This Last Year
I’ve seen these around the site, people’s stories, so I thought I’d do one of my own now I have some free time!
The Conception Bit
As with most of these stories, they begin with a boy, or a man. We met at University last year, when I first started my Chemistry Degree. Everyone at the Uni is allocated a ‘mother’ and ‘father’ to help them through their first year, older students that are studying similar degrees. He was my ‘father’ as such, and we would meet once a week and he’d help me with my organic chemistry and ask how I was handling the work. I crushed on him immediately, He was a third-year med student then, and the prospect of a dark-haired soon-to-be-doctor was pretty irresistible.
We ended up making out on my bed in the first few weeks I was in Uni, and from then on, things just started. I didn’t want a relationship. I was just fresh from a gap year in Asia and wanted to settle down to do some actual work, but I sort of fell into a relationship. It seemed impossible not to. He was intelligent, good looking in a kind of clumsy cute way, and at the same time had a typical lads-lad attitude which meant he played rugby and was always searching out a pint at the bar, where as I preferred a vodka and coke.
I have to admit I was on the pill but wasn’t taking it as regularly as I should of, and I can almost pin point a few days where I screwed up my cycle. We had started off using condoms but by the time you’re with someone for six months, neither of us felt it was necessary. I think I must of got pregnant around about when we’d been officially going out six months.
The Decision Bit
It was a nightmare. I can’t lie and say now that I was unsure, but knew straight away I wanted to keep them. My first thought was to get an abortion. To just abort this problem out of my life. I had barley started my second semester at University. I had been waiting for this degree for three years and here I had gone and messed it up. It’s like I’d made a plan for myself and then this comes along and everything falls apart. But my boyfriend was my rock throughout this whole process. He didn’t get angry or scared when I told him my period was late. He bought the pregnancy test from the shop because I was too worried. He sat with me when I took it, calm as anything. He even told me it was positive because I wouldn’t look. I don’t know whether it was the doctor in training that made him act like he did, but those early months in which everything was so uncertain, he was definitely the biggest factor in the decision I made.
The first doctor’s appointment, I was terrified, more because I hadn’t decided what I was going to do yet and the prospect of seeing anything like a fetus on a screen would haunt me if I did decide to get an abortion. My boyfriend wasn’t there. I think he had a placement at a hospital or something though I can’t quite remember, so I was all alone in this big doctors chair and it seemed like I was being swallowed into it.
The doctor was lovely. She could tell I was nervous and young. She laid out my options before she did the scan and explained what would happen so I knew what to expect. When she was looking for the amniotic sac, I was just thinking maybe I was wrong, that the pregnancy test had been a false positive or something, but then she found it and this grainy black and white almond popped up on the screen. I can’t say I had a moment of clarity where I was like ‘hallelujah’ but it did really hit me that there was this thing growing inside me. It made everything very real and for a second I remember having this moment of acceptance that, yes, I was pregnant.
And then I just remember when the screen slide a little and a voice exclaimed “Opps, there’s another one in there!” Oops. Yes, oops, only I think I said a ruder expression than that. Twins. Just thinking about it now, a stream of swear words comes into my mind at the memory. Nausea, I felt sick to my stomach. It was already unimaginable having one baby, having two? Impossible. I couldn’t do this. That’s all I thought. For me, this was not happening. I booked another appointment and I called my boyfriend and he met me and I just cried into him. I just kept on thinking I couldn’t do this. He asked me if I wanted to get an abortion, I told him no. He asked me if I wanted to keep them, I told him no. We went through all the options and I didn’t want any of them, I just wanted to hide away and not be in this situation.
Everything got more rational in the next few days after my scan. I started thinking about things logically, because mentally it was pretty hard. I thought about my work load, the emotional strain of abortion, the actual process of abortion which I knew far to much about thanks to him. And in the end, I knew I would end up keeping them. I couldn’t emotionally go through an abortion and I know that even more now, seven months later.
