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Multigenerational Mom Muses on Twin Toddlers & Twenty-Something Daughters

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January 2017

Sleeplessness was born a twin

“Happiness was born a twin.” At least, according to the Romantic poet George Gordon, aka, Lord Byron. And knowing Byron, he probably dated a set. At the same time –the kinky devil. So I believe I have Byron to blame. He and his perversions saw the last of the happiness twins.

Now don’t get me wrong. My twins are happy boys. But very rarely in tandem, it seems. And for the last three months, only Parker has been a happy twin. And that’s only in spurts because he feeds off his brother’s angry elf shenanigans. But when he’s sweet, he’s quite content, my little cuddle lump. He chills sweetly in my lap with his monster trucks or he charges rowdily around the house with a smile on his face and a chuckle in his chatter. Tate, the one allergic to apparently everything on this planet, including sleep, has been a Grumpy Gus – a veritable Fussbudget on steroids. Like, literally. He gets an inhaler full of the stuff every day. And he is chock full of roid-rage. (Evidence A.)

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It all started in November, when a wind worthy of a Mary Poppins sighting whipped up – and I wish I may I wish I might have that supercalifragilistic nanny of expialidocious proportions float into our front yard with her trusty umbrella and a carpetbag of tricks to bring the sidelined sleep back into our game. We’re beginning to get desperate. Spoonfuls of sugar – and Benadryl — haven’t been working. Shots of whiskey aren’t doing it for me either. I said for ME, not Tate. I wouldn’t do that, tempting though it might be… Jail time would not sit well with my naturally frizzy hair, and I would rather not bargain for flat iron privileges.

It was a Friday night, November 4th. I remember it well: the night the Purple Hurricanes won a decisive region championship over Troup County and three of the four members of our immediate family kissed our love affair with sleep goodbye. Don’t get me wrong, we are all still very much pleading with Mr. Sandman to come home to us, but he hightailed it out of Dodge and hasn’t really been seen since. I can count on two fingers the nights he returned for a cruel reminder of the old days. We are beginning to show some neglect…

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So on that windswept and win-swept night came the first signs of a decisively drippy nose and cumbersome cough for Tate. And a return of the sleepless nights we knew for the first sixteen months of the boys’ lives. Those were brutal, but I swear, since we had such a nice long stretch of good sleep, this new trial has been that much harder. I don’t know how much more I can take before my mind suffers irreparable damage. I caught myself staring into space the other day pondering the meaning of lice. (I am a schoolteacher, after all, and I hear they’ve been making a comeback.) So I was wondering…  do they live in what they believe is their own little volatile planet, working feverishly to put blood on the table while all the while fearing climate change and their newly-elected louse of a president? I’m telling ya, lack of sleep is taking its toll.

Now we knew right away Tate’s ailment was allergies. Georgia hadn’t had measurable rainfall in months and months, and the pollen and dust and dander and other nasal irritants spun themselves into a serious sinus cyclone. Tatebug had battled allergies before, but those had been child’s play compared to these. These were full grown allergies with a nasopharynx to grind. Benadryl and Kleenex couldn’t come close to containing them.

So we took ourselves on an allergy pilgrimage. We visited all the traditional and not so traditional places: docs, pharmacies, herb shops. Over-the-counter remedies and holistic hocus pocus accomplished nada. The first few prescriptions, likewise. We tethered our boy to a nebulizer and went through fifteen minutes of treatments three times a day. That’s an eternity to a toddler in a tailspin. We were not having fun. And nothing was doing the trick.

Eventually, though, thanks to an exceedingly diligent nurse practitioner, we got an asthma diagnosis and a creative blend of carefully orchestrated prescriptions. We were told it would take four to six weeks for the cocktail to take full effect. Sure enough, like clockwork on the fourth week, our youngest settled in for the night with his stuffed puppy named Spider and his collection of nursery rhymes, and got an entire twelve hours of beautiful, blissful shut eye for the first time in nearly eight weeks.

And that’s when I made my egregious error. The cardinal sin of twin moms (or any mom, really) the world over. I bragged on social media.

There has been no repeat. Of the bragging or the sleep.

