Turning Points...

The doctor smeared more gel on the wand.
“Let’s look one more time.” She said.

This was fun for her. She enjoyed this part. This was done with a lightness, a bit of play… a natural joy about all of it, as if to remind us that “people have babies every second of every day.”

This was our first child and our very first ultra-sound. The small exam room was the size of an airplane lavatory; very low ceiling, no chairs –a sink in the corner that might have been an ashtray at one time. She turned on the electronic monitor, put the greasy electric transducer on my wife’s belly and then pointed to the monitor and began talking, “There see?…There? There’s the head… and the feet. See the hands?”
I couldn’t see shit.

The doctor continued to move the magic stick around, studying the monitor. She seemed cool, hip…modern. She was mid to late 40’s, white, 5’5”, kinky gray, shoulder length hair, parted down the middle…old wire framed spectacles. I took her in and wondered if she was into Wilco.
“I’ll burn her a cd!” I thought.

The doctor continued to move the thing around and describe parts, and my wife agreed with whatever she thought she saw. My anxiety was starting to creep in. My forearms began to ache because I was gripping the arms of the chair so hard. My anxiety was turning to anger but then quickly gave way to apathy. This was no longer interesting to me. There was no clear image. The monitor was too small and the picture was intermittent and grainy and the whole experience was unlike any movie of the week or episode of ER I remembered from TV. We reminded the doctor again that we did not want to know what kind of baby was growing in there. We didn’t want to know the sex. We wanted to be surprised upon arrival. I thought about wanting to get out of there…”Let’s go, wrap it up!” I screamed in my head. We had stuff to do. We had planned to eat lunch, maybe buy a crib, pick out paint swatches, calk some shower cracks…endless items on our endless little lists.

But the doctor, who we both kind of took our eye off of for a few seconds, was no longer paying attention to us.

She had stopped.

We didn’t really notice her stop, but she did.

She paused…

And she turned on her stool slowly for a moment that was long enough to change the tone of the room. She seemed to be in what Stanislavsky called, “a small circle of attention.”

She then looked slowly to us both, calmly… with a slight tell of fear. She paused and put one hand up, her fingers to the side of her mouth touching her lips and looked at us both and said,

“You guys….”

“There are two babies in there.”

Blood erupted in my ears, my skull ripped in half, my chest seized, unable to catch air, my limbs fell, and my spirit flew around the room and sat in the upper corner of the ceiling looking down upon all of us. -Then snapped back into my chair. I was instantly freezing and on fire. Sweat poured onto my shirt, my mind was racing, waiting for the punchline, waiting for the punchline, trying to catch up, catch up to what the fuck she just said.

It was as if Chuck Jones himself had hit me in the face with a garden shovel. I was beyond stunned…much like the quiet that follows a severe car accident.
Clearly not thinking clearly, I thought she was fucking with us, but that wasn’t true based on the silence….based on her expression… based on the etch-a-sketch image of the two goblins in the monitor…based on the truth… in the room.

So, as our doctor sat there, mouth slightly open, jelly dripping off the magic stomach rod onto the floor, my wife and I tried to read her expression. We desperately scanned her face…this doctor who we had given all of our hope and trust to so readily, so easily, so, “la la la la la, we’re-having-a-baby-in-America-like-people-do-in-America…..on-Lifetime-or-LMN or on OWN or AMC or Hallmark-or-on MTV where you only need to be 12 years old…”

We locked on the doctor’s mug trying to read her. The doctor seemed to be quite surprised, which resulted in the question that could only come from a woman who was EXPECTING FOR FIVE FUCKING MONTHS TO HAVE JUST ONE SINGLE BABY--

“What are you saying? Are they attached?” My wife begged.

Our minds flashed to the tale we had dismissed by kooky stranger who chatted us up in the check out line at Trader Joe’s, “My cousin had a neighbor who gave birth to a head. That’s right…a single head.” Or, the time we were on a flight from Newark, completely unsolicited, the flight attendant offered this gem to chew on, “I read in Newsweek sometimes the feet grow together and never separate.”

Stoked by paranoia we wondered “Why would the doctor tell us this?! -Why would she tell us like that? –And what else is she not telling us?! How worse can it be?!” Will we be touring sideshows in 7 months?! Do they even still have sideshows?!”

“What are you saying?” My wife asked.

I was not keeping it together. But then, out of nowhere, I was hit smack in the head with a perfect moment of clarity. I saw that I was about to freak out but stopped myself! I observed from my most inner minds eye that I was suddenly making this all about me.

But I stopped. And said to myself, “Be a man! Do not freak out. Be there for her!”
I grabbed my wife’s hand, rubbed her shoulder, & gave her a reassuring smile.
This was the first time in my life when I actually believed that there was a greater power at work, a bigger plan going on, which I had no understanding or comprehension of. This truly was not about me at all. The only thing I could do was smile and feel the wonder and love and say yes.

It was as if I had been told the perfect joke and I was laughing in a brand new way, from my heart.

Another joke would follow, a month or so later; I came wandering to bed at 3am after a night out listening to some bands at the Lava Lounge. -I got all crazy n shit…I may have even smoked a cigarette. Yeah, partay.
So, 3am, Staggering down the hallway to our bedroom, I pass my wife who is now awake and walking the other way to the bathroom, but she’s walking funny; holding a pink bath towel between her legs. She says something like, “Hi.”

“Hi.” I say, totally making a bee-line for the bed.

“Uummm….I think my water broke.” She says.

I think my response was,
“Okay. I’m gonna try to get some sleep.”

“Okay.” She says.

This is just how utterly clueless and unprepared we were. We had a month to go in our pregnancy, so the actual “birth” part of it did not yet exist in our lazy, lavender, American deamtime myopia. After about a half hour of staring at the ceiling, one of us decided to open the Dr. Spock book. We found the page on “breaking of water,” and it said in bold letters, “Collect 200 dollars and go directly to the hospital, YOU FUCKING IDIOT!”

I just wanted to go to sleep.

Little did I know that I would spend the next 14 years, “just wanting to go to sleep.”
Our twin daughters were born one month early in May, 14 years ago. The world seemed to have completely stopped during that first year. We were in our pink, dream cocoon of love and bliss and no sleep; we were all healthy, we had a house, I had a gig…we had people around us and we had these alien creatures that looked like two old men that would stare at us and sleep and eat and cry.

Today they are full grown humans; faster, stronger, smarter…five steps ahead of me.
They are 14. They are women. They are sullen, and want things. They are warriors, now part of the largest buying demographic on the planet. Our true parenting days are just ahead of us. My hope is that we’ve improved on the model that our parents handed us.
People often ask us, “Twins! How did you do it?!” My wife answers, “We didn’t have anything to compare it to. So, we just did it.”

She’s right.

Whether you’ve had one kid, two kids, or nine kids…you dive in and just do it.
As they continue to battle us every day now, I breathe. I breathe and begin the journey of letting them go. Monday, they leave for Washington DC and New York City with their 8th grade class.

Seems like they’ve just arrived and now I’m letting them go.
But I guess I really don't have to let go, I can simply lighten my grip, and try not to hold on.