New beginnings

Flo and Archie are four months and three weeks old and time is just flying past.  This past week, under cover of seemingly innocuous smiling, sleeping and googoo gaagaa-ing, they have been busy hot-housing.  Unbeknownst to me, they have enrolled in a novelty circus act for very small wriggly people, in which they roll incessantly in every conceivable direction – off their play mat, onto the floor, onto toys but mainly onto each other.  Mini completer-finishers they are not so the glee of initial accomplishment is rapidly followed by puce-faced rage as they realize they are stuck, tiny arms simply too puny to bear their weight or turn themselves over.  With faces planted firmly in the floor, they proceed to vent their fury at multiple decibels until rescued by yours truly.  I look them in the eye, advise them soundly with a helpful “now this is just getting silly”, at which point they smile and then repeat the trick ad infinitum.  Meanwhile, we’re having some cracking vowel-sound conversations and Flo’s taught herself bubble-blowing which is nice, if messy.

Evie is having her own adventure as she prepares to leave the happy, loving arms of her nursery and start the transition to our village primary school this September.  A fantastic welcome meeting for parents reassures us of the nurturing environment she’ll be entering and we’re asked to commit our hopes for our children to paper, which we’ll revisit in a year’s time.  In the Q&A session with the class teacher, there’s much questioning about how much sport the children will play and I already fear the parents’ race at sports day next summer.  Must get fit.         

I realise my blog’s been a tad gloomy to date.  Sorry about that – I think I’ve tended to post on tough days when writing has served as therapy.  I wouldn’t want you to think for a minute that I’m not enjoying this new parenting lark.  I know I’ve probably over-focussed on the tougher aspects of raising twins but it’s because there are a fair few of those and they knock me for six at times, plus I need bucketloads of sympathy.  At times when I’m struggling, woeful posts on my beloved facebook trigger a mass of wonderful virtual hugs from friends far and near that lift my spirits no end.  Challenges aside - the fun bits are plentiful and heart-warming but I’ve tried not to bang on about that stuff because everyone hates smug parents with cloying tales of prodigal offspring.  Bearing that in mind, you’ll be pleased to know that these last few weeks I’ve been feeling much more chipper, less knackered and dare I say it, HAPPY. 

The cause of this epiphany is something I vowed not to do til September.  Yep, strike me down but I’ve been doing some WORK.  Now don’t judge me, I know the babies are still very young and I should be devoting each waking moment to their every need BUT in my humble opinion, all play and no work makes mummy a terribly dull and ever-so-slightly resentful old bag.  So, I’ve been researching and prospecting for my fledgling PR outfit and have unashamedly enjoyed every minute of it.  Daddy and Nanny daycare step in to play Mum while I network with some great local businesses.  As initial meetings lead to further meetings, I feel my horizons widen and get a glimpse of what I’ve wanted to do since we moved here two years ago - use everything I’ve learned in my career so far to run my own business promoting the brilliant ‘hidden gem’ companies on my doorstep.  A local glossy mag gets in touch wanting to feature our ‘escape to the country’ story, then out of the blue comes a request to work on a really exciting pitch.  I jump at the opportunity to dust off the grey matter and get the adrenaline pumping.  Despite some late night keyboard-bashing, it’s SO good to feel the pleasant pressure of a looming deadline instead of clock-watching for the next round of feeds.

This unexpected but very welcome spurt of industry makes me feel like a new woman.  I bounce back to my family with new relish, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the realization that in every aspect of my life, it’s a time of new beginnings.    

Mumblings

Flo and Archie will be four months old this week.  I can’t believe how quickly time is flying past.  They’re much more aware of each other now and are making the most wonderful sounds.  Flo attempts a few roll-overs most days now and Archie did a full flip onto his front today without any warning.  His expression of permanent surprise (a la Father Dougall from TV’s Father Ted) is still highly entertaining as is Flo’s ability to crack a smile at any given moment.  Feeding is increasingly a juggling act as they become more and more wriggly in their bouncy chairs and it doesn’t seem possible that in just a few months, we’ll start weaning. 

