. As fast as her feet could push, Jenna rode in tight circles around the woman's legs until she could hardly take a step. Jenna was determined to defend her home against intruders at all costs.
Both girls were early talkers. I would repeat to them, "Say 'Daddy,'" and "Daddy" was their first word, which thrilled George. I've long thought that it's a smart thing for mothers to do, to teach their children the word "Daddy" first.
George loved being a dad. He changed diapers when the girls were small. He got up at night to help feed them their bottles. He would come home and think of adventures. One night, when a rare Midland snow had started to fall and the girls had just turned three, he announced after dinner that we were going for a snow walk. We bundled the girls in their jackets and trooped off in the darkness, and as the snow shimmered under the glinting streetlights, we held up our faces to feel the flakes land one by one. And he loved to play with his daughters. Some weekends, we would head to Donnie and Susie Evans's house on Lake Travis outside of Austin, and the dads would play El Tigre with the kids at night, under the stars and the moon. The kids would run around the cedar brush and the dads--George, Donnie, and Charlie Younger, another good friend from Midland--would chase them and growl or roar. Somehow, the kids always managed to hide from or outwit El Tigre. Once, George, Donnie, and Charlie were creeping underneath the branches of live oaks when they spooked an owl that took off screeching into the air. That bird gave the three Tigres more of a scare than they ever gave the kids.
Another of our good friends, Mike Weiss, later told me that George had taught him how to play with his own kids. "My dad never played with me," he told me once. "George taught me how to be funny, how to have fun with them and have a good time."
Our lives in those years in Midland were centered on our family and our friends. Often, Mother and Daddy would come for dinner. I would call Mother late in the afternoon to see what she was cooking, and we would put our meals together around our little table. I remember one summer evening, working in the flower beds in our yard after the girls had gone to sleep, while the sun still hung low in the sky. George was sitting on the steps with the newspaper, and I thought to myself, This is the life. And it was.
For the first four years that George's dad was vice president, we rarely went to Washington. In the late spring of 1984, the Bushes came to Midland for a reelection rally for Reagan-Bush. We met their motorcade at the airport and rode in with the girls in the fleet of sleek black limousines. As we wound our way along the loop road, past the new acres of warehouses and strip mall buildings toward downtown Midland, cars slowed down and pulled over. Dozens of Midland drivers thought we were a funeral procession heading to the cemetery.
But that physical distance also meant that we were the outliers on the Bush family curve. We were not with them for Christmas, only for summer visits in Maine, with all the other cousins and meals for a small army of Bushes and wet beach towels strewn about the Kennebunkport house. George's parents had no time for drop-by visits to our home. Once, when the girls were two and a half, Bar Bush made a rare stop in Midland. Jenna and Barbara ran out of the house with their arms held out to greet her, calling "Ganny," the name all Bushes give their grandmothers, and she looked up at me and said with gratitude, "Thank you for teaching your girls to know me."
I always hoped I would have more babies. But I was thirty-five when the girls were born. The years unwound and it didn't happen. George never once said that he wanted more children. He never once said that he would have liked a son. He has always been thrilled with the two girls we got. We both are. But my heart was deep enough for more. There remained that twinge of what might have been.
Some 300 million years ago, the oceans overran much of the earth's land. The place I know as West Texas was nothing more than a vast floor at the bottom of the tepid Permian Sea. Slowly, over the millennia, the waters began to recede. Reefs and shell banks collapsed into dry ground. Twelve thousand feet of sand, limestone, and sil
ica were left behind by the sea's ebb, collecting in what is known as the Permian Basin. Then the water swept in one last time. Clay and limestone, prehistoric boulders and debris were strewn across the valley, producing a long, continuous plain, with the remnants of this ancient sea floor buried underneath. And among the fossilized fish and shells and curious spiny creatures that once plumbed its depths, pools of oil and pockets of natural gas formed. The roughly 100,000 square miles of Permian Basin land in West Texas and New Mexico are thought to hold significant portions of the United States' oil and natural gas reserves. Midland, Texas, sits in the basin's geographic center. When oil was found, Midland was where the oilmen came.
The inhabitants of the Texas plains had long known about petroleum. They were not as resourceful as the ancient Egyptians, who covered their mummified bodies in pitch, or the Babylonians (who built their kingdom in what is now Iraq), who employed it to pave their streets. But occasionally native Indian tribes wandered past oil springs and tar pits; their healers and medicine men sometimes spread the black oozings over achy joints and sores on the skin in hope of a cure. The Indians taught the early settlers to do the same, and on the range, ground oil was used for lubricating wagon wheels.
Although the first Texas oil well was dug in 1866, only in 1901 did men succeed in finding an oil gusher. Midland's first oil boom occurred during the 1920s. It sputtered back to life partway through the Great Depression. The 1950s were its golden age, the 1960s its crash. But by the mid-1970s, Midland had begun to rebound. The Arab oil embargo and long gas lines sent oil companies flocking back to Midland. Cranes dotted the skyline, sleek glass buildings rose along the downtown streets, and by 1983 only three other cities in the entire state of Texas had built more office space than Midland. Money followed. From 1974 to 1981, Midland's bank deposits rose from $385 million to nearly $2 billion. The most successful oilmen bought private planes and Mercedeses or outsize Cadillacs. They teed off at the country club in the middle of a weekday afternoon and gambled outrageous sums on every hole. Their wives glittered with diamonds. There were ranches bought in other states, second homes, and jet rides for an afternoon of shopping in Dallas at Neiman Marcus. People planned spectacular parties and flew in the bands and the caterers. Rolls-Royce opened a Midland showroom. So many newcomers flocked to the city to get into the oil business that Midland literally ran out of room; it was impossible to find a vacant house.