One of my favorite movie moments ever is Marisa Tomei on the porch of that cabin in the woods in My Cousin Vinny, when she informs Joe Pesci that her “biological clock is tick-tick-ticking.” (If you haven’t seen it, stop being a dork and watch the clip.) When Daddy-in-Training and I started trying to get pregnant 4 years ago, I could relate to that with every fiber of my being. Now, I’m lucky if I recognize ANY clock at all, much less an internal one.
In three days, my babies will be 7 months old. How did this happen? When I was pregnant, I asked every twin parent I came across for their best advice. Over and over, people told me, “The days are long, but the years go fast.” And although I believed them wholeheartedly, I was not prepared for the mindblowingness of how completely true that is. Every day they do something new, and I look at them in disbelief and think to myself, “How is this this possible? Weren’t you just in my belly?” It’s seriously distressing.
Miles is mere moments away from crawling. Every time I look away from him I’m convinced that will be the moment he takes off like a shot, and when that happens it’s all over. Emmett has started babbling like it’s his job (which I guess it kind of is when you’re a baby) and he routinely throws a few “Mamamama”s in there just to make me smile. Okay, not really. He does it because that’s normal baby development and it has nothing to do with me yet. But any day now he will actually connect words with things. How bizarre is this?
I keep waiting for the moment when I wake up and realize the last 16 months have been some kind of strangely detailed dream, or there’s a knock at my door and the person on the other side says, “Thanks for taking care of my babies, but I’m here to pick them up now” and none of it was real and they were never really mine. It’s been this way since the beginning, but for some reason I thought the surreal part would wear off and the reality of it would sink in. It hasn’t. Sometimes it’s like I’m watching a film of my own life.
People told me I’d forget how miserable my pregnancy was, or the pain of childbirth. (Side note: I loved my birth experience and don’t relate at all to the tales of “excruciating pain” or “pure hell” or “torture” that run rampant in popular culture.) I told them at the time and am delighted to report now that they were full of crap. I remember it vividly, in exquisite detail. I just believe it was worth it. The thing that I did not expect, though, like so much of this parenting journey, is that I remember it like a scene in a movie or a book, like it happened to someone else. I feel very disconnected from it but at the same time intimately, inextricably connected to what occurred.
I’m making no sense. I realize this. But since this is the new normal, I think we’d all better get used to it, hmm? When I think that one year ago I was 14 weeks pregnant and had just gotten my first PICC line put in, I’m just floored. How was that a year ago already? And how has it been only a year? Neither seems possible.
Sometimes when I close my eyes, I see my life in fast forward. But right now, I kind of just want to hit pause so I can savor it before I miss something. It’s going too fast.