I Was Injured and Struggling With Our 5-Month-Old Twins, but My Husband Told Me I Had to Handle It Alone and Soon Regretted It
The stairs had always been slightly steep.
I had noticed this when we first looked at the house, three years ago, before the twins, before the marriage had become what it had become, in the period when Derek and I were still in the mode of seeing possibilities in everything, including the steepness of stairs in a house we were considering. I had mentioned it then, said something about the angle, and Derek had said we would put a runner on them for traction and we had never put a runner on them and I had stopped thinking about it the way you stop thinking about things in a house you live in, until they become part of the landscape that you stop seeing.
The fall happened on a Tuesday morning.
I was carrying one of the boys, Eli, in my left arm, and a burp cloth and a pacifier in my right hand, and I was also tired in the way I have been tired for five months, which is a kind of tiredness that has its own specific texture, dense and total, the tiredness of a body that has not completed a sleep cycle since before the boys were born.
My foot caught the second step from the top.
Eli was fine.
I did not let go of Eli.
This is the thing I want to say first, before the arm, before Derek, before any of it: I did not let go of Eli. My body made that decision before I could make it consciously, the specific instinctive choice of a mother falling, which is to wrap everything around the child and absorb whatever is coming with the parts of herself that are available.
My right arm hit the stairs.
The rest of me arranged itself around Eli.
We reached the bottom and Eli was crying, startled and unhappy, and I was on my knees on the hallway floor with my right arm doing something that arms do not usually do, something that my mind was slow to process because the processing of physical pain that large requires a moment.
He was fine.
He was crying but he was fine.
I held him with my left arm.
He stopped crying before I did.
My mother-in-law, Sandra, had arrived ten minutes earlier to help with the morning feeding, one of the arrangements I had assembled in the months since the boys came home, the patchwork of help that I had organized because Derek did not organize it and because the twins were two people who needed constant care and I was one person who needed sleep sometimes and who could not be in two places simultaneously.
Sandra came from the kitchen when she heard the fall.
She found me on the hallway floor.
She called the ambulance.
The hospital was two hours of X-rays and waiting and a doctor explaining what a radius fracture meant in terms of what I could and could not do for the next six weeks. He said it as gently as he could, the way doctors have learned to say things to people who are visibly sleep-deprived and holding an infant, but the gentleness did not change what it meant.
No lifting of anything over a few pounds for six weeks.
My sons each weigh approximately sixteen pounds.
Sandra drove us home and helped me settle the boys and made tea and did not say what I could see she was thinking, which was that I needed Derek to step up and that she was not confident he would.
I called Derek at work.
He came home that evening.
I want to be fair about Derek in the early part of this, because fairness is what I owe the story even when the story is painful. When he came home that evening and saw the cast, his face did the thing it sometimes still did, the thing that reminded me of who he had been before we had children, the thing that looked like genuine concern.
He asked if I was okay.
I said I had broken my arm and that the doctor said no heavy lifting for six weeks.
He said that was a lot.
I said yes, it was, and that I needed him to help me with the boys. Not for six weeks of full participation, though I could have asked for that. I asked for a day off work occasionally. An hour earlier a few evenings a week. Working from home on the days Sandra could not come.
He rolled his eyes.
The eye roll arrived before any words, which is its own communication, the specific body language of someone who has decided that a request is unreasonable before they have finished hearing it.
He said he had a job.
He said he was not going to sit around with the kids.
I stayed calm.
I explained that my arm was broken, that I was in a cast, that I was asking for help managing two five-month-old babies with one usable arm.
He said moms don’t get sick days.
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He said I had wanted kids and I could take care of them.
He said it was not his problem.
I sat on the couch.
I sat on the couch with my cast in my lap and my son in the other arm and I looked at my husband and I processed, with the specific slowness of someone receiving information that requires significant processing, what had just been said to me.
Derek had wanted children.
This is documented not just in my memory but in actual documentation, the emails and the conversations and the specific evening three years ago when he had brought up having a family for the first time, had been the one to raise it, had said that he imagined himself as a father and that he wanted that with me.
