Step by Step Parenting

School is out (for the kids, not for me — law school is eternal), the sun is shining, and summer is here. With the arrival of the Devil’s armpit to North Carolina comes the seemingly endless invites to barbecues, park play dates, pool parties, and birthday bashes.

And I have declined almost all of them.

I have disappointed, ghosted, and even offended, more people this summer than I care to admit. All because I refuse to take my twins anywhere if it’s not on my terms.

At first, I thought maybe it was postpartum depression and anxiety. It’s not normal to not want to leave my house, ever, right? Then I wondered if maybe it was selfishness. People are trying to be nice and just want to see my new babies, shouldn’t I just go out? Why am I hoarding them for myself? Why am I being so rude?

But it’s not postpartum depression, or anxiety, or selfishness. It’s the freaking logistics.

I flopped down at my desk at work with a loud sigh. I had just told someone else “no,” this time to a day at the river. The person who extended the invitation was nice enough when I declined, but I could tell they didn’t really get it. I could also tell that I probably wouldn’t be getting any other invites anytime soon.

“Will anyone ever understand what it’s like to have twins?!” I called out to my boss, frustrated. By some weird coincidence, he has twin boys, and they were actually in my class in middle school.

“Nope,” he answered, “my boys are your age, and people still don’t get it.”

I explained what I was invited to this time, and by who, and asked if that’s something he would have gone to when his twins were my twins’ age. His response was immediate:

“Oh f*ck no!” he exclaimed, “I don’t think me and their mom really went out for stuff until the boys were eight months.”

Eight. Months??

Maybe the problem wasn’t me after all, and instead, I was trying to do too much, too soon. I had been comparing myself to moms without multiples, and I don’t care how many kids you have, nothing quite compares. But that’s the problem I find myself running into over and over so far this summer:

Nothing quite compares to having twins, so no one quite understands, leaving me feeling more isolated than ever.

My twins are only five months old. I have already taken them to the mountains, to the Cheerwine Festival, to church. I have really been trying to make an effort to leave the house and not let my whole life come to a screeching halt just because I have two babies at a time instead of one.

But I’m not yet up for plane flights, pool days, birthday parties. It took my boss telling me that they didn’t really do anything with their twins until eight months to make me realize that maybe I’m actually doing okay. I’m just doing this thing I’ve never done before called setting boundaries, and that’s allowed.

I’ve been convinced that I’m being dramatic, though, so my husband has agreed to help me tackle an outing with the twins every Friday this summer. I still can barely leave the house with all of the kids by myself. An eight-year-old, two five-year-olds, and two five-month-olds is just a lot. So I look forward to these Fridays all week.

We had done a few outings with the twins, but never the twins and the older kids. Since the highs were supposed to be above 100° one Friday in July, we decided to try a day at the pool.

The pool is in my mom’s backyard. How hard could it be?

The mission: drive 15 minutes across town and spend a day at the pool

Difficulty: 5/10

The first hurdle turned out to be simply getting out of the door. There was a long list of things we needed to pack, a list that existed mostly in my head, much to my husband’s dismay. Despite not writing this list down or communicating it out loud, I instead grew frustrated that I had to be the one to know everything on the list. He’s a parent, too! I thought angrily to myself, I shouldn’t have to tell him what we need!

This resulted in me storming around the house, throwing everything in bags, making snippy comments at my husband for not grabbing this or that. In reality, I knew what the issue was: I needed to pump, and when I need to pump, my anxiety skyrockets and my emotions tend to be all over the place, a jittery feeling that goes away within two minutes of turning the pump on. But since I was waiting to pump on the drive over to my mom’s there was no relief, only rage.

My husband, as gently as he could, reminded me that he stays at home with the kids more than I do, and that he is perfectly capable of packing everything they needed. I explained that we needed to remember our big cooler, because I was taking a batch of frozen milk over to my mom’s freezer, where the rest of my breastmilk freezer stash was. He assured me that he would grab the cooler, and that he would wait to put the milk in it until right before we had to leave. I was banished to the passenger seat to start pumping.

