Go Ahead. Panic.

I know it's trendy to believe that we don't have to give anything up to be parents. And some parents, even some parents of twins, go a long way to prove this. I have friends who, upon learning they were pregnant with two, started buying double sets of outdoor baby gear and mapping out trails for family wilderness excursions. Two months after the birth, they went cross-country skiing, pulling their babies behind them in a toboggan. But to tell you the truth, they didn't look as if they were having fun. I imagine they were just as tired as I was, only cold and wet, too.

To make it through our first few months of almost constant nursing and very little sleep, I had to accept the fact that life would be different. Birth, like death, is dramatic. It happens all the time, but it's still a big deal when it happens to you. Just as no one gets over the death of a loved one during two days of bereavement leave, I was not going to adjust to the birth of twins in the allotted six-week time frame.

What worked for me was surrendering to the idea that my life was going to be out of my control some of the time. I had to admit that I was going to feel overwhelmed  -- overwhelmed by fears, overwhelmed by diapers, overwhelmed by love. When I let go of the expectation that my life was going to resemble its previous form, I could put the pieces together slowly and in a way that I actually liked. In some ways, having twins gave me more opportunity to do that than a singleton pregnancy would have. People consider giving birth to one baby a normal thing, and therefore expect new moms to be able to handle it. The fact that I had twins gave me permission to completely freak out.

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