This story was written as an original episode for Out There podcast. Listen along:
The ultrasound technician walked into the exam room where I lay on the table. She grumbled a half-hearted greeting, sat down on her stool, and rolled across the floor to the equipment by my side. Hiking up my maternity shirt, just enough to expose my pregnant belly, she proceeded to shake and squirt the cold lubricating goop onto my bare skin. She moved the ultrasound wand across my stomach in a single pass, took a quick look at the grainy monitor, and heaved a sigh.
Tiny arms and legs fluttered inside of me as I thought: something weird is happening.
"Well, you know you're having twins, right,” she said flatly.
No, we did not know we were having twins. My husband shot out of his chair like he was hit with a 10,000-volt cattle prod.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” he chanted as he pinballed around the tiny room trying to absorb the news. In contrast, I was frozen on the table, tears streaming down my cheeks as I looked at my swollen belly with fresh eyes. Like it was full of magic.
The ultrasound tech thrust a box of tissues at my face and said, “Here. We better get started. Now I have two measurements to take.”
I could have kissed that old sourpuss. The day I found out I was pregnant with twin boys was one of the best days of my life. It was also intense – a word I would use, time and again, to describe my life as a mother of twins.
For starters, I had an intense pregnancy. Which, by the way, was my first, and would be my last, pregnancy. I went into pre-term labor and was on strict bedrest for three months. The medicine they prescribed made me feel like I drank ten cups of coffee and then caught the flu. It caused pulmonary edema where my lungs filled with fluid. For three months, I was trapped on the couch or in bed – hands shaking, wanting to vomit, unable to breathe.
The birth was also intense. I was rushed to the hospital with high blood pressure, blurry vision, and a failing liver. It’s called preeclampsia, a condition that can lead to seizures and death, and the only cure was to deliver my babies. I was given a drug to trigger my labor, another drug to lower my blood pressure, and yet another to help mature my babies’ tiny lungs. At one point, all three of our heart beats crashed and everything went black. The nurse hit the code blue button on the wall. When I came to, I was surrounded by an anxious team of doctors and nurses – my young husband pushed off to the side, worried hands on his head, tears in his eyes.
But I rallied, and we made it to the operating room, where I labored to push out Jake, my first baby.
The doctor placed him on my chest, and at the sound of my voice Jake stopped crying and opened his eyes. As I stared into his somehow-familiar face, I nearly forgot that I had to do it all over again.
After an hour, exhausted, I delivered Dane, my second baby. But he struggled to breathe, and I watched helplessly as they rubbed his tiny back and rushed him away to the neonatal intensive care unit. I didn’t even get to hold him.
Amazingly, overnight Dane grew strong enough to join his brother in a shared bassinet.
Deeply relieved, both physically and emotionally, I also started to recover, and a few days later we drove home from the hospital.
Once home, life stayed intense.
Imagine being a sleep-deprived new mother sitting on a bed, propped up by a mountain of pillows, nursing two babies at the same time in what is called “the football hold.”
You can’t do anything else – you can’t get a drink of water, walk around, answer the phone. Now imagine doing this every hour. Double nursing was only the beginning. Double diapers. Double teething. Double fevers. Double vomit.
“How do you do it?” people would ask in sympathetic exhaustion as I pushed my babies in their double-wide stroller through the grocery store.
“I guess it’s all I know,” I’d reply, reaching for a two-for-one deal on diaper wipes or baby food.
To be clear, I also know there are plenty of parents who have more kids, and more challenges, than I could ever imagine. It’s just that, as a mom of twins, every developmental step was not only brand-new and completely unfamiliar, it was intensified by a factor of two. I had no past experience from an older child to draw from that I could apply to the next. I also had to savor sweet baby stages while they lasted, because once they were gone, they were gone. I often felt a kinship with parents of an only child because they experienced milestones for the first and last time, every time.
This was not the parenting roadmap I had seen growing up. We had no twins in my family. It mattered so much to me to be a good mom, to do this right, and I had no idea what “right” looked like.
Overwhelmed as I was, I added an extra chore to my parenting to-do list: I wanted the world to treat Jake and Dane as two individuals rather than a singular package deal. Although they shared the same birthday, every year I baked them each their own cake. And every year at 7:22am on that shared day in May, I would ring an obnoxious cowbell and sing “Happy Birthday” to Jake. Then at 8:15am, I would shake that same horrible cowbell and sing for Dane.
“I see you” the cowbell would ring out. “You came into the world, on this day, at this exact time, and there is no one else like you on the planet. You are separate and precious. A fighter and a miracle.”
