Anya has pnemonia and is in the hospital. Tina is staying with her. It’s not that bad, though — she should be coming home soon. But I’m exhausted. Taking care of Rachel and our Boston Terrier Archie is a full time job. I come home and I spend the whole evening managing both of them — even with twins, Tina and I trade off on responsibilities, and the nights get easier. But alone, it’s just me. No trade-off’s.

Anyone who says single moms are asking for it, or have it easy should go ahead and piss off. I’d love to see those big, red-blooded manly men who are so critical of single mothers take care of twins, much less a single baby.

I’ve finally figured out how to get Rachel to give me an hour or so to wash her bottles and eat dinner — I put her in her car seat with a choice of toys. She switches between the two, and is relatively content. That’s a trick I learned tonight — it probably won’t work tomorrow.

Okay, off to bed.

I am getting five years older every day. I look in the mirror, and I see a middle aged man staring back at me, his eyes pleading: “Help me before it’s too late.”

Last Wednesday, I went home at lunchtime to move the car. One minute I’m walking down 17th Street, scanning the curb for empty spaces, the next I’m rolling on the pavement, unsure of how I got there. My arms and knees still hurt from the fall, though there’s no visible sign of damage — no brusies, swelling, or anything like that. Only one other person saw me go down, and she was kind, almost apologetic.

I love our girls, but they’re taking their toll on me. The lack of sleep is having a tremendous effect on my work, on my time, on my ability to carry on a coherent conversation. I wish I could say that every moment of fatherhood has brought me a bottomless well of joy and inspiration, but the reality is that I feel more like a baby manager than a parent. Feedings, changing diapers, and desperate attempts to rock one or either girl to sleep consume my spare time. I wonder if things would be easier if Tina and I were younger.

Whenever I hear singleton parents complain about their one, easy little baby, I want to tell them that it should be harder for them than it is. If the world was fair, it would be harder. I’ve never felt more jealous of anyone in my life than I feel about singleton parents. They can spend real time with their children, the quality time that makes parenting so worthwhile. Having one child would be a luxury.

Before the girls were born, I read a book called “The Poo Bomb” in which the father of a newborn baby offered endless complaints about the basics of parenting — dirty diapers, spitting up, having to clean his daughter’s private parts. He saw his daugther as a filthy little monster and made a lot of obvious and bad jokes about her.

In my case, our little girls are beautiful, and nothing they do makes me sick. I love them both so much. And we struggle to keep up with their discomforts, their colds and flu’s, their terrible teething pains. If only I had the luxury of time that he took for granted. Two parents for one child. Easy as pie.

If I can survive long enough to get them to five years old, I will consider myself a success. But if they don’t start sleeping solidly through the night again, I don’t know how I’ll make it.

I now know what it meant when they used to say “Silence is Golden” in reference to children. The silence that follows the heart rending experience of hearing one or both of your daugthers wail in agony for hours is perhaps the greatest thing I’ve ever known.

Something is amiss with our girls. Both of them. It started about two weeks ago, just after they began sleeping through the night. Anya, once a paragon of solid sleep, began getting up multiple times in the middle of the night and Rachel followed. The problem culminated on Thanksgiving, when Anya got a lowgrade fever and kept us awake for hours.

Anya’s crying is near constant, Rachel’s more sporadic, but they both cry more than usual. The chewed fingers and drool lead us to believe that they may be teething, but they’re only four months old — it seems so early. Yet all the usual online parenting sources say that teething starts between 4 - 8 months.

I’ve spent the past few days massaging gums, dousing the girls with Baby Oragel and drowning them in Baby Tylenol to help them sleep. There is nothing quite like the constant shriek of a child in pain — when it goes on for hours, you feel like your body has caught fire. As we pass Anya back and forth, we try to go about life as normal — reading, watching television, blogging, surfing the net. Yet, the soundtrack of misery makes everything seem to combust.

Your daughter is in agony, and there’s almost nothing you can do to help her.