He had also wept when the boys were born.
I was there.
I saw him.
He had held Eli and then Owen and he had wept in the way that new fathers sometimes weep, the overwhelming specific emotion of a person encountering something they had wanted and are now holding, and I had believed in that moment that we were in it together, that the team we had been becoming was going to continue becoming, that the babies were going to be ours in the way that things are ours when both people have invested in them.
The months since had revised this understanding.
He had not gotten up in the night once.
Not once.
He had not changed a diaper without being specifically asked, and when specifically asked had frequently produced a reason why this particular moment was inconvenient. He had not attended a pediatrician appointment. He had not bathed them or dressed them or sat with them through the difficult periods of cluster feeding that lasted two and three hours.
He came home from work and sat on the couch and watched television and expected dinner, which I made, because making dinner had become another item on the list of things that were apparently mine.
I had been managing this.
I want to be honest about why, because the why is important and because I have spent the months since examining it without flinching, and what I found when I examined it was a combination of things: exhaustion that made confrontation feel impossible, the hope that it would change once the boys were older, the specific fear of a woman who has two infants and no income that the confrontation might produce a result she could not manage, and a residue of the love I had for the person Derek had been before the boys arrived, which had made me willing to extend more grace than the situation warranted.
The broken arm removed the capacity for grace.
You cannot extend grace when you have one usable arm and two infants who need to be lifted.
I called my mother.
My mother’s name is Vivienne and she has the specific quality of women of her generation who have done difficult things quietly for a long time and who have therefore developed a practical efficiency that is its own form of love. She arrived the next morning and she did not say anything about Derek that required me to defend him or agree with her, which is one of the specific skills of a good mother, and she helped me through the days when my arm was the worst and the fatigue was the most comprehensive.
For three days she came every morning.
On the fourth day she had a commitment she could not cancel, a medical appointment that had been scheduled for two months.
I called Derek before he left for work.
I told him I needed him to come home by five that evening because the boys needed bathing and I could not bathe two babies with one arm.
He said he was tired.
He said he had come home from work every day this week.
He said that I stayed home and did nothing all day.
I sat very still with the phone in my hand.
I had, over the past four days, while broken-armed and sleep-deprived, managed the following: the feedings, which with five-month-old twins happened every three hours day and night; the diaper changes, which I had developed a one-armed technique for that I would not recommend; the laundry, which had to be done because babies generated laundry in quantities that defied reason; the meals for Derek and for myself; the dishes; the communication with Sandra and my mother about their respective visits; a pediatrician call about Owen’s persistent fussiness; and the management of my own pain, which I was managing with the minimum of painkillers because I was nursing and the doctor had restricted what I could take.
Nothing all day.
I sat very still for a long time after he hung up.
And then something settled in me.
Not anger exactly, though anger was there.
Something colder and more purposeful.
I thought about what I needed Derek to understand.
Not to hear. Hearing was not the problem. I had told him things and he had heard them and had produced, in response, the eye roll and the moms don’t get sick days, which meant that hearing was not equivalent to understanding and that the method of communication I had been using was not capable of producing the result I needed.
I needed a different method.
The specific thing Derek believed was that caring for two infants at home was not work. That it was nothing. That the person doing it was doing nothing, that the time was empty, that the presence of a mother with her children was a form of rest rather than a form of labor.
He needed to understand what the nothing looked like.
He needed to understand it not through my description, which he had already heard and dismissed, but through direct experience.
I called Sandra.
Sandra and I had developed, over five months of her helping me while her son did not, a relationship that was different from the mother-in-law relationship I had expected. She was on my side in a way that she had never stated explicitly but that was evident in every practical action, the showing up, the help that arrived without requiring me to justify the need for it.
I said: I need a favor.
She said: yes.
I said: I need you to come at four tomorrow and take the boys somewhere for the evening. Dinner. A drive. Whatever feels right. I need them out of the house when Derek comes home.
She said: what are you planning?
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