On my birthday last week, I was at Brain, Child Magazine’s Brain, Mother blog discussing two other birthdays – the day my twins were born and the day they came home. I talk about the scars my twins’ NICU stay has left on me, but not on them. It’s a piece I thought about writing for many years, but had not collected my thoughts. The essay is here.
The day after my twins were born, my mom handed me the birth certificates the nurse had brought in earlier. I had put them aside, too consumed with the status of my tiny preemies, a few floors down from me in the neonatal intensive care unit, their tiny bodies engulfed in tubes, where they would stay for two months. “They cannot be Parker A and Parker B forever,” my mom said to me now, referring to the nomenclature doctors use for twins in utero and in the NICU. Those little beings in the incubators did not seem real to me at that moment, but she was, obviously, right.
I realized I had no second name, first or middle. In fact, I had no middle name for the first twin. All I had was Natalie. Continue reading Naming Twin A and Twin B, Too Soon