I don’t know if it’s post-natal comedown, hormones getting back into synch, overtiredness or just my somewhat gloomy nature (or possibly all of the above?) but I seem to be at the complete mercy of my emotions.  I thought because I’ve had a baby before and being an older mum, I’d be better at all the emotional stuff but it appears not.  It goes without saying that I love these babies with all my heart.  They’re joyful, flourishing little chaps, fun to be with, cute as buttons, and in rude and robust health.  On good days, I feel like Supermum, skillfully juggling the demands of our expanded household and smugly lapping up praise from strangers in supermarkets while rustling up a tasty supper, keeping my body hair in check and even doing a spot of light weeding in the garden.  But on tough days, I feel overwhelmed by the weight of responsibility, stifled by the tedium of domesticity and wrung out by the military-style logistics required just to do the nursery run or to meet a friend for lunch.  I don’t think I’ve ever felt so nerve-janglingly hyper-sensitive and seem to go through days of being constantly and inexplicably on the brink of tears.  I well up when singing nursery rhymes to an oblivious Flo and Archie at ‘Bounce & Rhyme’, get a full throat lump and lip tremble when those peskily adorable kids and military wives do their Jubilee thing, and can’t even look our local Big Issue seller in the eye for fear of wanting to adopt her.   

A few weeks ago, an(other!) unkind comment from a thoughtless geriatric reduces me to a gibbering wreck while at the supermarket.  I go home, unpack the shopping, and add: ‘Grow thicker skin’ to my to do list.  It sits just below: ‘Don’t be too proud to ask for help’ and ‘Stop denying that having twins is hard work when people say “that must be hard work “ even when you know bloody well that it is‘. 

Respite comes in the form of my wonderful Mum (and fairy godmother) who comes to stay for a few days while my Dad is overseas.  I meet her off the train and even as I see her crossing the platform, I’m fighting back tears of relief (again, the crying thing) as I know she brings with her unconditional love, fuss-free help with the babies, and endless patience to read every single Meg and Mog story to Evie each night of her stay, not to mention a Marks & Spencer’s store card and a devout love of coffee shops which we indulge fully during her stay.  We talk, talk, talk and she tells me I’m doing a great job of this motherhood thing and that I should be proud of myself.  It’s the very best kind of praise and when we hug our goodbyes at the end of her stay, I cling to her like a child and miraculously manage not to sob – well, at least until I get back into my car anyway.    

Dusty wedges and rusty edges

Our lovely little chaps were three months old last week.  We’ve watched them grow from tiny mites into robust, smiley babies.  Archie’s taken a three pound lead over Flo and as he gets bigger, she seems even smaller somehow, even though she’s growing well too.   They’re finding their voices - Archie has an owl-like “hoooo” while Flo coos and babbles, smiling constantly.  And then there’s the hands.  We’re loving watching them randomly pointing, staring at their own fingers and brandishing a Superman fist.  A truly delightful sight is watching Archie stroke his own fuzzy peach-skin head.

The last few weeks have been the most exhausting by far.  While the babies are pretty much sleeping through the night, the trade-off is very wakeful daytimes.  Even now we’re using bottles, feeding still takes up a huge part of the day and I’m frustrated at the lack of tangible evidence of anything vaguely productive to show for my day.  I never seem to have a long enough run at anything before the next epic double feed/burp/change round starts.  I leave snatched meals uneaten, the ironing pile half-creased, emails half-written, exercise abandoned.  A diehard completer-finisher, I struggle with what to me seems chaos.  Just asks: “Did you have a good day?” when he gets in from work and I woefully tell him I’ve not achieved a single thing, nothing to report, just the nursery run, baby duties and domestic drudgery.  He hugs me and tells me I’m a great mum and that Evie, Flo and Archie are growing and flourishing under my care – that that is my biggest achievement.  He says all the right things but the fact is that while I’m very good at working, I’m a pretty hopeless housewife.  Sadly I’ll never get the same buzz from baking a sponge as I will from cracking a strategy or pitching a great idea.  I give myself a good talking to about making the most of this special time with Flo and Archie as my return to working life will come round soon enough.  At that, I switch my brain down several gears and slow the well-oiled cogs, stick a muslin on my shoulder and put on my pinny (spotless and for show obviously).

