It was the twins’ birthday party day and I was meant to be somewhere soft. I was meant to be preparing a cake, or folding small clothes, or breathing in the warm scent of their hair in that quiet way mothers sometimes do when the day still belongs to them.
But instead I was seated in a school meeting, surrounded by professionals whose names I knew only because of the emails, the referral forms, the careful chains of escalation that always ended in delay. There were 11 people in the room, maybe more. Teachers, the principal, a resource teacher, the district counsellor, the director of inclusion, the associate superintendent, a psychologist from MIST—an acronym that sounded like MISSed, which felt like an unintended confession. A MIST coordinator. Perhaps someone from Our Team, likely our occupational therapist, though it blurs in memory. The room was full of professionals, full of acronyms, full of business casual and restrained expressions of concern.
I sat there and did what I have done so many times, trying to stay composed, holding my face in a shape that would not be dismissed. I did the work of pressing my knees together, digging my fingernails into my palm under the table to feel something other than the gnawing pain of this betrayal and siren in my brain. Because inside, I was back at the beginning again.
The breath that wouldn’t come
For sixteen weeks I had been breathless. The kind of breathlessness that does not mean winded but means encroached upon—means squeezed and pressed and expanded to the point of pain. My lungs drew air that my twins needed, and I feared that every breath fed them and crushed them both. My son protested often. He kicked the walls of my belly in a pattern that felt like outrage. He made his presence undeniable. My daughter moved too, but gentler. They took up space in ways I had never learned how to do. But on that second day of thirty-one weeks, my son stopped. He did not move.
I remember waking in the night, my eyes open before my body caught up. The kind of waking that arrives with warning. I lay still beside their father, the silence in my womb louder than any sound. I searched back through the day for proof that he had shifted, stretched, objected—but there was nothing. I told myself I was being careful, not frightened. I rose to go to the bathroom—because that is what you do when you are pregnant with twins, you rise and rise and rise—and that is when something changed.
There was a burst. Wetness on the sheets. For a moment I thought I had simply peed. I remember that thought clearly because I hoped it to be true. I wanted it to be a small moment, an ordinary moment. But the moment did not shrink. It grew. It soaked. It made itself known.
What happened next
I do not remember the order. I think we waited until light. I think we believed it would slow down, so we called the midwife. I did not have my hospital bag packed. My mom met me at the hospital and I was given a drug meant to help develop lungs—the list of side effects was so long the nurse trailed a long printout behind her. The page slithered out of her hand and onto the floor, an impossible ribbon of contingency. You can’t pick stuff up off the hospital floor and it was irrelevant anyway, because I wanted them to be able to breathe.
My mom held my hand. Their father and his daughter went to the movies because we were told it would take time. I tried to believe it would. I sat on the toilet and felt the world vibrate inside me. My bowels pounded. My brain filled with music—the desperate kind, the kind that plays under sirens. “Move goddamnit move” became my song, my breath, my incantation.
The images arrived without permission: glass boxes, machines, tubes, bleeds, scans, speech delays, chronic illness, blue lips, blue skin, complications. I was both dreaming and awake. I was on the toilet, I was in the hospital, I was underwater, I was already grieving, my uterus making dull contractions, like an easy round of cramps.
Meanwhile, in the meeting
Someone in the meeting was speaking about “expected timelines.” Someone was saying “regulation strategies.” Someone else was explaining why the resource block could not be adjusted to meet their needs. Their words arrived through a tunnel. I saw the lips move. I even wrote some of the words down, because I was trained to do so. But I was not there with them. I was back inside the delivery room. I was remembering the way I knelt and cried and asked the babies to wait just a little longer.
I heard myself say, even then, “Stop, please. Stay longer. Don’t come yet.” I moaned through it. I remember the stirrups, the command to turn, the breath I didn’t have, the sound of my bones creaking open. And then: my daughter. Suspended. Beautiful. Unbelievably alive. And after her, my son. Pulled down by one leg. Blue. Still.
I saw him suspended like a mirror of fear. I remember the shape of him in the air.
That memory rose in me like a scream that day in the meeting room, but no one noticed. They were busy discussing “baseline regulation.”
The refusal to see
There is something grotesque about how well these systems have trained their staff to look away. When a mother arrives red-eyed or trembling, they say she is overwhelmed. When she speaks forcefully, they say she is difficult. When she dissociates, they proceed with the meeting as planned. And when she weeps, they offer tissues without pausing the conversation.
I believe I was all of those mothers that day. And I believe no one cared.
They did not want to see my pain because to see it would have meant recognising their role in causing it. They did not want to know that it was my twins’ birthday and I was sitting in that hard chair instead of holding them. They did not want to think about what it meant to be dragged back into the day I almost lost them while hearing words like “resourcing,” “safety,” and “fit.” They did not want to believe they were loved children, wanted feverishly, conceived through years of effort, guarded like a dragon, loved fiercely, and we are real people with real feelings.
But I am done hiding that interior life. I am done folding it up so that professionals can have an easy day.
This is what it cost
It cost me everything to be in that room. It cost me the illusion that time heals. It cost me the chance to wake slowly, to cry privately, to spend the day remembering what we survived. It cost me the softness I had saved for them. I gave that to the district staff instead, so they could feel reassured that I was “working collaboratively.”