The very next day, the plagues of the E-jinx invaded our household. We’ve had tours of duty from stomach flu and common colds and all the anger and resentment and frustration and hostility that comes when your forty winks take an extended vacation. If there’s a quarrel to be had, Mike and I can find it. It’s easy to fold, spindle and mutilate an innocent word or gesture into a Cold War nuclear stand-off or watch it escalate into WWIII when we’re wiped out and wigging out. Every night for weeks on end, one or the other of us has wound up in the guest room, not because either of us is in the dog house (though it’s a wonder in these lethargy-laden days and nights), but because we’re carting Tate in there at 2:30 AM after he’s woken up for the fourth time unable to breathe and we’re all desperately seeking sleep.

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I am not proud of who I have become recently. They say sleep deprivation is one of the cruelest forms of torture ever invented and can cause irreparable mental and physical harm. It can completely change a person’s personality. I’m here to say I am not myself. My mind is mired in the muggy mildew of spilled sleep and the sludge and stench of a weary, wizened wit.

I am sick and I am tired, and I am moving at the speed of a barge in brackish water. I have toddlers permanently growing off my hips like barnacles. The one who doesn’t sleep lives in a perpetual state of whine and wallow, and his brother has started feeding off that whine like an angry, little drunkard ready to brawl. But, in the midst of the chaos and carnage, I utter my serenity prayer. And then proclaim…

Happiness was born a twin, my ass.

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An Inspirational Inaugural Weekend

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My heart, such a blue, bruised, tight little ball in survival mode on Friday, has been warmed, replenished, and reopened this weekend by the outpouring of women’s voices and women’s marches — not just in our own nation’s capital, but the whole world over. Seeing my sisters spilling out of their homes and into the annals of history has been a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Women have always been my heroes and my leaders. I come from a matriarchal family, where the women are strong and outspoken and they get the job done. My aunts and grandmother showed me – after sixteen years of living beneath the shadow of misogyny and the dominance of patriarchy in a cult cut straight out of the cloth of the caveman days – that women are a pretty, big deal. They showed me that we can speak up and we can speak out. And what we say matters. And how we feel matters. And what we need matters. My matriarchs taught me that we can and should stand up against injustice – alone or together. Either way, we are a force to be reckoned with. On Saturday, that force rose together in tsunami fashion – a storm surge that flooded the streets of cities across the globe with a moral mission to preserve and advance the rights of women and other minorities whose voices are being threatened, whose rights are on the chopping block. I am so proud to be a woman.

I always have been. I’ve never, ever wished I were a man. Being female is the greatest. I love almost everything about it. I love dressing up. I love smelling good. I love putting on make-up and curling my hair. I love soft, fuzzy sweaters and soft, fuzzy kittens. I love carrying babies –  both in my arms and in my belly. I love chocolate kisses and passionate kisses, Disney princesses and the princes that come with them (although my favorites are definitely the most recent ones – where the princesses orchestrate their own rescues and the princes play supporting roles). I love the color pink and big, white wedding gowns. I love rainbows and unicorns, peace signs and freshly baked cookies. All of these things fill me with warm fuzzies, as do romantic comedies and super bowl commercials. I get all the feels almost all the time. I don’t see that as a character flaw or a genetic glitch. Just because I’m soft, doesn’t mean I’m soft. And just because I’m soft-spoken doesn’t mean my voice can’t or shouldn’t be heard.

Yes, I embrace all my girly girl traits, but just because I love being a girl doesn’t mean I love everything that comes with the territory. Period cramps and labor pains bite. And glitter and leopard prints can go back to the ridiculous drawing board that first designed them. High heels hoover and handbags are too high priced. But the thing I hate most about being a woman is the disrespect and condescension that is served up from people – male and female alike — who refuse to recognize and appreciate a woman’s worth as equal to a man’s. Which leads me to my most-despised term in the English language: Ladylike. Them’s just fighting words.

But this weekend, we brought our fighting herds, which is what I choose to focus on during this oh-so-inspirational inaugural weekend. Yes, inspirational.  And no, not due to an orange man in a white house. Nope. The inspiration comes from the outpouring of support by and for Womanhood, the subject that has most profoundly shaped who I am today, how I live today, how I love today and even why I am today.