Well-meaning friends and glossy magazines tell me I need ‘me time’ to separate mummy-me from me-me.  But I don’t know how to fit that in.  I used to think of ‘me time’ as being a spa day or shopping splurge, solo cinema night or long soak in the bath with my book.  Now it’s more likely to be going to the loo without a four year old in tow or an evening trip to the supermarket to pick up forgotten groceries.  This weekend though, I finally get me some of that elusive time.  I winch myself into skinny (ish) jeans, dust off my towering wedge sandals and attend a drinks party at my local art gallery.  It’s wonderful.  Chilled white wine soothes my ‘new mum alone and out of the house in going-out clothes’ angst, the company is charming and bohemian, and the art baffles and intrigues me in a most pleasant way.  While I’m there, something happens deep inside my head but I don’t recognize the feeling.  Then today I go to the Hay Festival to listen to my favourite columnist, proud and potty-mouthed feminist and mum Caitlin Moran, discuss her caustic take on the modern woman’s lot.  Her witty rantings are bitter-sweet and entertaining and create much chatter amongst the crowd afterwards.  Then that thing with my head happens again.  I drive home and as I put my keys in the front door and hear the familiar sounds of my family, I realize what’s happened this weekend.  I’ve done something I’ve not done for a good few months.  I’ve done some THINKING.  I’d like to try doing it again, just as soon as I finish this ironing.

People say the funniest things

Flo and Archie are twins.  We’ve always known this.  When we saw two dots on the screen at our first scan, I behaved mortifyingly inappropriately.  I swore – really badly, a lot, out loud.  I had to apologise to the sonographer and I was ashamed of myself.  She laughed and said: “Don’t worry, it’s quite a common response.  Hey, it could have been triplets.”  I loved her for that.

We’ve always had trouble calling them twins.  From that very first scan, we choked on the words - I think it was the shock and fear of it all.  When pregnant, we found that if we called them ‘the babies’, it made the prospect feel less terrifying, less daunting, even a bit exciting.  We’d had a ‘baby’ before and we did OK with that one - she’s turned out lovely so there was comfort in the familiarity of that word.  And so we agreed that once they arrived, we’d avoid ‘twin talk’ and raise the babies to be individuals, not a single unit.  It helps of course that they are fantastically different in pretty much every way possible, even beyond the gender difference.  One’s small, one big.  One’s noisy, one quiet.  One’s dark, one fair.  One’s animated, one steady.  Perhaps I actively seek out differences to justify our decision but to me, they are two entirely separate little people.  Even though their hands touch many times a day as they wriggle around alongside each other, they seem blissfully unaware of each other at the moment and I’m loving watching each of them develop their own personalities and characteristics.

One aspect of twin-ness we could never have prepared for is the attention of other people.  Newborn babies are always magnets for attention but the power of twins seems a particular crowd-puller.  People stop us to take a look, they point and stare at us when out shopping, they comment on our chariot of a buggy, they call over friends and family to have a look too, they tell me they don’t know how I cope and ask if I feed them at the same time.  Some (weirdos) even tell us they make them feel broody.  Complete strangers openly share their own twin stories (I’m a twin, twins run in our family, I married a twin …) and it feels like we’ve joined a club in which members wear their badge with deep pride.  People tell us there’s something magical about twins, that they’re special and different, that they’ll have their own unique bond, that they’ll speak their own language, that they’ll always have each other, that they’ll look out for each other.  They ask if twins run in our family and after some awkward exchanges early on, we fudge an agreed response to avoid divulging our entire medical history to complete strangers in the supermarket.  We smile and nod, smile and nod, and I ponder whether the attention will wane as they get older, how it will make them feel when they’re old enough to take it in, and whether it will ever bother Evie.

Even when people are looking straight at the babies, even when Flo’s in pink and Archie’s in blue, even when I tell people their names, we’ve had to learn to stop sniggering like immature teenagers when asked: “Are they identical?”  

