A retrospective analysis (the first year)

Now I understand why we always talk about the zero to three development stage. The change is enormous. They are no longer babies, they have started nursery school and their learning curve is very high. Truly fascinating. From the moment they are newborns there is always somebody who tells you "you'll see how much they have changed by the time they are 3, 6, 9 months old, or one year old, or when they turn two". There are always changes on the horizon (which sometimes come true and sometimes do not). Now I have really grasped the main ones.

That is why I have decided to stop for a moment and analyse what these three years have been like. It's one of those analyses which you can do thanks to retrospective and which show how selective our memory is. Surely, if I had reflected on this at that moment, the things that seemed vital to me when the girls were four months old would now seem a trifle.

0-12 months

For starters, fear. Fear to an unknown situation and twice over. I will cut to the chase: I think that people had frightened me so much that it was actually not as hard as people foresaw. Of course it was difficult. It isn't a piece of pie to get home with two newborns and your first. In spite of the fear and the zillion questions like "will I overcome this?", "what will I do if..?" "how should I react if...?", I think that we didn't get too uptight about all this, which was both a blessing and our salvation. We just let things happen and we faced them calmly, simply living the day-to-day. Naturally, it is fair to say, with all the help in the world, because my mother gave me a hand in the mornings and my parents-in-law in the afternoon. Help? Grandparents, uncles and aunties, siblings and nieces. On my side, the youngest niece is 23 years old, so they were agog over/thirsty for a baby.

There was a key fact that put us on the right track. My husband could stay home with us for a month and a half after they were born. I would have been snowed under if he had had to go back to work after 15 days. We were very lucky in this, although he spent a great deal of his paternity leave doing paperwork.

I went back to work after five and a half months. I was torn apart over this. On the one hand, I felt like it because I wanted to recover what had been my life and because there had been some hard moments, marked by anxiety, tears and nerves. On the other, I understood that nothing would ever be the same again. I missed the girls and I only wanted to go back home to be with them. When I started work again, my husband could stay home. He was in charge and took on the burden of the first baby foods and some exasperating moments because Estel simply wouldn't eat at all.

How would I define the year 2009? It was their "first" everything. Their first summer and holidays, their first swim in the sea, their first stay on the snow, their first baby foods, their first solid meal, from their first crawl to standing up, their first steps, their first teeth. And in September, their first day at the nursery school, the first inconsolable weepings because I left them there.

I look back and I have this feeling: It was hard, but I don't remember it anymore. I don't remember our sleepless nights, holding it up one day and the next. I know that my husband will absolutely disagree with what I am writing (in fact, I have also asked him to write this analysis too). Sneak peak: He remembers the lack of sleep as if it had been engraved with fire on him. I believe that it was so intense a learning process and gained such an impressive knowledge that I only recorded this in my memory.

A matter of hours. Has it been nine months already? They're about to be born

I am 38 weeks and a half pregnant and I'm at the end of my tether. Estel weighs over 3 kg and Ona over 2,5 kgs. They're both fine, and when I was thinking that I'd have to endure this a bit longer by the end of this medical appointment, I leave the surgery with a hospital admission order. We have to be at the hospital before 8 o'clock for admission. It is not until I get there that I become aware that the time has come. However, I’m not very clear on what to expect. I went through that moment as "one thing leads to another" and now I've got some vague recollection of it.

At eleven in the evening oxytocin is not working on me...so we go up to our room. Looking back, perhaps it was at that time when I started to get nervous, because you realise that you don't quite know how things are going to unfold. I obviously thought about my midwife a lot... especially after what I had been told about her in the hospital birthing rooms... it turns out that everyone knows her! And not precisely as an example of great professionalism.

I sleep badly. In fact, right now I can't remember if I slept at all. What I do remember is when my water broke. Throughout my pregnancy I was wondering if I would notice... and I was worried about this, huh? Things that come along with being a first-time mom.  It is one of those things which you don't realise how obvious they are until you're pregnant and go through it. It is one of the strangest sensations that I've felt in my entire life. It was seven o'clock on the morning of December 15 2008, two days before my birthday (and yes, then it dawned on me that I should have programmed the twins' birth on my birthday. Now I'm lucky if people remember to wish me a happy birthday... as we've already celebrated the girls' birthday).

We leave our room and go back to the birthing rooms. The professionals at Taulí Hospital reassure me and calm me down. As matter of fact, I am very satisfied with the follow-up that they've done in the past four months. New tests. Estel is in the right position upside down, but Ona is crosswise. In the end it'll be a C-section. In no time we sign the documents and I am taken to the operation theatre. I realise that I barely take farewell from Jordi, my husband. I'm not aware of the moment. Right now, I am only aware that I have never been in an operation theatre. But I also know that when I leave it, I will never be the same again.