I use the word SUBJECT here with absolute intent and purpose. As an English teacher, I teach sentence structure and semantics. I know the importance of word order and connotation. In grammar, the subjects are in control of their sentences. They are the ones doing and the ones being. They own and they control. For centuries and centuries – for entire histories – the subjects that are doing the doing, the owning and the controlling, have been men.

Objects – direct objects, indirect objects,…SEX objects – they are not in control. They are not doing and they are not being. For centuries and centuries – for entire histories – women have been the objects that were owned and controlled. We were wives or mistresses or prostitutes. We were the objects of sentences written by a patriarchy.

But we women have made tremendous progress in rewriting our destinies. We are currently at the highest point in our grammatical and sexual evolution. Not all of us, but many of us, are the subjects of our own sentences. We own and are in control of our options. Our decisions. Our bodies. Our lives. Our selves.

And this weekend, we poured onto the streets to protect and advance our rights. Do not doubt us. Do not denigrate us. Do not sandbag us, or coddle us or condescend us. Do not fault us or foul us or fabricate lies about us. Do not undermine us. Do not underestimate us. Because, as Maya Angelou prophesied in her poetic call to action:

Out of the huts of history’s shame, we rise…

up from a past that’s rooted in pain, we rise…

we are the black ocean, leaping and wide,

welling and swelling, we bring in the tide.

I am living in a heart-wrenching time to be a woman, but it is also a heartwarming time to be a woman. Yesterday, as Gloria Steinem said, we saw the upside of the downside. We saw women by the millions taking to the streets in support of autonomy and equality. In DC, in Austin, in L.A.; in Atlanta and Nashville and Chicago and Nome. In Berlin and Rome and Sydney; in London and Dublin and Ipanema — and even the Antarctic peninsula — we rose up and we roared.  673 marches across the globe, we rose in a sister solidarity to connect continents, challenge conventions, and change policy. And it won’t end there. We will continue to rise for as long as there is terror and fear and injustice and inequality.

For as long as these evils exist, We Will Continue to Rise.

 

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Social Media Etiquette when Dealing with a Twin Mom at her Melting Point

I’ve raised daughters. Reared them into adulthood. They were a challenge, true. But I’m female; they’re female. We sort of had that thing going for us. So even as they grew and educated me in the care and keeping of them, the learning curve never felt that steep. Plus, I had them one at a time. So that was going for me, too. But twins  — and twin boys at that – I feel like this learning curve needs climbing gear complete with harnesses and carabiners.

And in all honesty, our friends and family kind of need a crash course in emotional support — particularly in terms of emergency management — for when the going gets tough. And believe me, it gets tough. Take today, for instance. Today is Day Four of what has turned into a Twintestinal Distress week. They stayed home again today. And I stayed home again today. And boy, has it been tough.

We’re all bored shitless.

Which is good, I guess, because I’ve had all the shit I can handle in the past half-a-week. I’ve changed more diapers and sheets, swabbed more butts and floors, and used more Lysol wipes than the community hospital did last year.

We are being held hostage in our own home by toddler boys’ digestive tracts. We are in dire need of some fresh air. Ours smells like retch and poo. And the boys are cranky with cabin fever. No. Cranky is an understatement. Godzilla in Tokyo was cranky. My boys are downright angry. And it could even be that they are hangry, since they’ve had nothing more substantial than a toast crust in four days. Every time they try, their gag reflexes kick in and their bowels run amok.

It’s times like these, when the perils of Twindom absolutely overcome me. It’s times like these when the poo hits the fan and I’m ready to rage against the latrine!  So what do I do? I vent to friends and family on Facebook. And what do they do? Well, the ones who get it, they give me support. And the ones who don’t, they give me clichés.

Which is why I’ve decided to pen this crash course in social media emergency management…

I’ve already established the crisis situation for you. Now let me give you a quick cry-for- help demonstration. Let’s say that as you peruse your Facebook news feed that you spy a post from a desperate  twin mom at her absolute wit’s end. Perhaps she has proclaimed her life is a festering cistern of agony and upchuck. IN ALL CAPS.  Or maybe it’s something less dramatic, but just as desperate. Something along the lines of:

I literally have not stepped foot outside my house in five days. I may go off the deep end.

