In the Beginning (cont.)

When I found out I was pregnant, I specifically decided that I was not going to solidify my relationship with their father just for the sake of having a nuclear family. I was only 19 and I wasn't ready to make that sort of commitment. Of course, my fear of settling down drove him away because it seemed to him that I was interested in anyone but him. Really I was interested in denying and running away from what was happening. I was terrified of being a mother, because I had never really wanted children. My career had always been my main focus.

Still, I decided not to bother with my own personal goals for a while, when the twins were little. The pregnancy went smoothly, but they were born a month early and their underdeveloped digestive tracts left them grumpy and difficult. I was a very protective mother bear and wouldn't trust anyone else to care for them, under the circumstances. So I stayed home and focused on them for about a year and a half before I started distance learning classes online.

I studied visual communications at Westwood College Online, which allowed me to continue spending lots of time with my girls, who were still not talking and barely starting to be interested in the potty. I was so relieved not to have to put them in daycare.

For those of you who don't know, raising twins is not just like raising two kids of similar ages. If you've had "Irish twins", which I guess is what people call it when you have two babies about 9 months apart, you may think you understand... but it's not the same.

Before I expound on that topic too much, I should get back to the series of events that lead me to where I am. By the time I started taking classes at Westwood, I was living in Austin, Texas. I had moved there when I had nowhere else to go, shortly after I brought the girls home from the hospital. I moved in with a stranger who had an extra room, and tried to help out how I could with foodstamps.

That was a complicated and uncomfortable situation, and I was still extremely moody as a result of post partum depression and taking care of two babies on my own. And, at that point, I was avoiding their father out of bitterness for having been left alone in my first trimester to fend for myself in downtown Denver in the winter. It was near impossible for us to get along even on the phone when I was pregnant. He specifically told me he had no respect for me, and he never really listened to anything I said. Plus, by the time the twins were born he had joined the military; so his communications had become scarce anyway.

To Be Continued