A Thousand Ordinary Mondays
The life Noah and Victoria never got to live -- and the mother I never got to become alongside them.
Five years ago today, we woke up before sunrise and drove into the city for what felt like the first page of the next chapter of the rest of our lives.
We’d just moved into this gigantic house in the suburbs a few months months prior, coming out here with only one plan - to fill it with little kids running around, the pitter patter of little feet down the hallway, and the constant echoing of a chorus of “Mom, Mom, Dad, Dad, Dad”.
At 6:30am, the hallway on the 24th floor of Northwestern’s Fertility and Reproductive Medicine department was still quiet in that particular way hospitals are before the day officially begins. The hallways were bright but hushed. Like everyone was hiding under their own cloud of secrecy and shame and stigma and repeat mantras of “I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t need be here. This isn’t how it’s supposed to feel.”
The waiting rooms were filled with people carrying invisible cargo: hope, fear, superstition, exhaustion. We checked in. We signed forms. We answered the same questions we had answered a dozen times before.
And yet that morning felt different.
Not because we had any guarantees. We knew better than that by then.
But because this pregnancy felt like the one.
The one that would finally stay.
The one that would finally let us stop calculating probabilities and timelines and loss percentages. The one that would allow us to step out of the strange suspended space of infertility and into the ordinary future everyone else seemed to inhabit without thinking.
We already knew there were would be two.
One boy.
One girl.
I remember carrying that knowledge around like a secret jewel. A matched set. A completed family. The symmetry of it felt almost too perfect to say aloud.
These babies would be ours.
Not embryos. Not possibilities. Not statistics.
Our son.
Our daughter.
We talked about them as though they were already on their way.
And in so many ways, they were.
Even now, five years later, I still see flashes of that morning. The paper gown. The procedure room. The careful choreography of medicine and science and hope. The monitor displaying tiny images that somehow managed to contain entire futures in minute little glimpses.
The snapshot images I have from the moment the babies were put back into my body.
I knew in theory there was probably something I could do to make this go around more or less useful, to make the most out of this time and this space with my mind, my heart, my body, my soul, but part of me didn’t want to get off that table even once I had the go ahead - because part of me believed that if I didn’t move, they wouldn’t either.
They’d find their place to rest; they’d nestle in, they’d plant proverbial roots, and they’d begin to grow a home in my uterus.
They’d grow placentas, and they’d start taking what they needed from me to become themselves. Each one of them unique and different, each one of them one hundred percent mine.
The transfer itself was quick.
The meaning of it was enormous.
What I remember most is not fear. It never was.
It was relief.
Relief that we had made it this far.
Relief that the waiting was almost over.
Relief that after years of trying, years of appointments, medications, procedures, ultrasounds, blood draws, injections, overflowing sharps containers, disappointments, and losses, we could finally allow ourselves to share in the believing that maybe, maybe we had the power to bring Brooklyn home a sibling.
We left the clinic that day carrying instructions and photographs and dreams, just like just like the five times beforehand.
I remember the air was warm - not humid like it was going to rain, or like there were distinct signs of summer ahead, just a warning that the tides were about to change.
We had the windows cracked in the car and I remember my hair blowing into my eyes as it mixed with tears - not sad tears, tears of relief. Tears we’d made it to this moment. Teas of naively believing that maybe, maybe this was where this was where the heartbreak ended.
For that moment, I was PUPO (Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise).
I don’t remember what we ate after we left the hospital. I know we didn’t stop at the Stan’s Donuts on the first floor - that was for regular mornings, or the mornings where it took the phlebotomists five attempts to get an IV in each hand to draw blood before my ultrasound. If I had to guess, it was probably McDonald’s fries if we’re being an honest because I’m addict to traditions and superstitions. #IYKYK
I don’t remember exactly what music played in the car, or what song I interrupted a thousand times I had a “what if” moment I urgently needed to share with Rick… but if I had to guess, it would’ve been “Rewrite the Stars” or “A Million Dreams” from the Greatest Showman Soundtrack - anthems on repeat that season.
But I remember the certainty.
I remember looking ahead and seeing a life that felt tangible.
The five of us.
I remember getting home mid day and sitting on the bean bag chair on the floor of my office talking on the phone in hushed voices with my friend Kate, the angel of a doula that helped our fast and furious Brooklyn come roaring into the world 4.5 weeks early just a little more than two years prior. She’d already moved out east by then and I knew i had a nosy toddler listening in tight to ask any questions she could, but I aksed Kate if there was any way she could still coach and mentor me through this pregnancy and delivery.
We were still in the height of the pandemic and neither of us knew what that meant for air travel or for extra visitors in hospital birthing suits, but my husband and I had agreed - having Kate on standby virtually was more calming to us than not having her at all.
If we could try to time the hopping on a plane thing. I remember talking about how when the twins were born (not if, but when), our family would be complete, and my gratitude would be held so tenderly by so many women who came before me and who walked alongside of me.
Today those sweet babies would be closing in on four and a half years old.
They’d have spent last week picking out backpacks and water bottles and swimsuits for kinder camp, a favorite around here, and they’d be preparing for the leap from their preschool friends to the circles they’d move through in their elementary school years. I can hear myself now - “Just because their twins, doesn’t mean they have to share everything. Only what they want. They don’t need the same teacher or classroom or friend group or extracurricular activates” I’d whisper to my husband while trying hard not to interrupt a fierce game of hide and seek between the three older kids.