A year in the making

A year ago last weekend, we went to the wedding of one of my oldest school friends.  We enjoyed every minute of that sunny day, sharing in their special day, catching up with friends, taking photos on the beach, dancing til the next morning and enjoying some much-needed grown up time while Evie stayed with her grandparents.  We drank loads, far too much.  We planned it that way because we knew that the following week, we’d be starting the rollercoaster journey that we hoped with every bone in our bodies would bring Evie a brother or sister – booze would be off our radar for a while.  We’d agreed that after previous heartache, years of treatment and our savings much-dwindled, this would be our last attempt.  Every drop of that wedding booze was delicious as we put off the uncertainty of what lie ahead.

52 weeks later, Evie has two little chums to play with and they are two months old already.  Flo was first to smile – a lopsided little grin with accompanying gurgle.  Archie followed a few days later with a more beatific effort.  I’m getting the feeling that this will be their pattern in life!  I struggle to keep up with their appetites and realise with a fair measure of angst that my breastfeeding days are numbered.  I just can’t keep up with the babies and they berate me with shouting and angry little fists when I can’t deliver the same effortless and plentiful service provided by those damned convenient fast-food-mongers Tommee and Tippee.

It’s not just the physical and emotional wrench I feel at stopping feeding, it’s the quality reading time.  I’ve been ploughing through books while feeding, unashamedly nose-down in mum lit - when not gazing adoringly at the babies obviously.  Pamela Druckerman’s ‘French Children Don’t Throw Food’ gave me much Gallic food for thought about how to reduce the stress of family mealtimes with a child that eats like a mouse.  My current (failing) strategy of yelling “JUST EAT IT” while trying to shovel food into her closed mouth is possibly not the best way forward I acknowledge and almost certainly a route to a teenage eating disorder.  ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’ made me feel damned grateful that psychotic sadist Amy Chua wasn’t my mother and made me cherish my own parents’ gentle-but-firm encouragement when it came to school work and learning musical instruments.  I certainly know where I’d have shoved my violin if I’d have been Amy’s long-suffering daughter.  Caitlin Moran’s ‘How to be a woman’ is the very finest manifesto for 21^st century feminism and should be compulsory reading for every schoolgirl in the land.  She’s been my writing idol since I was a teenager reading her in the Melody Maker and I hope she’ll write tons more books as she’s a genius.  And last but no means least, no working mum can possibly not read Allison Pearson’s ‘I Don’t Know How She Does It’.  Mum-lit lite it is not as she gets right under the skin of the working mother’s essential dilemma and wrings out your very heart in the process.  Ignore the film, it’s not the same.  I’m breaking out of mum lit next – ‘50 Shades of Grey’ is coming, pardon the pun.        

Leisurewear and Chanel No 5

Our lovely wee chaps are 7 weeks old now.  Archie is now so big he’s already secured himself a place at Eton and will undoubtedly be one of those clever but weird socially inept genius kids that go up to Oxbridge at 12.  Flo eats the same volume of milk as Archie but remains resolutely tiny, yet brilliantly perky like a little meerkat.  We go to a baby massage class this week and Archie is the teacher’s ‘dolly’.  He sleeps, wriggles, gazes around with gorgeous eyes and generally looks adorable.  I am immensely proud and almost certainly quite smug as both babies adopt zen-like silence as the rest of the class descends into crying.  Because I’m quite shallow, the part I like most about the massage class is the vocal admiration of the mainly first-time mums at my coping with newborn twins and a 4 year old.  I’ll be going to the massage class again but will wear more make-up, better clothes and possibly carry a briefcase next time just to show them what I can really do.          