The Pregnancy Bit
So I had decided. I made a lot of decisions in my first trimester. About what I wanted for myself, for the babies, for me and my boyfriend. It was very much the time that all my plans had been destroyed and I had to rewrite them from scratch. I knew very quickly I wanted to stay at University. I’d worked so hard to get there. I wanted to study Chemistry, go into environmental research and I needed my degree. I knew I needed my boyfriend, but I also knew that I was prepared to do this without him if he wouldn’t want to. What came with the first trimester was also morning sickness and indigestion. It was horrible, I don’t even like writing about it, but with some advice from the site, I did end up finding some foods I could eat without retching and times that were better to eat in the day than others.
The second trimester was when I actually started telling people I was pregnant. More because I had to. If I didn’t they would probably just guess anyway because my stomach was ballooning pretty quickly (I really hadn’t anticipated how big I would become with twins). Most of my friends were shocked “Not you,” they’d say, “We never expected you”. I’m not sure when I look back on it whether it was a compliment or an insult. I also moved in with my boyfriend, and three of his friends in a town house in a city center. It definitely changed our relationship, living together. We grew a lot closer, but at the same time I didn’t feel like we were really very adventurous anymore. But that I suppose, came with growing up so fast.
I think I should probably include something about my parents’ reactions when I told them. They were a lot calmer than I expected, but then again I am 19. I think it wasn’t as severe for them as if I got pregnant when I was 16, when I hadn’t got A-Levels and a university place under my belt.
This was the time I met my best friend and I think my most important resource. I met here through Stand up Girl. She had also had twins, but four years ago and was a pro on twin tantrums and motherhood it seemed. I still look up to her a lot and she ended up being one of the first people outside my boyfriend and myself that held the twins when they were born. Thank you Stand Up Girl for that.
Another big part of this was when we went to my 19 week scan and found out the genders. A boy and a girl, fraternal twins, but that wasn’t really the main focus of the scan. It soon became clear that the doctors were concerned that the boy’s growth was abnormal and he demonstrated early indicators of Downs Syndrome. We went risky and got an Amniocentesis, which is where they take a sample of the baby’s cells and grow them in a lab for 6-8 weeks before genetically testing for downs. A nervous wait that took me into my third trimester, and I have to say before we got the results I had already accustomed myself to the idea to having a downs child so much so that I was surprised when they came back negative.
I have so much to say about my pregnancy, but I really can’t natter on for much longer. For one, because it would bore you all to death and another, because I’m balancing feeding my boy whilst typing.
The Now Bit
The now bit is when my contractions started a week ago and I was rushed for a c-section, despite at least wanting a stab at a natural birth (and yes, they are possible with twins). The girl was delivered first, and her brother about ten minutes after. Elsie Violet, Elsie was my grandmother’s name and Violet was my boyfriend’s, and she weighed a healthy 6lbs and 7 Ounces. Theodore Lyle was the same, as my Grandfather was called Lyle, where as my boyfriend’s was Theodore. Family has become important to us, and I know we both wanted to honor our heritage and relatives with these names. We call Theodore, little Theo, because he weighed 6 ounces less than his sister, but still seems to cry a lot louder than her. I’ve been a parent for about six days now.
We took the twins out today, right down to the park where all the older kids were playing. I can just imagine how they are going to grow and develop into individuals. They already have their own personalities, and I already feel this tie to both of them, so much stronger than anything I’ve felt. I’m still so new at this, both of us are, and its going to be a lot harder when he goes back to Uni next week, and I go back in six weeks. I don’t see how I’m going to leave them, but I know I’m not just studying for me now. We’re studying so we will be able to provide a brilliant life for our children when they grow up.
I would have laughed if someone told me last year I would be sat in a flat I shared with my boyfriend, sitting watching my children, my twins sleep. That would be impossible last year, I would have called them fools for even suggesting such a thing but life works in strange, mysterious ways and looking at Theo and Elsie, I’m sure glad it does.
