The Day Before: the things I Wish I Knew Before I Gave Birth to Twins

Two years ago tomorrow, I became a mother to two at once.

But the day I keep coming back to isn't the birthday. It's the day before.

I was in shock. Not the panicked kind — the quiet, floating kind, where your body knows something enormous is coming and your mind hasn't caught up. And strangely, I wasn't thinking about the twins yet. I was thinking about my son. My first baby. I spent that last day watching him and grieving, in advance, a life he couldn't comprehend was about to end as he knew it.

He had no idea his world was about to turn upside down. He didn't ask for it, couldn't consent to it, couldn't understand it. Tomorrow he would go from being the baby, the everything, to being the big brother — sharing his mother, sharing his things, sharing every ounce of attention he'd never had to share before... double time. Total disruption to everything he knew as normal. And even though I couldn't comprehend to the extent things would change, I couldn't even give him a heads up that would even make sense.

If you're in that window right now — days away, whether it's hanging on to those last days of 'freedom' with no kids, or holding your first a little tighter — I want you to know that grief is not a sign something is wrong. It's normal. It's love. It's life. You're mourning something real while you make room for something new. Both can live in you at the same time. And that's okay.

Here's the rest of what I wish someone had told me.

"High risk" starts on day one — no matter how healthy you are

Here's something almost no one outside the multiples world understands: the moment they see two on the screen, you are classified high risk. Everything a little scarier and riskier. Automatically. It has nothing to do with your health, your age, the viability of the babies or positioning, or how strong your pregnancy feels. Two babies simply means more to monitor, and the label comes with it from the very start.

In practice, that means a lot of watching. Frequent ultrasounds (I had 8), even two a month as you get toward the end. And those appointments hold both things at once. On one hand, you get to see them — over and over, growing, moving, two heartbeats on the monitor — a gift most parents of one only get a couple of times. (We got to see Cameron literally kicking Christian in the head on one). On the other, every scan carries a low hum of fear: are they both okay, are they growing evenly (disparity in size is closely monitored in multiples), is everything where it should be. You leave some appointments floating and others holding your breath until the next one.

Nobody warns you that the reassurance and the anxiety come in the same visit. If you're living in that two-week rhythm right now, know that the fear you feel between scans doesn't mean something is wrong. It means you love them already. And somehow in the miracle that they already are, they seem to figure it out in there.

Your body will heal on a timeline you don't control

I was scared of how my body would recover. I knew the c-section would hurt in a different way after than my vaginal birth. What no one prepared me for was the numbness. Nerves get cut in a c-section (7 layers to get in there), and for weeks afterward I had no sensation across parts of my own stomach. It's a strange, disembodying thing — to touch your body and feel like you're touching someone else's. (I tried to put ice on after to "keep swelling down" and got queasy when I couldn't feel it.)

Two years later, I honestly still move between two feelings about my body: awe and grief. Awe that it safely and healthily created, grew, carried, and delivered two humans. Grief for the body I used to have, the one that did what I told it to, that would adapt and respond to nutrition and fitness tweaks as prescribed. I don't think that grief is a problem to fix. I think it's part of being honest about a transition this big. You're allowed to be proud of your body and mourn it in the same breath.

I gave myself space, grace, and time. I moved the goal posts, I increased the timeline. All things the old me never would, and I am still seeing changes.... slowly. Feeling more, adapting more, fitting more. But that doesn't take away from the hard and frustration as well.

You will not "bounce back," and that's not a personal failing

I wanted to be back to working out fast. I'd built my life around fitness. And I physically could not — not because I lacked discipline, but because it genuinely wasn't possible. You cannot out-will the combination of total sleep depletion, major abdominal surgery recovery, and managing a toddler at the same time. The math doesn't work, and pretending it does is how women get hurt.

I healed from a four-finger diastasis recti — the natural, unavoidable separation of the abdominal muscles that happens in pregnancy. I understood this pregnancy that I didn't do anything wrong, but that it is the cost of your body making space for life. However, the healing process would need to be regimented and delicate, cautious and continual.

I'm a certified personal trainer and postpartum specialist, and I will still tell you honestly: two years out, I'm cautious with the ab wheel — once my favorite — and with leg lifts, because I fear the coning, that little ridge that pushes up through the midline when the core isn't holding the load appropriately. Listening to that is not weakness. It's the exact opposite and is safer for the long term affects on my body.

Get a pelvic floor PT. I mean it.

If you sprain your ankle, no one questions sending you to physical therapy. So explain this to me: two humans — or even one — come out of an opening meant to be less than a centimeter and stretch to ten, or you're cut seven layers deep to bring them into the world… and we're just supposed to go home with a diaper and a "take it easy" for six weeks?

