Alone, and half-dead, while everything rests on my head.

I’ve joined a few facebook Mom’s groups. They were especially helpful when I was too tired to think for myself. There were questions I had in the moment that needed to be answered right now. I would have called and asked my mom but it seems I remember more about my mom’s pregnancies than she does these days. After the seizure episodes, diagnosis and medication, she’s forgotten a lot of things.

Since there’s always new Moms on the group a repeat question comes up, whenever a Mom is about to be left alone with her twins for the first time. That moment leaves most with anxiety and many with outright panic. I too remember too well the “go home” date on my hospital board being repeatedly changed to the following date. I was admitted for a C-section on a Tuesday and released the following Monday. I was coached through the hospital birth by a good friend, Maureen, who had been my prayer partner and companion on a spiritual journey for a couple years prior to my marriage. She kept tabs on the babies along with my sister Kim, while I spent time in surgery and the recovery room.

I spent a week in the hospital while my babies stayed in the special care nursery. We stayed at the hospital so long because of me not because of their pre-maturity. First, there was the C-section, then the huge blood loss. Then there was the HELLP syndrome (skyrocketing high blood pressure) to deal with. I was on Mg for about a week. Then there was complete constipation induced by the pain meds which left me in horrendous pain for 3 days. I hadn’t eaten for 2 days and was trying to function, while on Mg and while in horrendous pain. I didn’t succeed in feeding my babies every 3 hours and a few nurses were cross with me for not keeping up. I was easily confused by the bad charting of the feedings and mostly felt lost and neglected by the staff.

Sunday night or Monday night I knew I was being discharged the next day. I was quite frightened inside but too sick to make much of a fuss about it. A few friends and relatives were lined up to come over and help arrange the house and bring food. One friend spent the night with me, for the first night. After that, things went silent at my house. I slept in the couch and put the twins in the crib my friend donated to me. I got up to breast feed, then laid back down to rest. Everything was quite a blur. I didn’t even care that the crib still had the unwashed sheet that came with it from my friend’s storage unit. I had two preemie outfits on the babies and they wore them constantly. I didn’t give them baths. I had tunnel vision toward fulfilling absolute needs. Baths were unnecessary because unbathed babies don’t die. Unfed babies die.

After the first day of stop-ins and moving home from the hospital, things fell silent till the first weekend. The 4 hour feeding rotation stretched on and on broken only by the heavy truck movement outside in the morning and the hour or two in the evening when people stopped by here and there, after work. There was a lot of alone time. The house seemed to go completely silent. My computer didn’t work, so there was no distraction from the large silence. But with the silence came a song of comfort. It was an old hymn we used to sing at church, “God will take care of you. Through every day, ‘or all the way. He will take care of you. God will take care of you.” If it were not a song that came from the Spirit and spoke to the depths of my soul, it would have been the words of a trite excuse, from some stingy soul, for withholding a gift that would have ministered to a desperate need.

In the silence, I heard a song, a song that the Lord spoke to me. I was in no position to proclaim to everyone the goodness of God. I could barely put one foot in front of the other. Some may have described this as the low point in my spiritual life because I didn’t read the Bible, nor did I make any effort to seek out God. All I did was lay on the couch and sleep and feed my babies, while listening to the song and the vast silence of the Spirit, which enveloped me. There was a peace and a calm that stilled the worry. There was a quiet decision about what I would attempt to accomplish and I did only that.