The One Time I Had Twins - Mother's Day, Part 2

Keeping with my Mother's Day theme, I thought I would explain what happened the second time I became a mother. If you missed the first time, you are going to need to get current.

After my eleven month marriage to my first baby's real daddy, I remained single for a scant seven years. Sure I dated, but that is a different theme and for right now I am sticking with the agenda at hand, Multiple Marriages and Babies from Different Fathers.

Walk with me; we are going all the way back to 1988.

Needless to say, ol' Fertile Myrtle here gets knocked up again. I forgot to mention I got pregnant with my oldest child I was actually on the pill. Yeah, I am the reason the statistics can't EVER declare it one hundred percent effective.

My new baby's daddy had a remarkably low sperm count with something like zilch mobility. He even had a certificate that said so. His previous wife tried to conceive with him and he was the problem. His swimmers were certifiably dormant and the fertility doctor told me to go off the pill in preparation of getting pregnant.

Well, Mr. Fertility Smarty Pants Doctor Man certainly hadn't heard about me and my handicap friendly eggs. I was two weeks late with my period and I felt pregnant. Not as sick as last time, but I felt pregnant.

I figured it was just my body's reaction from going off the pill ... like reverse pregnancy or something like that. In My Head it went like this: When you take the pill, your body thinks it is pregnant that way the eggs don't come a-rollin' down the slope and you don't get pregnant. So, using that theory from In My Head, when you go off the pill your body doesn't know what the heck is going on and the eggs coming flying at warp speed.

There is a big difference with this pregnancy than the first time. This time I really was engaged and we really were getting married because we wanted to and we were really going to live happily ever after. We even had the date and the place picked out. We really, really wanted kids so this was all amazing.

So, I am now pregnant and growing again at rapid never-before-heard-of-rates only this time there special fandangled tests and they have the ability to capture more information about your pregnancy than they actually know how to use. Ultrasounds were rare back in the day, but they did one on me because I had some type of high level of something somewhere and that could only mean significant birth defects or a multitude of infants.

Now I could drag this out and describe my angst but what purpose would that serve, the ultrasound revealed what would be declared Twin A and Twin B. Now this was a happy day for my babies' daddy because Mr. My Sperm Are Deader Than A Door Knob had just hit it out of the park, ran the extra mile, you get the idea.

I stayed pregnant for my entire pregnancy. Isn't that a funny sentence? I just put that in there to see if you were paying attention. I stayed pregnant for forty weeks. Forty very long weeks full of twists and turns, meds and bed rest, and incidents that would be worthy of a Lifetime Movie Event.

And on November 7, 1988, I met my babies. Each one was a glorious five pounds, ten ounces. Each one was eighteen inches long. And that is where the similarities ended.

One had hair, one didn't. One had a wiener, one didn't. A round face, an oblong face.

One baby had APGAR scores of 4 and 6, gulped amniotic fluid and was a shade of blue I will never forget. Within about six hours after his arrival we got word that all was well. He is now nineteen, completing his freshman year at a private college. That was the only time in his entire life that he ever scared me.

The other baby scored 7 and 9, was a beautiful shade of pink with a shock of dark hair. She, however, was not well. A gastrostomy tube went in at three months, a tracheotomy tube at eleven months. She had twenty four hour nursing care in our home for the entire seven years she was with us.

I am the mother I am today because of her, because of them, because of all three of these children. With a terminally ill child, you develop a voice and whether you want to or not you become an advocate. And because I became an advocate, I went on to become a foster parent. And because I became a foster parent, I adopted. And because I have adopted two foster children five years ago, I am about to adopt two more foster children ... hopefully to be finalized this year.

I am the sum of all my parts. Although there were seven children, I am now comfortable to say six. At one point I had three children, then I had two. That was a difficult subtraction problem. But to add two plus two plus two, now the math was fun again.

I don't mind talking about her, Madeleine Rose. I just don't need to always be talking about her. But today I wanted to because it is so close to Mother's Day and I miss her. She was the first daughter I ever had.

I would like to write more about her but I don't want to be known as the bummer blog or the blog that you are going to need Kleenex if you want to read it. I am Carrie Lite and if it wasn't for my sense of humor I might as well have been buried next to her because it is laughter (and the grace of God) that I kept going.

And you are probably wondering, what became of Mr. My Sperm Are Deader Than A Door Knob ... ? The marriage lasted seventeen years. Adultry. Secretary. I told him not to hire her, I had a creepy vibe. I was right. Damn, I'm good.