A few moments later, my husband loaded all five kids in the car, and we were on our way. I finished pumping right as we pulled into my parents’ driveway, so I quickly detached myself from the machine so that I could help unpack everything and get the kids ready to jump in the pool. I carried in the pack-n-play (so the twins would have somewhere to nap), my pool bag which was filled to the brim with towels and sunscreen, and the diaper bag. It was then that I realized… the cooler was missing.

I asked Kevin to double-check, and he confirms that yes, it appears he forgot the cooler. I begin freaking out, because that meant the cooler was just sitting out in our living room, with breastmilk that was supposed to remain frozen thawing more and more by the second. My husband immediately leaves to get the cooler while I hung back with the five kids, knowing that it would be over thirty minutes before he returned.

Once he came back, I opened the cooler and… no milk.

“Kevin,” I begin, trying to not sound as agitated as I am, “where’s the milk?”

“I thought you had put it in the cooler,” he responds.

“No,” I reply, “you told me to go pump, and that you were going to load up the cooler, remember?”

We both sigh, mutually agreeing that it didn’t matter at this point anyways. I would just have to bring over the milk another time.

Kevin took over watching the twins while I had “first shift” at the pool. We had agreed that we would take turns, with one of us stationed inside with the twins and one of us stationed outside with the big kids. I was going to be outside until I had to take another pumping break around lunch, and then we would switch.

Once outside, I put sunscreen on all three kids and made sure they each had their goggles, and then released them to jump in the pool. I settled into a lounge chair in the shallow end, and blissfully did nothing for the next hour or so. All of the kids can mostly swim, so I didn’t have to do much other than occasionally remind them to not whack each other in the head with their floats.

Both twins fell asleep for their morning nap, so I sent Kevin upstairs to take a nap on the couch while I prepped lunch for everybody. It was nothing crazy, just frozen dino nuggets and cheese sticks, but per usual, it was a big hit with the kids. After we finished lunch, we all had mini ice cream sandwiches, laughing as we raced to eat them before they melted.

It was almost time for Kevin and I to switch off, but it was also (already?!?!) time to pump again, so I snuck upstairs to pump for thirty minutes before sending Kevin out for lifeguard duty. As luck would have it, one of the twins woke up the second I was done pumping. After some milk, she was happy, so I decided to take her for her first dip in the pool! She didn’t love it or hate it, but was definitely intrigued.

Once Evelyn was also awake, I tried to bring them both outside, that way I could still spend time with the rest of my family. Evelyn was not loving the heat, though, so we headed back inside where she was much more content. I stayed with them for the next two hours or so, and right as we were ready to head home… Emersyn fell asleep!

Not wanting to disturb her slumber, I moved her to the pack-n-play where she could continue her nap, and not long after, Evelyn fell asleep in the other pack-n-play. We still brought the older three kids inside, helped them change out of their swimsuits, and got everything ready to go. I put on Toy Story 3 for them on the TV, while we all waited around until one of the twins woke up to go home. 

Navigating outings with all of the kids is already complicated enough with my pumping schedule, and then adding in not one, but two babies’ nap schedules can make it feel like an Olympic sport sometimes! I was grateful we were just at my mom’s house, and not truly “out,” because it made it all a little easier to manage. Still, the day proved to me that I wasn’t ready to tackle any outings much more complicated than that anytime soon.

The day was a humbling reminder of why I don’t venture too far from home with five-month-old twins. It wasn’t even that anything went wrong, it’s just so. much. work! We have to pack so much stuff, and especially once pumping is factored in, it becomes basically impossible to go anywhere alone with all five kids.

A lot of people, albeit well-meaning, say things like, “Well, just bring the twins!” without really understanding that there is no “just” bringing them anywhere — it’s a whole production, every time. Nobody really gets it if they haven’t lived a day in my life, though, and I’m learning to be okay with that. My boundaries as a twin mom don’t have to make sense to anyone else or earn anyone’s seal of approval; they just have to work for me, my family, and my sanity. In this phase of life, I make no apologies for that.

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