Please find a pelvic floor physical therapist. In some countries it's standard, automatic care after birth as it should be. Here you often have to seek it out yourself and often times they are out of network or reimburse through insurance. Do it. It is one of the highest-return things you can do for your recovery, your core, and how your body feels for the rest of your life. Advocate for it the way you'd advocate for your child. (Your bladder later in life will thank you)

You and your partner become an unbeatable team

You will become a great team with your partner. You have to. My husband became an even more incredible parent because there was no other option — with two, you are both all-in, all the time, and something beautiful comes from that. You learn to empathize with each other in a way you never had to before, because you're both living inside the same impossible days.

But I'll be honest about the shadow side too: when you're that depleted, when the hormones and the sleeplessness are doing their thing, and you're still healing, anger can creep in that nobody actually deserves. You can snap at the person standing next to you because they're the only adult in the room. The thing that saved us was remembering, over and over: we are on the same team. The enemy is the exhaustion, not each other.

You have to let people help — and you have to tell them how

This one took me too long to learn: you cannot do this alone, and trying to is not strength. It's just suffering with extra steps.

Here's the part almost no one says out loud: people genuinely want to help you, they just don't know how, so they say "let me know if you need anything" and then nothing happens — because a depleted new mother of multiples does not have the bandwidth to project-manage her own village.

So take the guesswork away from them. Be specific. Tell them exactly what would actually move the needle: come sit with the babies so I can shower. Do the dishes in the sink. Throw in a load of laundry and fold the one in the dryer. Come over for an hour so I can nap. Drop off dinner on Tuesday. Hold a baby or two so I can hold my older one with two free hands.

The people who love you are standing there wanting a job. Give them one. Asking for help isn't the thing you do when you've failed to cope — it's part of how competent, resourced mothers get through. Let them in.

The sleep thing is part nature, not just nurture

If we're being honest, we really did not sleep for the first fifteen months. And here's the crazy part: one of the twins has slept through the night since six months. However, the other didn't until fifteen. Same house, same parents, same sleep routines, same everything — two completely different sleepers.

So if you're lying awake, doing the mental audit of everything you "should" be doing differently — please hear this. You will sleep again. In the first two months alone we cycled through three different ways of managing the nights. You do what works until it stops working, then you adapt, because they're changing as fast as you are.

I love sleep. I need sleep. I genuinely don't know how we survived on so little of it. But you just do — not because you're superhuman, but because there is no other choice, and somehow the not-having-a-choice carries you.

They are two people, not "the twins"

It's easy, from the outside, to see one unit. But they arrived as two entirely separate humans, with separate needs, separate temperaments, separate ways of being loved.

Each of them deserves their own one-on-one time and their own version of your parenting. Learning to see them as individuals — not a matched set — is one of the quiet, ongoing works of raising multiples. Different personalities, communication, likes and dislikes, parenting styles, people.

I used to be Type A. Now I'm Type... T?

Before, I was Type A. Organized, driven, in control. A Leo through and through. Then I had two babies and a toddler, and I dropped clean past Type B into something maybe called Type T: built entirely on survival and zero judgment going with the flow.

That's not a loss. It might be the biggest gift motherhood gave me. You do what you need to do — for each kid, for your particular family, in your specific season — and you let go of the picture of how it was supposed to look. The old me would get super stressed about... many if not all facets of how things are now. There is no gold star for suffering through it the "right" way. There's just your family, getting through it your way.

You are one of the rare, lucky, chosen few

Somewhere in the middle of the hardest stretch, a truth settled over me that I still carry: we are the lucky ones.

Only about 3% of births in the United States are twins — roughly 1 in 33 — and much of that is thanks to fertility treatments. When twins happen on their own, the odds are even rarer: somewhere around 1 in 85. Out of everyone, we're the small percentage handed this particular superpower: raising multiples.

And there's an unspoken bond in it. Catch eyes with another parent of twins across a parking lot and you don't have to say a word — they know. The chaos, the double everything, the way your heart lives outside your body in two places at once.

It is beautiful and breaking at the exact same time. Both, always, together. And you come out the other side stronger than you were, more patient than you knew you could be, more understanding of other parents in the trenches, and more resilient than you ever asked to become. Not despite the hard — because of it.

What I'd whisper to myself the day before

If I could stand next to that woman on the day before — floating, in shock, grieving her son's old life, scared of her own body — I would tell her this:

You make it through. Not by doing more. By protecting what's underneath — your rest, your recovery, your body, your capacity — so that there's actually something left of you to give the three little people who need you.

That upstream care isn't the thing you get to after you survive. It's the thing that lets you survive at all.

That truth is exactly why I do the work I do now — helping mothers navigate this transition with support instead of white-knuckling it alone, the way so many of us did. Because you shouldn't have to figure out the day-before, or any of the days after, without someone who's been there handing you the map.

Happy second birthday to my two. You turned my world upside down. It's so much better down here. 🤍