But in my drive to ensure the world viewed each of my sons independently, I let go of my own sense of an independent self. I was grateful to be a stay-at-home mom, but that became my entire identity. No longer working, I stopped planning for my future. And as dreams for my children grew, dreams from my own childhood began to fade.
When I was in second grade, I wanted to be a writer and publish my stories, and I wanted to live in a cozy log cabin like Laura Ingalls in the Little House books. I pictured myself tucked into the trundle bed, listening to Pa Ingalls play a lullaby on his fiddle as Ma sat in the rocker, knitting by the soft glow of firelight.
pc: Little House in the Big Woods, Harper & Row Publishers, Garth Williams illustrations (c) 1953.
But as a mother raising babies in a crowded city, my childhood dream felt absurd.
“You are as close to becoming a writer in a cabin as you are to living in a space colony on Mars,” I told myself, as I put the Little House books on a shelf. I was focused on my boys, their activities and achievements, their schedules, their lives.
As Jake and Dane grew, sadly their dad and I grew apart, and we ended our marriage in divorce. We didn’t want our boys to live out of a suitcase, but that’s what happened anyway. I think back to those first weekends, and then whole weeks, when they were living away from me; the house felt empty and I felt lost. When they returned, I felt restored. And we managed like this. The weeks when they were with me, I fed them as much quality time and comfort food as they could hold. And the weeks I didn’t have them were spent preparing for their return.
By now I was 40 years old, and had taken a desk job. I needed the benefits and steady paycheck. As a responsible single mom, I could not afford to daydream. I had a mortgage and bills to pay, and two little boys who were counting on me. For three years I trapped myself in a dark cubicle, writing government proposals, day after day after day. What was my dream again? I hardly remembered.
The stress of that desk job nearly broke me, and the misery made me desperate enough to hatch an escape plan. At night when the boys were asleep, I would put pen to paper, sketching budget scenarios and carefully timed next steps like a well-rehearsed prison break. With no spouse and second income as a safety net, every career change, every move I made, had to make financial sense. I was in survival mode and had to make it out of that cubicle sooner rather than later, so I began to prepare.
First, I sold my larger house and bought a modest condo to reduce our living expenses. The boys were uneasy about the change, but they supported me. I sobbed as I packed the truck and drove away from the home we had loved for six years.
But as my tears subsided, I started to see the way forward. While unpacking a box of books, a yellow paperback resurfaced on the top of a stack: it was Little House in the Big Woods. I smiled and held it for a moment, vowing to read it again at some point.
In the meantime, I quit my desk job to become a freelance copywriter – living off small projects and my tiny savings while I slowly built my own business. Writing ad copy in a condo wasn’t my dream, but I was taking steps in the right direction. And these changes gave me the flexibility to spend more time with Jake and Dane, hike the mountain trails I craved, and start writing a book.
But as business started to pick up, I lost myself again, this time in the clients’ work and writing stories in their voice. I abandoned my unfinished story.
In the blink of an eye, my boys were seniors in high school, towering above me in height. I knew they would be leaving for college soon, but I didn’t know what my next step would be exactly.
pc: Photography by Desiree
I always encouraged them to go after their dreams and explore their curiosity, and I felt fiercely proud they were doing just that. One heading south to Denver to study film. One going north to Montana to study paleontology.
“How’s your book coming along, Mama?” Jake asked one day.
Embarrassed, I stammered, “Well, it … isn’t.” And his simple question made me ask myself, Why?
Why do I tell each of my sons to follow their dreams, and tell myself the opposite? So before they left home, I started to practice seeing myself as an individual apart from them – to try on this new identity other than mother. I sometimes traveled without them, often into the Colorado mountains.
As I hiked each trail, I thought about what I wanted to do next as a writer, and how and where I wanted to live. Nature has a way of helping us make sense out of our lives, and with each step, I began to outline my next chapter as an empty nester. With each successful summit, that dream of living in a cabin didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore.
As Jake and Dane were online selecting their college dorm rooms, I went online to find a house just for me, that little cabin in the woods by a river where I could write. At first it seemed surreal – working with realtors to check out mountain properties for sale, learning about septic systems and well pumps – each step new and unfamiliar. The more cabins I toured, the more it started to become real, and when I asked the boys to weigh-in on different properties, Jake finally said, “This is your place, Mama. Don’t buy this for us, you need to buy it for you.”
Still, it all felt pretty intense. As Jake and Dane typed their final senior papers, I signed loan documents and real estate contracts. And after we scheduled their graduation party, I scheduled a closing date on my new house. We spent the summer downsizing our current home, dividing everything into three piles, and preparing for three moves that would take us hundreds of miles away from each other.
