I wrote a lot as a child. Once, on a trip to America over summer, a childhood friend of mine showed me an autobiography she was writing in the third person for an assignment. I was immediately intrigued. I wanted to write my own. So I tried, and tried again. It never felt quite right, so I never finished one. I had dozens of notebooks of stories, diaries and autobiographies. (Most of them I threw away in disgust as a teenager.)
There was one constant: my autobiographies always began with the birth of my sisters. Their birth was engrained in me as The Beginning. The beginning of change. The beginning of my family. The beginning of hardship. The beginning of complication. The beginning of my life.
The discovery of my mother’s pregnancy being twins was a subject that my mother and I began to contest in my late teens. I distinctly remember telling her that she was pregnant with twins. I remember her smiling and explaining to me that that was not the case. Later, I remember her praising me for being the first to know.
My mother, ten or fifteen years after my sisters’ birth, remembered it as her own realization due to the locations of kicks. She remembered going to the doctor and asking for an ultrasound (not standard procedure at the time) because she was sure it was twins. When the doctor told her that it was unlikely, she said to him flatly, “It’s either twins or a monster.”
(One of my sisters once told me that upon hearing this story, she asked, “Which would you have preferred?”
Our mother responded only, “Which do you think?”
I asked, “Which was that?”
“Twins, obviously,” said my sister. “Who’d prefer a monster?”
“Hm,” I responded, remembering our mother’s endless exhaustion during their infancy.)
After a few such discussions, I dismissed my own memories as false, painted by the dreams and wishes of my childhood. Years later, after my mother’s death, I reconnected with some of my friends from my early childhood—and, by extension, their parents. One of them started telling me, one day, how my mother had been so proud of me for being the first to realize that she was having twins.
I remember someone saying cynically, “It was probably just your wishful thinking.” But this is one childhood illusion that I have no desire to let go.
My mother’s pregnancy was a time that, for years afterwards, I remembered as the best time of my life. She was often at home, and frequently asked me to do small things to help her: go fetch this thing or that, make sandwiches for a picnic… I felt important, and had her attention. As a family, we were incredibly happy. We were all elated with anticipation of the birth. My parents bought a new van so that we could comfortably fit all five of us and more, factoring in car seats for the babies. My mother spent what felt to me like hours at the kitchen table deliberating over names. (The only thing set in stone was that a boy would be Julian. I would also have been Julian, had I been a boy. All the girl names picked were so non-traditional and so unusual that all of us routinely use fake names at places like Starbucks to avoid confusion. Yet any boy would have been plain old Julian. I always thought it funny that the only name that either of my parents had decided in advance was my mother’s desire to name a son Julian; and then she only had daughters. Go figure.)
The birth changed my life drastically. I went from having all of my parents’ attention to having none. I couldn’t even leave the apartment to play in the hall with my friends: my new baby sisters were bathed in the kitchen sink, which was near the door. I had a confusing interaction with my father in which he told me I could go out only if I could do so without opening the door. I said, “Ok,” and immediately went for the door. When I was scolded, I cried, “But I’m only going to open it once!” It was explained to me that opening the door would create a draft that would make the babies cold. I could go out after their baths. But bathing the babies took a small eternity. I could hear my friends in the hallway now. By the time the baths were over they’d be done playing. I sulked.
I initially felt mostly forgotten in the face of my new sisters. Then one day, my father had to leave my sisters strapped into little bouncy chairs to my care for a scant five or ten minutes while he took a shower. Of course, as is inevitable, the moment my father left the room they woke up and began to sob their tiny hearts out. I remember feeling utterly exhausted, nearly desensitized to all the screaming and sobbing. I was sitting on the couch. I positioned the bouncy chairs so I could rest one foot on the top of each chair, above their heads. I just bounced them with my feet.
The screaming quieted and then stopped.
My father came rushing out of the shower. (At the time, I was confused as to why he was so frantic after they’d stopped crying. In retrospect, I realize how frightening silence must be to a parent who just left newborns in the care of a five-year-old.) He was surprised, then delighted and showered me with praise. I remember it distinctly, because I’d been wilting, and his praise let me regain my footing. I knew that I still mattered.
After that, my parents let me babysit my sisters from time to time.
I was still reeling from the changes when we moved. The new van was sold barely used. The apartment I’d always known was stripped and sold. My sisters were only two or three months old when we moved to my mother’s parents’ place to await our visas. We finally moved when they were nearly nine months old.
Because my father’s visa had been issued months before ours, he had had to go ahead to start his work and set up our apartment. This meant that my mother moved with a lot of luggage, two infants and a five-year-old. (She carried my sisters by strapping one to her chest in a front pack, and the other to her back in a baby carrier backpack. Then she carried over her shoulder the giant baby bag full of necessities. If ever there was a person that needed priority boarding to get seated, it was my mother.)
In a way, because the changes were more or less constant over this year-long period, I probably adjusted not to any new state of affairs, but to the state of constant change. And by that, I mean that I became accustomed to being confused. The state of confusion was so normal to me that sometimes I’d entirely fail to realize that I was confused at all. I believe that this has largely become a strength in my life. But it would take a long journey to get there.