You stop scrolling. You pause for a moment. As a friend, as a family member… what do you do?… what should you do? Should you like the status and end it there? Well, you can… but there is really nothing about that status to like. At all. But if you pity that poor, dispirited twin mom then don’t you think she at least deserves a crying face or a sweetly-placed heart? Give her some emoji love, for crying out loud — which is what she’s doing, believe me.

And if you want to go further, to try to preserve her sanity and your relationship with her, here are some Dos and Don’ts of the comment variety…

Do give her love and support. Tell her she can make it through. Tell her that the giant shit igloo that has formed over and around her diaper pail will soon melt into a memory – a foul-smelling, filthy, recycled memory – but a memory nonetheless. So tell her that.

Don’t tell her she’s paying for her raising. Because as she recalls, there weren’t two of her. Two versions of her squirting vast quantities of digestive detritus and retching saltine crackers simultaneously. All the while begging to be held and struggling to escape. Two. At the same time. So just hush it.

Do send her texts, and love… and groceries. When her family has been eating toast and applesauce for five days – not merely for the fact that it follows the BRAT rules for stomach flu (Bananas, Rice, Apple sauce and Toast) – but also because they have nothing else left in the house. Their cupboard is bare. And so are their bowels. And they could really go for some chicken soup. It’s good for the soul and the shits. So do do that. (But don’t doo doo. They’ve had enough of that…)

Don’t tell her it comes with the territory. It’s not her first rodeo. She knows the territory. It is, however, her first rodeo with twins and she’ll tell you, the rules of engagement are entirely different. Unless you have ever parented twins… especially twins purging their innards for seventy-two hours straight in a snow storm (well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. They live in the South. They had a snow flake), then don’t act like you’re the fucking Lewis & Clark of parenting territory. You’re not. So hush it.

Do tell her she’s doing a good job. Tell her that you know kids are hard because you’ve been there. And then tell her you’ve heard many, many, MANY rumors that twins are harder. Way harder. And that she is way beyond Wonder Woman to you. That she belongs in Marvel comics. Or is it DC? Shit. She has no fucking clue. Boys love super heroes.Just one more thing she has to study up on. That learning curve gets steeper and steeper. It’s never ending. But she can do it, you say. Because she is Way Beyond Wonder Woman. Tell her that.

Don’t try to lighten the mood by cracking jokes. Believe me, she is not amused. That’s not laughing you hear. It’s tears. And choking. She’s crying hysterically while drowning in an endless sea of projectile poo and vomit and sippy cups of ginger ale. So unless you can throw her a life line – or a kind line – Just. Hush. It.

 

 

 

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Snow Days and Stomach Flu: Happy Birthday, Daddy!

It was Mike’s birthday weekend. We had hoped to do dinner and a movie. We had  a sitter on reserve and everything.  But then Snowmageddon 2017 hit the greater Atlanta area with a hearty warni…

Source: Snow Days and Stomach Flu: Happy Birthday, Daddy!

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Snow Days and Stomach Flu: Happy Birthday, Daddy!

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It was Mike’s birthday weekend. We had hoped to do dinner and a movie. We had  a sitter on reserve and everything.  But then Snowmageddon 2017 hit the greater Atlanta area with a hearty warning from the forecasters and a half-hearted hiccup from the ensuing cold front. The result? A foamy upchuck of about an inch-and-a-half of the white stuff — and about a half-a-week of impassable back roads. Facebook became littered with pictures of empty bread aisles and sparse milk coolers, families “sledding” on laundry baskets and garbage can lids (not many folks in these parts have ever purchased an actual sled. The cost/benefit ratio just doesn’t pan out.), and Frosty and Olaf look-alikes flecked with mud and dried bermuda grass (an inch-and-a-half doesn’t really contribute to porcelain-skinned snowpeople).

None of the afore-mentioned photos could be found on our family’s Facebook pages. Instead, we were bundled up beneath blankets and bathrobes battling stomach bugs times two. (Because twins always make sure they double the pleasure and double the fun.)

