sacrifice

there has been a ton of speculation this week surrounding the mom who gave birth to eight babies on monday, at once. yes that means octuplets. funny, as i type that, the spell checker doesnt even recognize "octuplets" as a word. that gives us an indication of just how rare it is. apparantly there is only one other living set, who are now 10 years old.

i feel for this mom, because, like it or not, she has been thrust into the public eye. now everyone feels the right to comment about her life, her choices, her method of becoming pregnant, how many children is too many children, why doctors allowed her to proceed with such a plan, etc. privacy as she once knew it, has disappeared. and what of the poor innocent children?! they did not ask to be brought into this world. yet they will go through life, probably spending more days feeling like a spectacle than not. they will go to drs. appointments or the shopping mall and watch their mother be peppered with inappropiate questions. they will enter kindergarten, and their siblings will likely take up half the class. one day they might even google themselves and get exponentially more hits than the average person would if we googled our own name.

although i understand all the speculation about how and why, i still feel for her. as a mother of twins i am constantly fending off personal and inappropriate questions. complete strangers think it is perfectly appropriate to ask if i took drugs to become pregnant, if my children are natural, how long it took to become pregnant, are they test tube babies or did i use a turkey baster, did i have a vaginal birth, did i breastfeed, etc. i have been forced to engage in a debate with a minimum wage worker in a big box store about whether or not my children are identical. a debate which was then followed by a lengthy discussion where i fruitlessly attempted to kindly point out the differences in my children. followed by further discussion on how i tell them apart. all because i wanted to buy a ceiling fan for my 5 year old's bedroom.

as parents we make sacrifices for our children, its part of the territory. sometimes we give up things that are important to us, like careers, sleep, money, a social life, the ability to complete a sentence, dining in restaurants that dont have the word "highchair" in their vocabulary, and yes, privacy too. we give up privacy first. sometimes we take medication, give ourselves shots every day, and visit a dr. every other day for seemingly months on end to have blood drawn and have large probes put in sacred places to measure tiny follicles. sometimes, in utter desparation, we lie in a bed on our side for 5 weeks straight just to give babies a chance to actually be able to take a breath when we birth them. all in the name of love. and sometimes those babies are born and shit and piss all over us. and sometimes they grow up and figuratively do the same thing. but you know what we do, we find a way to make another sacrifice. it is what mothers do. we sacrifice. all in the name of love.