I ended up buying a 600-square-foot cabin, the former bunkhouse on an old cattle ranch, in a Colorado canyon I have loved since childhood. From my writing desk, I watch hummingbirds dive-bomb the feeder, chipmunks dash around the wood pile, and bighorn sheep scale the rocky outcroppings. The ancient and wild river that has cut through these steep, canyon walls reminds me of the strength in forward momentum, the flow found in purpose, and what can be accomplished with patience over time.
After I moved into my cabin, the empty nest wasn’t quite real to me yet. I had dropped Jake off on campus, but Dane was still at home for another week. We still ate our favorite meals, watched our favorite shows, and played cards. We still walked the dog together.
When it was time to move Dane to college, we loaded my old Subaru with new bedding, and his clothes, and our dog, and we took a road trip to Bozeman, Montana.
I recorded a few audio diary entries, trying to capture this milestone for the first and last time.
Becky: Do you mind if I do an audio diary?
Dane: No, go ahead.
Becky: How are you feeling?
Dane: I’m nervous. But, I’ll get it done. It’s going to be quite the adventure.
[sound of car ignition]
Becky: [deep breath] Ready? Let’s rock and roll.
Dane: Let’s do it.
When we arrived on campus, I tried to arrange Dane’s room, like he was a child. He stood his ground, and gently said, “Mom, you’re stepping on my toes. Please stop.”
I cried, because I didn’t want this to be his last memory of me. I cried because he didn’t need me anymore – they didn’t need me anymore.
The dog wagged his tail, and licked Dane’s salty tears, as his boy scratched him behind the ears one last time. Dane and I hugged hard, and I drove away, watching my man-sized son – the tiny baby who had once struggled to breathe – disappear in the rearview mirror. The baby I didn’t get to hold.
The lives of my sons were out of my hands, and I tried to put on a brave face.
[audio diary recording]
So it’s Saturday the twenty-fourth of August and I just dropped off Dane. He got his textbooks. He’s going to get his dorm room all organized today. I’ve got the car all loaded up and I’m heading back to Colorado. So … [sound of car ignition, putting car into gear, sound of tires on gravel and car driving away]
But that stiff upper lip didn’t last long.
It’s really weird [starting to cry] having an empty car. It wasn’t as hard when I dropped off Jake because I know he’s only an hour away and it still hadn’t really sunk in yet. But today, when I dropped off Dane … I have to stop. [pulls car over, sobbing hard]
Today it really hit me. It really hit me right now.
Moving forward has been bittersweet. It’s the end of an era, but it’s the beginning of the second half of my life. It’s living alone, but it’s giving myself the quiet space I need to be creative. It’s the loss of identity as “mother with kids at home,” but it’s claiming my identity as “author who writes in a little house in the big woods.”
Twins or not, life is intense. That’s just the way it is.
And as life-changing as this next chapter is for me, it’s the same for each of my boys. The unknown is ahead of us all. Yet here I am again, with no roadmap. Just confusing signs, crossroads, so many options to choose from, and knowing I have zero excuses to stay small and stuck. I can look at these empty-nest years as scary or as exciting, as loss or as finding myself, it’s up to me.
The words of poet Mary Oliver strike a chord: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
If there’s something my twins have taught me, it’s that we each get one wild and precious life, and we’ve got to savor it, because once it’s gone, it’s gone.
So I rolled the dice, double or nothing, betting on myself, and I bought that cabin I always dreamed of. Where I could wake up to the smell of sage and pine trees. Follow new trails out of curiosity. Send my stories down bold rivers and out into the world.
Last month, curled up cozy by the fire, I began rereading the Little House books. I also dusted off another forgotten book on the shelf – my unfinished manuscript. I started working on it again, giving my story the full attention it deserves.
When our kids leave home, it’s not just them flying from the nest, testing their wings. As parents, we’re fledging in our own way, too.
I love my sons, and I’m not a bad mom for also loving my independence. Just as I ring the cowbell for Jake and Dane as unique and amazing human beings, each separate and precious from his brother, I will ring it for me – a unique and amazing human being, separate from my children.
In September, I drove from my cabin to one of my favorite local trailheads, and hiked, by myself, to the edge of the wilderness boundary. Small trout were rising in the clear, alpine lakes. The last of the summer wildflowers were in bloom. And two lanky, adolescent moose grazed in the meadow, no mother in sight. They looked healthy. I walked on by, just watching and giving them plenty of space.
Hoping they will make it through their first winter on their own.
Hoping I will make it through, too.
Confident we can.