There was no half-hearted hiccup involved in OUR upchuck. Nope. We had literal, bonafide, bile-filled, food-splattered, smelly stuff. As a result, our milk stayed on its shelf. And our bread – well, we did toast an insane amount of bread, which sadly, quite often sat neglected and slowly hardening on the boys’ Minion and ladybug plates. As far as snowmen, we’ve watched a lot of Frozen. Apparently, Elsa and Ana have a soothing effect on wayward tummies. The boys lay in listless lumps on our laps while Kristin Bell sang “Do You Want to Build A Snowman?” over and over and over, their eyes glazed and their foreheads hot, their appetites absent and their bellies cramped.

They looked wretched. So wretched, that at one point I called big sister the surgeon and Mike called his student’s mom the nurse practitioner. We were worried that the listlessness was bordering on lethargy – with Tate, in particular. He hadn’t said a word all day long. He wouldn’t sit up and he wouldn’t eat. Nor would he leave my side. I had to nap with him three times yesterday just to help him rest more comfortably — and so I could quickly supply the puke bucket in the event of an emergency. Finally, ‘round about three o’clock he strung a sentence together — a forceful “Mommy sleeps with Me” — and my fears subsided. But then new ones quickly took their place. I feared I had created a monster: a pint-sized, possessive sleep dictator with Mommyitis.

I’ve always heard it takes twenty-one days for an action to become a habit, but my youngest cleared that up for me post-haste. Turns out a toddler can develop a habit in a scant twenty-four-hours. Last night, he demanded, “Mommy sleep with ME” and “Daddy sleep with Parker.”

Thus sayeth the toddler.

And because his eyes were purple, sunken orbs of pitifulness, I acquiesced.  Probably a big mistake. Huge.  I have a feeling that breaking him of this habit is going to be about as easy as finding milk and bread in the South in a snow st…er, hiccup (or a substitute teacher in Bartow County on a sick day – but more on that in a moment).

So today is Day Three of our Snowmageddon and our Flumageddon. It’s Monday. Thankfully, school was cancelled, so no endless hours of sub shopping for me. As the snow and ice slowly melt, the boys slowly improve. They’re still sitting sedentary on our sofas, but they are actively surfing YouTube Kids on their iPads, searching for such riveting toddler favorites as Pez dispensers being dispensed and elevator rides being ridden. Dad is manning the pink plastic puke bucket, and I am penning my blog amidst toast runs and ginger ale refills. Periodically, the unmistakable sounds of poo percolating in a diaper interrupt the Frozen soundtrack. Yes, the vomiting has subsided, but the diapers are still piling up in drifts of unbearable stench. Hopefully the roads will thaw and the trash will run tomorrow – and the boys’ bowels will NOT.

Yes, the streets and the boys are improving, but we’re not out of the woods yet. Because in the South, snow days are about as unpredictable as a bout of the stomach flu. Things can look like they’ve improved on the surface. The sun is out. The coast is clear.  You’re cruising along nicely. Then, out of nowhere, those dark, twisty places rear their ugly underbelly and suddenly you’re careening out of control in a slippery riptide of hidden wretchedness.

But I’m confident we’re at the tail end of both… no pun intended.

PS… In between the boys’ bouts of intestinal distress, I did manage to bake up Mike’s favorite  birthday cake — carrot.  We had a twenty-minute window to celebrate before we were once again swabbing  floors and bottoms. Happy Birthday, my handsome husband. I wouldn’t want to do life or twindom — and all of the ensuing madcap mayhem and unbridled awesomeness — without you. ILY

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#SoulfoodSeoulfood

Our dishwasher has the longest cycle of any machine I’ve ever encountered. An elephant’s menstrual cycle is only slightly longer. It runs for 2 hours and 83 minutes.(The dishwasher, not the elephant.) Not kidding here. It seems unheard of. I’ve never been around one as dedicated and hard working. What makes this so incredibly irritating is that we can’t run the dishwasher unless the boys are asleep or absentee because they like to push buttons. All buttons. The ice and water buttons on the fridge (we had to put it on lock-down mode– I didn’t even know a fridge had such a thing!), the buttons on the oven, the buttons on the remote control, the buttons on their parents (every damn day), the buttons on their parents’ cell phones… the list goes on and on. You name it, they push it. So if we run the dishwasher while they’re awake, inevitably it gets stopped somewhere, mid-cycle. And they’re so stealthy about it that we never see or hear them do it.

