Hanging on one of the walls in my home is a trilogy of photos. The first is of my sister holding her daughter, Anna, the day she was born. I’m in the photo, too—smiling over my sister’s shoulder, thrilled to be meeting my niece. The next is a photo of me holding my daughter, Rosalie, on her birthday. My husband, Evan, is gazing at our sweet, perfect new baby, while I’m giving the camera a tired but content smile. The final photo in that trio is of me holding my twin nephews, Alex and Max, on the day they were born. I love this photo wall, but it also makes me very, very sad.
Why?
Well, I had every intention of adding one more photo to that set. I imagined a photo of Evan and me, each holding one of our newborn twins. Teary, smiley, tired—another momentous and joyful moment for our family, right alongside the others. Seems like a simple enough goal, but it didn’t end up happening.
My birth story with my twins is a bit brutal. Despite signs of worsening pre-eclampsia, my medical team either missed or ignored the severity until a routine non-stress test became urgent. Even though my induction was scheduled for a few days later, I was told that wasn’t fast enough. It was no longer safe for me to be pregnant. At 37 weeks, Ivy and Owen were born with underdeveloped lungs, which landed them in the NICU immediately after delivery. While they were whisked away to receive medical attention, I was rolled into a recovery room to slowly make my way out of anesthesia.
Evan was told he could go see the twins “soon,” but nobody came back in the room for hours. When they did finally come to get us, they shared news that nobody wants to hear. The babies were struggling to breathe, and it was likely to be a very hard path ahead.
The two weeks that followed were among the scariest of my life. Ivy and Owen were hooked up to tubes, wires, and sensors that beeped relentlessly. I was separated from all of my kids. Rosalie wasn’t allowed to visit due to hospital visitation restrictions, and the babies were in the NICU instead of right next to my hospital bed. I remember touching my post-delivery stomach and bursting into tears dozens of times because I craved being with my babies. It didn’t make sense to my body that they were both out of my body and out of my room.
My severe pre-eclampsia only continued to get worse post-delivery, and it wasn’t responsive to any medications or treatments. My blood pressure got so high that they padded the rails of my bed and told me I had to stay on complete bedrest. I remember the sheer sensory hell of that 24-hour window. One arm had the blood pressure cuff, set to go off every 15 minutes. One arm had my IV. Both legs had those inflatable cuffs to help avoid blood clots. They moved me to the room closest to the nurse’s station and told me, “Don’t worry, honey! We have you here so we can run right in if something happens!” Somehow, that wasn’t very comforting.
When I was off bedrest, I would visit my babies in the NICU as often as I could, but I was unwell. My stamina was practically nonexistent. Recovering from major surgery and dealing with the chaos of postpartum hormones while my health remained unstable made everything harder. One day—maybe two or three days after giving birth—I was determined to spend the entire day with my babies in the NICU. On that day, I developed the worst headache of my life. The searing hot pain spread from my head to my neck and shoulders, and once again—nothing helped. I was crying so hard, devastated that I had to leave the NICU because something was clearly wrong with me.
That headache? It turned out to be caused by a hole in my spinal cord, caused by the spinal block I had received for my c-section. I had been leaking spinal fluid. The more fluid I lost, the lower my “headache” would travel. I had to get an unexpected and stressful procedure done to fix that.
I didn’t get to spend real time with my babies for several days after they were born. I wasn’t able to hold them for days. When I finally did, we were haggard and emotionally broken. There are very few photos from this time that convey positive emotions. Almost all of them are hard for me to look at because they reflect the reality of that fear and exhaustion. Wires, tubes, frail babies, and wrung-out parents.
We finally made it through that and welcomed our babies home in September. In December, we underwent another hospitalization for the babies when they both contracted RSV. One day, I’ll write another post about how my babies were whisked to Children’s Hospital in the back of an ambulance just three months after they first came home. Today is not that day, but trust me when I say it was a nightmare that compounded our trauma. We made it home just in time to celebrate the twins’ first Christmas as a family. That was a huge relief, but the experience left us shaken. We became shut-ins, doing everything we could to try and avoid more health scares.
Back in January of this year, I won a photo giveaway contest on Instagram. An old friend of mine has become a fantastic photographer since our days of doing community theatre together, and I was incredibly excited when my name was announced as the winner of a free family photo session she was offering. After a year of such intensely emotional experiences, it felt almost ridiculous to admit that one of my lasting painful memories was the fact that I didn’t have any photos of me with my newest little loves that made me feel happy, but it was true.
Last weekend, we finally cashed in on our photo shoot, and receiving those pictures has brought me more healing than I had expected. I was expecting to love them, of course… but I wasn’t expecting it to feel like the closing of a hard chapter.
All photos by Julienne Marie Photography.
In these photos, I don’t see frail, sick babies, and I don’t see scared, exhausted parents. There are no wires, tubes, blood pressure cuffs, or puffy, swollen eyes. I don’t feel the anxiety and trauma that have filled our home and our hearts since my pregnancy started getting scary. All I see is our sweet family—big smiles, loud laughs, and connection.
I will never have the hospital photos I had imagined. I will never complete that trilogy of photos. It’s simply not how things panned out, and accepting the fact that I wasn’t able to get something so simple was hard. I needed some help putting that vision in the past. Julie—if you’re reading this, thank you so much. You’ve given me such a gift that extends beyond the beautiful photos.
Next month, we’re going to recreate our picture wall. We’ll print some of these gorgeous new family photos, take down the trilogy, and dedicate that space to another part of our art collection. Our new gallery wall will include all those smiling faces I love to see—Anna, Alex, Max, Rosalie, Ivy, and Owen—and some classic family photos I inherited from my grandparents. It will be a beautiful way to move forward, putting the ache behind me and embracing the truth: hardship may lie in the past, but there’s comfort in the present. And my goodness, we are really good at getting through some tough shit together.
All photos by Julienne Marie Photography.
DEEP ROOTS | FULL BLOOM 