I read a book recently called A Long Walk to Water. It's a short but true story about Salva Dut, a displaced and orphaned boy during the Second Sudanese Civil War. Salva undergoes many hardships on his journey, but one that stuck with me was his trek across a desert as a young boy. At the time, his uncle was with him and they were walking across a desert. Salva did not think he could make it. He was worn out, starving, hot, and his bare feet ached. They passed dead bodies on the way, people who had not made it across. Whenever he felt that he was going to give up his uncle would tell him, "Do you see that bush? Walk to the bush. Don't worry about anything else. Just get to that bush." Once they reached the bush he would say, "Now do you see that rock? Walk to that rock." In this way he managed to eventually cross the whole desert.
Having twins is a lot like that for me. In the morning I pour a cup of coffee and tell myself, "Just make it to lunch time." At lunch time I crack open a can of sparkling water and tell myself, "Just make it to dinner time." At dinner time I sip a glass of wine and tell myself, "Just make it to bedtime." In this way the day passes, and each day that passes brings me closer to the end.
Not that having twins will ever end, but it will change. The challenges and difficulties will always be there, but they will be different as the twins grow. Right now I have two babies but soon I will have two toddlers. Still hard, but a different hard. A worse hard? A better hard? It doesn't matter. It's all hard.
Twin moms spend a lot of time sitting during the baby phase, especially if they are breastfeeding or pumping. Our arms are rarely free (and if they are, it's only for brief moments). It can sometimes be difficult to fill those hours of sitting. It's not like you can draw or paint or knit or bake while your arms are full of two babies, so there is a lot of what feels like sitting around doing nothing.
Sometimes when I'm sitting in a chair nursing both the babies, or when I'm standing up swaying with both babies in my arms, I feel listless and bored and desperate for a distraction. That's when I think of another book I read: Unbroken. It's an amazing, incredible story of survival and resilience. In 1943, Louie Zamperini was on a bomber plane that crashed into the ocean. Zamperini and two other crewmen were the only survivors. They floated in a raft on the ocean for 47 days (one man died on day 33). They had no food and no water so they had to survive on what rainwater and raw fish they could catch. They were harassed by sharks constantly and were attacked by Japanese bomber planes. But one of the most awful things about being stranded at sea was that there was nothing to do. A tiny speck of a raft floating in the ocean, and the three men just lying there feeling like they were being baked alive by the sun. The men risked going insane if they didn't at least try to keep their minds occupied, so they would tell each other memories and would recount every tiny detail they could possibly remember. Zamperini would talk about the meals that his mother would cook, and he would give detailed instructions of the menu, the ingredients, and exactly how to cook it. This kept their minds active while they waited, and kept them from going insane. When I feel like I'm going to go crazy if I sit in that chair and nurse those babies for a minute longer, it helps to remember what these men went through, and that I'm not in a raft in the middle of the ocean being encircled by sharks.
In September, when the twins were born, I started reading Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. The main protagonist, Scarlett O'Hara, is another example of remarkable resilience. For all her faults and all the times you want to ring her neck, you have to admit that she is tough, capable, and uncompromising in her pursuits. There is something Grandma Fontaine says to Scarlett that I feel is true and helpful to remember:
"...I'm practical and so are you. And when it comes to something that's unpleasant but can't be helped, I don't see any sense in screaming and kicking about it. That's no way to meet the ups and downs of life. I know because my family and the Old Doctor's family have had more than our share of ups and downs. And if we folks have a motto, it's this: 'Don't holler - smile and bide your time.' We've survived a passel of things that way, smiling and biding our time, and we've gotten to be experts at surviving."She goes on to explain why:
"We bow to the inevitable. We're not wheat, we're buckwheat. When a storm comes along it flattens ripe wheat because it's dry and can't bend in the wind. But ripe buckwheat's got sap in it and it bends. And when the wind has passed, it springs up almost as straight and strong as before. We aren't stiff-necked. We're mighty limber when a hard wind's blowing, because we know it pays to be limber."
"That, my child, is the secret to survival."It reminds me of an anonymous saying I once heard that I think is really good advice for twin moms too: blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.
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