Tommorow, we try the pediatrician. But, as always, there’s likely nothing they can do to help us. You have to ride these things out. I’m afraid this next phase may last a long, long time. Yet, as difficult as it is for us to deal with, I can only imagine the nightmare for the girls, as they suffer wordlessly with only a cry to communicate their discomfort. Imagine an adult living like that for months on end — congress would call an investigation. But for babies, we take it as the norm. And as comfortmable as we try to get them, it’s only temporary.

It’s an excellent thing I did not get my XBOX 360. I doubt I’d have a moment to play it.

In other unrelated news, today we came home from my mother’s to find that my mousetraps successfully snagged and killed the mouse that had been spreading his droppings all over the apartment, running from room to room and eating our food. The first time I saw him, I felt a shiver of genetic memory, a feeling of utter revulsion and disgust. But in the end, finding him nearly decapitated in the mousetrap, I felt sad for the little bastard. He was so small, and he desperately wanted to eat that peanut butter. He was clever enough to dig his way into an Old El Paso Taco Kit box, but he failed to anticipate that the peanut butter was the bait in an ancient contraption that is probably the most clever killing device ever invented by man.

I’m just glad that the girls weren’t old enough to plead the case for his survival. Bad enough, their mother could barely look at him.

Not to worry, though. There are other mice out there.

I spent a good portion of the evening tonight trying to figure out just how to attach our infant car seats to the Graco DuoGlider tandem stroller we bought last winter. I don’t know what it is about baby gear, but nothing every works as well as advertised. Graco is the number one maker of strollers and car seats in the country, yet it took me an hour to figure out how to attach the car seats. I’m not sure how I’m going to get this stuff to fit together once there’s actual live babies in the seats, but that’s a challenge for another day.

58 days left if Tina goes full term — that’s less than two months. Time grows insanely short, now. I don’t even think we’re close to be ready for the girls.

Just to follow up on things, Tina is okay. She went into the hospital Friday for some tests, and came out with a clean bill of health (well, besides the multiple pregnancy, anyway).

Saturday, we had our baby shower at Allen Pond in Bowie, MD. Just about everyone we know came out, and I have to say I was quite moved by their enormous generosity. If you’re reading this, we appreciate all your support.

The only bad thing about the shower was the heat — it was about ninety-five degrees, and about halfway through opening our gifts, I began to get sick. We never would have guessed that it could get so hot in early June.

Tina is just about to pass the thirty-one weeks mark. Only little over two months left. I can’t believe the girls are almost here — the last few months have been an amazing blur. It’s easy to think that pregnancy will last forever, that nine months of your life is an incredibly long time. But it’s not — it’s so short. Soon, if you can believe it, I will be a father.

* * * *

This afternoon, I was working in my office when I heard that Michael Jackson had been found not guilty. On the one hand, I’m sickened that this terrible man has used his celebrity as a shield against what I thought was pretty overwhelming evidence against him. His home with all its various amusements was obviously built as a trap for children — and the verdict pretty much means he can continue abusing them with impunity for the rest of his life.

But as evil as he is, I can’t help but blame the parents, too. To leave their children with such a person shows how easily they let Jackson’s celebrity cloud their judgement. They failed their kids in the worst possible way, handing them over to a predator in exchange for being in the proximity of his unimaginable fame.

You really have to wonder what makes people like that tick — to so easily abdicate their responsiblity to keep their kids safe from harm. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand them.

I’m sorry to give away the ending of the story, but it’s such a relief.

We visited the specialist at Georgetown today. Things seemed bleak when he looked at the “monoamniotic/monochorionic” diagnosis and said: “I’m assuming you’re going to terminate one of them.”

“Absolutely not,” we both said in unison.

He nodded grimly.

Then he ran the sonogram machine and almost instantly pointed something out to us: “Ah, look — you do have a membrane!”

Monochorionic, but not monoamniotic. Bullet dodged.

Afterwards, it was a celebration — he let us look at our babies in blurry, ghostly sonogram black and white, and it was like watching fish swimming around a fishbowl. They looked like those cartoon fishpeople from the old Sea Monkey packaging — insanely cheerful. “Twin B” was a livewire, seeming to ram her/himself into the membrane as if to say: “Look Mommy and Daddy, WE HAVE A MEMBRANE! W00t!”