My post natal wardrobe continues to vex me.  Nothing fits properly so I surrender a little too willingly to the comfort of leisurewear, much to my chagrin.  While I revel in the soft baggy sagginess of my sweatpants and Uggs, my vow never to wear them outside the house has been well and truly broken and they become my daily uniform.  Special occasions call for an upgrade so out come leggings or jeggings – the equivalent of my ‘best dress’.  On a supermarket run, I catch my reflection in the door and realize that the tragic figure looking back at me is in fact not straight off the ‘true life tragedy’ pages of Bella magazine – no, it’s me.  Urgent action is required but options are frustratingly limited: any new outfit must accommodate my still-very-much-present twin tum and frequently-in-use E-cup boobs, plus I can’t do any proper exercise yet in case my mystery stomach pain (which thank the lord is abating) returns.  I know a major shopping expedition is required but I just can’t face the demoralising squeezing of my post babies body into unsuitable outfits in overlit changing rooms manned by skinny teenagers.  Accepting my post babies shape is a challenge too far at the moment and knocks my self-esteem when I’m having a tough day.  I try to reassure myself with the thought that all my friends with older twins look to be in great shape so perhaps I’m expecting too much too soon.

Once I’m pain-free at last, I shall dust off my trainers, lose a stone and a half, and purchase a stylish and flattering new wardrobe.  Until then, I shall wear my diamond earrings, liberally apply Chanel No. 5, snuggle into my sweats and avoid mirrors.                   

The Great Middle Aged Mum Hair Dilemma

Flo & Archie were 6 weeks old yesterday and pass their check with flying colours.  I don’t know where the time has gone.  Those early days in hospital seem a lifetime ago and our chubby, healthy, wriggly little chaps bear little resemblance to their tiny, skinny former selves.  With my mad and unexplained pain of recent weeks fast subsiding (unlike the stubborn remnants of my twin tum sadly), I’m given the OK to drive so get behind the wheel for the first time in forever.  The instant high of impending freedom is rapidly replaced with a raft of new logistical challenges just to leave the house and an overwhelming sense of responsibility as I pull out of the drive with 3 sets of precious cargo on board.

With Justin back at work after weeks of heroic invalid support (me!), I get used to my own company again, which in the absence of adult conversation, means only one thing: list-making.  I’m no domestic goddess (we’ve been living off my Mum’s freezer meals for weeks now and austerity measures are yet to impact our cleaner’s weekly visit) but though I say so myself, I do make a cracking list.  And shallow pinny-avoider that I am, top of that list is not in any way related to housewifely tasks or family life – nope, it’s My Hair. 

I’ve had the same hair for years – big, long, thick, straight, blonde (almost entirely natural if it weren’t for the highlights) and ‘naturally styled’ (go to bed with it wet and too busy/lazy to blow dry, straighten or curl in the morning).  When hairdressers ask excitedly: “So what shall we do with it?”, my inner rebel always yells: “Something radically different, something dramatic, something young, brave and short”.  My somewhat more introverted actual self mumbles: “As many highlights as you can cram in, let’s take an inch off the length and I don’t want to chat about my holiday plans”.  I realize that at 41, I may have to face up to the fact that I have possibly come to resemble variously a middle-aged Alice in Wonderland (when it’s down), Sandra Dee (ponytail) and even down-on-her-luck ballerina (bun), only with way more tangles.  Tangles are the bane of my life.  I reached a new low last week when I actually had to cut out a tangle that refused to budge.  It wasn’t just a tangle – it was a dread, a disgusting matted, BROWN dread.  It had to go and with it went my resolve to keep long hair. 

I think I’ve kept long hair all this time because I thought it represented sexy, youthful abandon and general funkiness.   But I think I might have been in denial – I think it might just have been sheer laziness and avoidance of having a ‘hair style’.  I’ve not really had a ‘hair style’ since my 1980s Princess Diana flick or my short, funky but very high maintenance ‘wedding hair’ in 2003.  Justin wants me to have my ‘wedding hair’ again but I remind him that it took an expert stylist over 3 hours and an ocean of noxious chemicals to create it which is possibly a little unrealistic bearing in mind our recent family developments.  So begins The Great Middle Aged Mum Hair Dilemma – do I pontificate and stay long-ish wondering what could have been, do I carpe diem and go short but worry about looking manly, or give in to the obligatory Mum Bob?  What else is there?  I’m lost and need help.  While I deliberate and crowd-source views on Facebook, I shall pour over hair mags, eventually braving the salon clutching a torn-out picture of a highly-styled, airbrushed celebrity half my age.  “Make me look like that please.”