We were adventurers, traveled, and enjoyed our twenties thoroughly. My husband “G” and I are a team. We always worked similar jobs or worked together, and always knew what the other was thinking. Our friends know us as the couple who gets in trouble. We've been kicked out of establishments in Paris (they were honest mistakes, I swear), we were in Manhattan during the big blackout, and we got stuck in New Orleans during Katrina. How much more trouble could we get in? Double trouble. We had identical twin boys on May 30, 2008.
G is a teacher at a rough, “turnaround” high school. During his summer off we shared the sleepless nights, and traded off making bottles. But when he went back to work and I was left at home, the team was divided. Suddenly we were comparing who had the harder day. He told me about a 15 person SWAT team coming to his school to remove a student for drugs and weapons. Some of the teachers cried and it was hard on the students who also needed to be calmed down.
My response? “Oh, yeah? Well, the kids didn't nap today AT ALL!”
Obviously, I'd had the worse day.
Little things made us on edge. Clothes were not put away and we didn't even know whose job it was to clean the bottles. We found ourselves yelling over the kids, which sounded angry even when we weren't mad. But I think the hardest thing for us to deal with was the first time we ever said to each other, “You don't know what it's like.”
I didn't know what it was like to work all day, being tried and tested to the max, and then come home and take over the next baby shift. He didn't know what it was like to try to make some sense of eating napping and screaming all day, trying to organize two babies all day without a break until Daddy comes home.
We had to find moments when we could talk about what was happening, and what we could do about it. We started with not talking over the babies. Stopped comparing days, there was no comparison and if we needed to talk about a stressful day we did it at a better time. We also figured out a pattern for cleaning bottles.
We're a team again. We adore the moments we get to share with our children, and we cherish the time the two of us can steal alone. We don't plan it, but we take it as it comes. Just like all the trouble we tend to get into.
Happy Valentine's Day!
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