Pregnancy Twins

I haven't chosen to talk a lot about being a mom on this blog, but today there's a good occasion.

Today this picture popped up on my social media feed:

I wanted to answer the question, but I don't like using social media as a chance to just blabber about my life to no one's benefit. But then I realized this question is actually complicated. And it sparked some grief for me, in more ways than one. Thanks social media. Instead of stewing about it all day, I'm just going to write it out and move on. That's how we writers mend our hearts.

Who was my pregnancy twin? I always dreamed of it being my best friend Stasia. But she wasn't even married when I had my first baby. In fact, none of my friends were pregnant at the time. My sister-in-law had just had her third child. Another sister-in-law had just had her first before I even announced it. In my closer circles, I was the first friend to have a baby. So my pregnancy twin didn't exist. I didn't realize then that I was actually alone with it, and I would have benefited to know some people who were going through the same things I was. Instead, I just did it.

For my second pregnancy, I had TWINS! I had QUADRUPLETS! I'm not blaming the Song of Solomon series we had in our class, but there were four weeks in a row with pregnancy announcements. One of them was one of our closest friends. My sister-in-law also got pregnant a little after that. Yay! What fun! For once I wouldn't be the only pregnant one. But five months in, that pregnancy ended, and I instead watched my friends have their babies. They were so kind and caring and they knew it was painful, but there's nothing you can do to fix it. The pain of seeing their kids growing up is mostly gone, but the memory of the pregnancy is still hard for me.

The third time around, my other BFF Bethany was pregnant with me. And we even had the same due date! Another friend at church got pregnant with her first, and we got to shop together and go walking and share the general sisterhood of it all. I'm thankful for that. It was a really, really hard pregnancy after losing one. I couldn't exactly share that with people, and I think they knew it too. It was kind of an elephant in the room.

There was a gap in my pregnancies at this point, where I watched lots of friends have their next round of babies. I wasn't super grieved by that; the third baby was a hard one and it took a long time to recover.

For the fourth pregnancy, the joy abounded. I was READY for another one. There were twins. One gal in my weekly small group was due right after me so we got to be pregnant together, along with one of the moms who'd shared that second pregnancy with me. Our kids were all born within a few months, and another close friend ended up adopting a toddler whose birthday was just days before my daughter's. So that was a time when the pregnancy twin thing worked out.

The last time around, it happened in a crazy flurry of other things all around it. The saddest part for me was that I knew it was my last one, and my BFF still wasn't able to get pregnant. I had THREE twins that time around - Two different sisters-in-law on my husband's side, and my brother's wife as well. It was a joy.

It's like I always say. joy and sorrow are tightly strung together on the tapestry of life. I'm thankful that God gave me the desires of my heart for some of my pregnancies, and I'm thankful for the friends that I've had through it all. Being a mom is hard. Being a pregnant mom is hard. And being a mom on social media is hard too (maybe dumb for me).