Dropping In: Youth is fleeting. So is parenthood

Published 12:30 pm Wednesday, September 11, 2024

Sept. 6 marked a special occasion for my wife and me: the 22nd birthday of our identical twin daughters, Lillian (Lilly) and Lucia (Lucy).

Truth be told, Sept. 6 was always an awkward birthday when they were in school, sometimes landing on the first or second day of school.

Now entering their senior years in college, which convenes in late September, Lilly and Lucy have mostly been around home when their shared birthday rolls around the last few years.

But not this year. In fact, our identical twins were in two different countries: On Aug. 31, Lucy hopped a plane for a three-month study abroad in Spain, and on their birthday, Lilly was enjoying a night of karaoke with fellow members of her cohort in Querétaro, Mexico, at the tail end of a six-week Spanish language program.

Needless to say, I could not have envisioned either journey when they were born. Back then, we were just trying to get them out of St. Charles Bend’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit as soon as we could, and make it through some long and trying days ourselves.

Their lives began on rocky footing, and I’m pretty much in constant denial about how close we came to losing them before we knew them. It’s too big to think about.

The evening of Sept. 5, 2002, my wife, Catherine, who’d read the books, done the yoga and eaten well just like she had with our first born, knew what to expect. When she wasn’t feeling the kicks she knew she should have been 32 or so weeks into her pregnancy, she called the midwife, who was quick to reassure her but said if it would make her feel better, to head into the ER. We went immediately, me driving like a crazed man suddenly sick with worry that this was serious. We had our 2½-year-old daughter, Caroline, in the backseat. At St. Charles Bend’s emergency room, they hooked up a fetal heart rate monitor and were just about to dismiss Catherine when the heart rate they’d detected began to drop.

A doctor and portable ultrasound machine were brought in, and then and there, that evening, we learned Catherine wasn’t just pregnant, but had been transporting twins for the past seven months.

People will still sometimes ask if we’d known we were having twins. I can’t imagine there are many parents of twins in our generation who didn’t know, but it’s true. Nor did we know the gender of our incoming, but we also didn’t know there were two until the night they were born.

You see, our midwife didn’t do routine ultrasounds. We’d heard the old saw that a second pregnancy shows more than the first, and defaulted to that wisdom. Still, I joked with Catherine after she began to show that she had to be pregnant with twins. Did I know? No, of course not. And I guess I never made the joke in front of the midwife, who at one appointment I watched do belly palpitations and say how she felt a head or foot. I bet she did — there were two or more of everything, so the odds were good.

We were overwhelmed in the ER. A second doctor was brought in and explained to us that “one of these times, the heart rate is going to go down and it’s not going to come back up.” What seems in memory like just minutes later, Catherine was undergoing a Caesarian section neither of us had expected.

Lilly and Lucy were delivered in the wee hours of Sept. 6, weighing 3 pounds, 9 ounces and 4 pounds, 5 ounces, respectively. Dr. Allen Merritt and a team whisked them away. For reasons we’ll never know, they were severely anemic and needed blood transfusions. Those moments were harrowing. All we could do was hope. Along with their immediate well-being, we’d spend the next couple of years watching for markers of healthy development.

We, especially Catherine, spent as much time in the NICU with them as we could. Our girls might not have gotten to finish incubating in the womb, but Catherine pumped night and day, and they had all the breast milk they needed. We bought a midsize freezer for our garage, and at one point it was completely full of bagged and bottled breast milk. Lilly and Lucy grew like weeds.

For the too-few years his life overlapped with theirs, my father marveled at their height. “You wouldn’t know they were premature,” he said more than once. They’re above average in height, intelligence, wit and beauty.

On Sunday, Lilly and I drove home from Portland to Bend after her flight from Mexico. She told stories of her trip and we talked and listened to the music she curated. We got out of the car to stretch our legs at Peter Skene Ogden Scenic Viewpoint. After we climbed out of the car and started walking, Lilly briefly put her arm around me and told me she likes talking to me. Affirmations must be my Love Language because that made my day.

We walked over to the old Highway 97 span and watched a bungy jumper leap off the platform. As the bungy cord stretched before stopping her plummet, the woman yelled, “Oh God!”

I chuckled because — and all of my skate friends will verify this — that’s my involuntary catchphrase when I do a scary trick skating in bowls these days. What can I say? I’m definitely more scared of big leaps than I was decades ago.

On the nearby lawn, tall sprinklers were operating in the early afternoon heat. Lilly, who will move back for her senior year at Portland State in a couple of weeks, asked me to hold her phone and sprinted off to run through them, just as she and her sisters used to in our yard when they were little girls. Then I took a lap myself. I’m not that old, yet.

This year, it was Mexico and Spain for two of them, but with all three heading into their last year of college, who knows where my daughters might run off to next.

As a parent, all you can really do is watch them go.