We’ve tried for four days to run our dishwasher. Four. But, sadly, because we are the parents of twins who have decided that sleeping is overrated and shouldn’t necessarily be applicable to them  – well one twin in particular these days — we continuously forget to run said dish washer because our minds are M.I.A. So we currently have no dishes in our cabinets. None. Every dinner, salad, and dessert plate – even every coffee saucer (because we ate breakfast off of those this morning) — is dirty and festering in its own detritus waiting for us to run the load. And we just can’t seem to manage it.

Which makes the task at hand – preparing our New Year’s Day feast – rather difficult. I’ve been closely examining the contents of the dishwasher – sniffing glasses and squinting at fork tines – to determine whether or not I need to take forensic countermeasures with a brillo pad and hot water. I decided it was easier to just pull out the Vodka and pour myself a drink and let the alcohol kill the germs. Besides, I hadn’t properly rung in the New Year yet. Mike and I fell asleep last night before 10:30. Tate and his propensity for middle-of-the-night wake-up calls are beginning to take their toll.

But let’s talk about New Year’s Day in the South. It’s a beautiful conglomeration of country fare: black-eyed peas and collard greens, buttermilk cornbread and sweet tea. And I do it all. Well, except for the sweet tea. I told you already, I’m not a tea-totaler 😉 And I may be Southern, but I’m not Southern Baptist. So I threw back a couple of vodka tonics while I cranked up my veggies because I like my potatoes fermented. Not mashed. And not fried.

But it’s not all peas and greens and potato juice at our table on New Year’s Day. Remember, we’re a mixed marriage, so we’ve got ourselves a mixed menu.  Mike contributes his cultural heritage, too.  He makes his family’s duk guk. It sounds incredibly wrong — like something feculent at the bottom of a millpond. But it tastes incredibly right — like seventh heaven in a soup bowl, complete with seaweed and rice cakes. It’s my second-favorite thing my husband does for me… but I digress.

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Now the boys won’t eat any of the above-mentioned goodness. And it’s not that they are the kind of kids who will only eat chicken nuggets and French fries (although they love those too.) They’ve been raised on multicultural menus their entire two-and-a-half years on this planet. Their favorite foods are Korean curry and chicken n dumplings. Sadly, though, they draw the line on vegetables of almost any variety, so beans and greens are entirely out of the question. And it saddens me, but while my mom and Mike and I feasted on soul food and Seoul food, the boys feasted on Cheez-its and the bacon reserved for crumbling atop the collards. Oh, and some random bites of cornbread. If tonight’s any indicator, I won’t be winning any mother of the year awards in 2017.

But I am winning. Even when I fail.

Even when the boys have minor (and major) meltdowns in Aisle 3 of the new Kroger — and then again in Aisles 8 and 12. (Which happened today while we were shopping for our duk guk and greens, by the way.) Even then, I am still winning. Because I have been given the opportunity to mother four exquisite, perfectly imperfect children who show me the secrets of the universe every single time that they smile. They bring me a joy that cannot be described nor contained.

So, yes, I am winning. Even when I fail. Even when I have minor (and major) meltdowns because I feel like I am inadequate. Like Mike deserves someone better. Someone younger and more energetic and maybe even more Asian who can truly appreciate his passion for all things Ramen and Star Wars and technological. Even then, I am still winning. Because when he wraps me in a big, warm hug and looks me squarely in the eyes, I know I am right where I belong. He is my destiny and I am his. Star Wars fanatic or not.seoultrain

Yes, I am winning. Even when I fail. Even when I have minor (and major) meltdowns because I feel like I can never be all that I should be as a teacher for my students. Hell, if I can’t even remember to run my own dishwasher, how in the blankety-blank am I supposed to properly impart kernels of truth and wisdom to the young minds of Bartow County? But I am still winning. Because even though I teach them about life and literature, they teach me so much more. About life and about living it. The wisdom of American youth should never be underestimated.

Yes, I am winning.

By the way, my first favorite thing my husband does for me is his curry. His thick, brown, spicy, Korean curry.  Happy New Year, ya filthy animals.

 

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