And then the baby proceeded to do something that looked like foetal breakdancing, while the laconic sybling watched passively on the other side of the membrane, amused by the other’s insane antics.

Based on the doctor’s calculations, one twin is two days older than the other. If they were conceived on day two of our trip to London as we suspect, then they split and became two around the time we visited Stonehenge, Bath and Salisbury.

Yes, I love these twins. It overwhelms me. To paraphrase Kim Deal: “Big, big love.” Gigantic love.

w00t!

I’ve navigated work and life today in a state of complete and utter shock. I’m still absorbing the news yesterday that the twins are probably monoamniotic, and my brain seems incapable of working on much else. An event announcement sent out to the school was loaded with errors I would have otherwise fixed before sending. I walk into closed doors. And what’s more, I am seemingly incapable of focusing on anything.

Even my Halo 2 game is off. And that’s something that should be soaked into muscle memory — my score last night was atrocious.

Tina is much more positive about things. She has an emphatic connection with the twins on some level I just can’t quite understand — a sense of them that seems both mystical and somehow naturally scientific. She knew they were twins before they were diagnosed, and last night had what almost could be called a religious experience, when she suddenly felt a wave of joy erupt from the proto-foetuses swimming around in her womb — a personal message of love and comfort that assuaged her fears.

I wish the twins could talk to me, too. But alas, I’m only a man. My first brief encounter with them was the moment before conception when they were still partly me, and I won’t feel them again until they’re in the world. As much as I try to cast myself as their advocate and protector, they don’t know me, yet. I must connect with them vicariously through their mother.

We have a new appointment scheduled with a doctor at Georgetown — a specialist in a long list of baby-related problems, including high-risk mothers and multiple pregnancies. I’ve Googled him, and some of his papers are pretty damn impressive. I don’t know anything about him as a person, but if he can insure our twins survive, I’ll offer him whatever he wants in return.

No matter what, we are entering a long strech of darkness and terrible, wonderful surprise. This process has found a new shock every corner we’ve turned, and I don’t doubt the trend will continue. I don’t like unpredictability — anyone who knows me, knows I am in complete control of everything around me. But finding myself in a situation where I can do nothing at all, leaves me feeling angry and disconcerted. Yesterday, an aggressive panhandler insisted I give him whatever money I had in my wallet so he can eat, shoving a card in my face that no doubt contained his woeful biography. At first, I gave him a polite, “No, sorry.” When he persisted, I told him I have my own fucking problems and could care less about his, so piss off.

I hate being mean to people, yet when I’m not on my guard, I find it comes too naturally. Thanks, grandpa — I appreciate the inheritance.

I’m reminded of the Arcade Fire song “Une Annee’ Sans Luminee’” (”A Year Without Light”), and its soft, sad beginning. It paints a world where all light, all happiness has been submerged in dark grief. Yet there’s a turning point, a moment of hope that explodes into anthemic joy as the tempo transforms. The message is clear: things can get better. Things will get better. Hold on.

And perhaps that brief communication between Tina and the babies was an omen — it may look scary now, but things will ultimately be okay. We love you! We are happy! Everything will be okay!.

I have faith that they will. What else can I do?

It’s not enough that my dog is spreading blood around the house — oh no. Today, Tina’s OBGYN clinic dropped her because she’s too “high risk.” Apparently, our twins are momo — Monoamniotic and Monochronionic — which means they share the same amniotic fluid. Aka: your twins may be fucked.

And of course, this is all done through the telephone, coldly. Have a nice day, fuck you very much. Rather than help us set up a new appointment, as I would have thought customary, they gave us a set of numbers and said “farewell.”

Next appointment: January 31, 2005. My emotional state: scared out of my fucking mind. Tina’s emotional state: steady, but nervous. Convinced this is a misdiagnosis. I sure hope

Huhm, I wonder what this means?