Rose: I tried to sit up in bed after you left and ended up rocking myself back to sleep again.
Raoul: Baby, you’re pregnant.
Rose: I know. What if I crush them with my boobs?
Raoul: I love your tits, I love your ass, I love your belly… and I fucking love you. And our babies will love you, too. Xx
I’d spent five minutes trying to find an emoji that covered a fart noise response to Raoul’s last text, but so far it hadn’t been invented. I knew what he meant, but he wasn’t the one carrying two babies around inside him. And I wasn’t kidding, I actually had rocked myself back to sleep again trying to sit up this morning.
I was now on maternity leave from work – or as I like to call it: vaginal tears, stretching, and mutilation vacation – and I was bored. I wanted these babies out of me like yesterday, but so far they were as stubborn as their father. I was so big that I couldn’t even go outside and work on the garden. Amazingly, the thing looked even better since Raoul had moved in. He’d decided that he wanted to be the one who looked after it for me, so the garden guru only came once every four months now, instead of every three to five weeks like he had before.
“What is it, Rose?” Jarrod asked as he sat down next to me on the couch. He’d come over with food earlier and was keeping me company while I wallowed in pregnancy pity. Every pregnant woman has felt that self-pity, the one where you feel like you’re the only one who’s ever been this uncomfortable, and it feels like it’s going to go on forever.
When I just sat there playing with the wrapper that my sandwich had been in, he started singing Every Rose Has Its Thorn, poking me in the side every so often. Nothing was going to snap me out of my funk, though, not even the elbow or knee that was currently sticking out of my stomach next to my belly button. Well, nothing that was until he poked again and something burst under me making me gasp.
Pulling back, he looked at me wide eyed. “What? What happened? Did I poke it in the head?”
“I think my water just exploded.”
Standing up quickly, he took a step away from me. “Just from poking you?” he asked, looking around us for something. “What do we do?”
I’d seen quite a few births, some of them slow, some of them fast, but first births tended to be slow and took their time to happen. That’s why I wasn’t expecting it when the pain hit at the same time that every muscle in my stomach tightened.
“I’d say call Raoul,” I groaned, trying to remember to breathe through it all. That breathing shit was for the birds, though, there was no way in hell you could do it when your body was doing this.
Pulling out his phone, he hit the screen and held it to his ear. “Just to let you know, your man’s going to kill me. He wanted to be here for this.”
“Oh, he’ll be there for the best parts, trust me.”
RaoulShe’d wanted a water birth – with twins. We’d tried talking her out of it, but during the pregnancy she was adamant that she was doing it. The OB-GYN had agreed that she could try it if everything was going smoothly, but once we’d gotten to the hospital she didn’t want “stupid fucking water”, she wanted the drugs, so she’d had an epidural.
“Ok,” Glynnis, the OB-GYN, said. “You’re fully dilated already, Rose. On the next contraction, we’re going to get you to push while your husband counts down from ten. He’s going to hold one of your leg, Leah beside you will take the other leg, and we’re going to get these babies out into the world. Are you ready?”
I’d done a lot of reading when we’d found out she was pregnant with twins, and what I’d read about the possible complications during birth scared the shit out of me which is why I’d been so against her even trying to do it in the water. So I’ll admit I was prepared for her to need a caesarean and I’d psyched myself up so that I didn’t lose my shit if it happened. But instead, she had the babies smoothly, almost like she did this every day, and they were born exactly eight minutes apart.
It had taken a couple of days to get over the shock when we’d found out we were having identical twins during the first scan. You’re prepared for there to definitely be one, but I hadn’t been prepared for them to find two, that’s for sure. And identical? I’d gone online and had found out that identical meant they were the same sex, you never got one of each that were identical, and I’d immediately pictured two little girls who looked just like their beautiful mother.