[By this point, if the world worked as it was supposed to, baby Rowan would be here too, having arrived sometime around Thanksgiving or early December 2024, and fully toddling the picked up choice language from their big siblings even though they were just approaching 18 months old.]
One day we’d find Noah and Victoria mischievously sitting on the floor in front of a full length mirror at Target besides big sister Brooklyn, attempting to pick out matching kindergarten clothes without getting caught. I’d sneak past them as if I didn’t even see them there, strewn about in the middle of the aisle, and I could hear the sound of their giggles from several rows away.
Is this was happiness feels like?
Is this what life could felt like, even some of the time?
We’d spend our afternoons and evenings with the big kids, listening as they’d benignly argue over whose turn it was to choose the bedtime story that night. And even though I might still be just as tired, even though my body might still be just as fragile or broken, everything would still be different.
One of the twins would probably be fearless - my money’s on sweet Noah. The one who wouldn’t stay without his sister, even though she was already gone. The one who it the water first, cold and shocking, but who’s heart kept beating as I held him in my hand, reminding me that I gave him that life and that he tried his hardest to hold onto it.
The other might need a little extra reassurance. Victoria, I suppose, would be her mothers daughter - waiting for permission, encouragement, validation. Victoria who couldn’t leave even though she was already gone - because she just wasn’t ready to say goodbye.
Of this, I couldn’t be any more sure.
Call it instinct, call it mother’s intuition, call it living in my daydreams or in a foreign life, but it’s like I can visualize a scene that never even really occurred.
It’s hazy, but I still make it out, like a partial memory that never fully formed - Noah and Victoria running around, yelling about breakfast and their favorite colors and which stuffed animals were still only allowed to sleep in each of their beds, not to be shared with their siblings, not to get stuck on the couch, and definitely not get trapped in mom and dad’s rooms. They’d be just as full of light and love and curiosity and intelligence as their big sister, and being their mother would also be the love of my life.
I have to admit, it’s confusing to be able to visualize any of this, let alone all this in the same breath where I tell you that in the four months that I was pregnant with them, and in the nearly five years since they died, I have thought of a million other things but I have never ever been able to stop thinking about this.
In late 2024, more than three years after their passing, under the guide of Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, I saw something I’d never been given or gifted before. I saw our family - as it was supposed to be. Brooklyn was four and a half and plying near the Christmas tree, Noah and Victoria were close to three years old and playing tug a way with one of the santa hats they’d pulled off the mantle, and Rowan, brand new, was asleep in a carrier strapped to my chest. I’d never felt more at least or at peace than I did in that moment, and when medicine was over for the first time ever I resisted returning to the ground. I quite simply didn’t want to let go.
That was the very first time I had seen the babies outside of their moment of trauma. Outside of the moment I delivered them around 3.5 months gestation. They’ve stayed that size and in that exact formation in my head - frozen in time like the photographs I have of them since the moment I handed the tupperwear container to the receptionist at the Maternal Fetal Medicine office, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do to change that.
I think for a long time my brain felt that letting go of that image, walking away from that grief portal - it would somehow lose them, and the tiniest of memories I did have with them.
But in staying there, my brain never let them grow along with where life would have taken them had they lived and breathed and stayed on this earth with us together.
Brooklyn wouldn’t be an only child.
She would be the big sister she was always meant to be.
Not in theory.
Not in the quiet, invisible way loss makes someone a sibling.
In the loud way.
The everyday way.
The “stop touching me” and “come play with me” way.
The three-kids-in-the-backseat way.
The three Christmas stockings way.
The three lunchboxes lined up on the counter way.
And I would be different, too.
Not because motherhood would suddenly be easy.
Not because illness would have disappeared.
I know enough now to know that life would still have found its way to me.
The diagnoses would have arrived.
The surgeries.
The medications.
The pain.
The uncertainty.
But the shape of my life would be different.
The logistics would be different.
The noise level would be different.
The memories would be different.
There are entire versions of myself that only existed because they didn’t survive.
This honesty feels heartbreaking to admit.
My daughter and my son had entire futures that disappeared before they had the chance to become a series of perfectly ordinary moments.
Five years later, that is what I feel most strongly.
Not just the loss of two babies.
The loss of a thousand ordinary Mondays.
The loss of kindergarten registration forms and soccer cleats and ballet shoes and sibling arguments.
The loss of knowing exactly who they would have become.
The loss of finding out who I would have been, too.
Then, in just ten short weeks, they’d take those brand-new school supplies and brand-new backpacks into their brand-new kindergarten classrooms.
And just like just like big sister Brooklyn did two years ago, they’d start their academic journey in just a clock-ticks time.
Five years ago today, we walked into a fertility clinic carrying all of the hope in the world.
Today I carry love.
It has nowhere obvious to go except in the tears that slide out of the corners of my eyes and down my cheeks silently. Except in the way other loss moms hand out hugs - with wholeness and meaning and brute force and sincerity;
“I see your forever your broken heart, I feel the cracks up against the rough edges of mine, and I can’t fix it, but I’ll never let you hold it alone.”
This year Noah and Victoria will not give Rick and I kindergarten camper hugs.
They will not need us to tuck them into bed at four and a half years - because in truth, we’ve never gotten once had the honor of tucking them into bed, of dressing them in snugly jammies, of snuggling after bath time, of “one more story”… we missed all of those moments.
God, what I’d give for even just one night with each of them, right now, tonight, right at this age and this stage.
But that doesn’t for a second change the how deeply and fiercely my love for them remains.
That love is still here.
That love is still theirs.
That love is still mine.