Last updated on September 30th, 2021 at 10:12 am
I wanted to write an article about reclaiming myself after the birth of the twins and to share my secret on how others may be able to as well. As I started writing, it dawned on me that what I was writing was a lie. I can’t reclaim myself my old self. The person I was before children, that person has gone. Forever. I will never have the freedom and the care-free attitude of just having to take care of myself (and my husband) again. Our hearts have been filled with another pocket of love though and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. It made me realise that I may not be able to fully reclaim myself, but maybe I can reclaim most of the good parts.
They say it takes a certain type of person to raise multiples and two traits I think parents of multiples embody are stubbornness and persistence. It is those two attributes that have helped me in the quest of reclamation. I took out my bucket list and my 50 year plan spreadsheet and looked to see what challenges I had set myself for the year 2015. This year I had stated that I was to run a half marathon and to focus more on my writing. Easy! Pre-birth I volunteered to write a monthly article about my first year as a twin mother, as well as deciding to finish my manuscript. I believed I would have all this time to focus on my goals after the birth because the children would mainly sleep., right? (Cough cough! How naive I was).
I have since choked on my own words. I heard having one child was full on. But two! Geez, I was lucky to get any sleep in those first few months. Why did no one ever mention the sleep deprivation and pure exhaustion? Somewhere within those first 6 months I must have had a bright idea — fueled by exhaustion, or maybe a rare excellent night sleep — because before I knew it, the next day I had written deadlines on the fridge calendar; dates of article deadlines, dates of manuscript submissions, and a 14-week training plan for a half marathon.
The calendar would loudly shout — in bright fluorescent highlighter yellow — deadlines were looming, and that running shoes needed to be attached to my feet to clock up some miles. Every time I went to the fridge I was reminded of the commitments I had set myself. Strangely I think it had an annoying, subliminal affect on me. It felt like a seed had been planted and within days that seed would sprout ideas and motivation.
The same thing happened with training for the half marathon. I overestimated my abilities and underestimated the amount of training and found a race to run. It gave me 14 weeks to train (the most I’d run before was 10 km, or just over 6 miles) and to get myself ready. I woke up earlier than everyone in the house to get out the door and train, mostly through winter. Some days it was so cold. Some days I couldn’t get myself out of bed because of the twins taking turns getting up and down all through the night. Before children, it would have been the end of the world if I didn’t keep to the schedule. Now I just tell myself that tomorrow might be a better day. I even missed two weeks of running due to teething, colds, and a pulled back, whereby I didn’t get to train at all. I was frustrated, but I also realized that I could only control so much. I needed a daily reminder to be kind to myself.
On the day of the half marathon, I stepped up to the starting line and as the gun went off, I just started to run. Not fast. I said to myself that I’ll just keep going until I can’t. There were many times I walked. There were many times I tried to convince myself that I was nearly finished when I wasn’t. My knee gave out a third of the way in. But I kept going and I finished. My time was terrible but I finished something that I’d never achieved before and I had done it while raising 9 month old twins.
In some ways I’ve been overconfident, crazy, and delusional about many things in my life, let alone during the first year of having multiples. But you know what? They happened. I did those things, which tells me that anything we set our minds to is possible. It’s not some foolish pipe dream. If I can do it, you can too.
But — and there has to be a but — we can’t have everything. You have to choose what is more important. Studying? Exercising? Traveling? Working? Quilting? Finding the intimacy in your relationship again? Whatever it is, other things need to be sacrificed for those dreams. I’m not saying you’ll never catch up with your girlfriends or go shopping for 4 hours or take a long hot bath with a glass of wine again, but I am saying that we have to make a choice about what is more important for us in any given moment in time.
I see goal setting like buying new clothes – to fit them into your bulging wardrobe, you need to clear out some of the old, threadbare, ill-fitting, and out of style clothes in your closet. It needs to be reorganized and made over. That reorganization is a metaphor for your new life as a parent of twins – you need to dump activities and people from your life who suck your energy, make you feel inadequate, feel bad about yourself, are time wasters, or are just plain nasty. It seems quite harsh, but as parents of multiples (or more) we are time poor. We have to be selective about how, where, and what we spend our time doing. So by saying ‘no’ to time wasters, what you’re really saying is ‘yes’ to your health and sanity.
Here’s what works for me:
- Set yourself a goal
- Make sure every day has a small challenge which will add to the bigger goal. For example, you may be trying to lose weight and the small change might be cutting sugar out of your coffee. A small but significant change over time.
- Have a calendar on the wall so you can see it daily. This helps you to plan out important dates. I did this for tracking training runs and for deadlines on articles.
- If you just show up at the starting line, who knows you may just finish.
- Be kind to yourself. Not everything goes to plan, and that’s okay.
It’s not easy, but if it fuels your heart with happiness then it’s worth trying to fit it back into your life because, guess what… you’re worth it. Good luck.
Briar Wright is a full time mother who cannot decide if she should go back to work, and a wife who still cannot decide if she should change her last name, years after marriage as well. She married her own ‘Ice Man’ in the air force and tries to manage her day with a tight schedule. If only the twins and dogs were on board, the things she could do!
