I Lost a Week of my Life Washing Bottles

“How I Lost a Week of my Life Washing Bottles (Or the Joy of Raising Twins)"
A Monologue

         “Twice the blessings,” or so I’m told, again and again and again.

         See, I have twins. I’m a father of twins. Eleven month-old twins. Girls.

         I emphasize “Girls”, because I’m bombarded with that question every time I’m out with them. “Oh, boy and a girl?” Even when they’re both wearing pink. No, not a boy and a girl. They’re identical, for Christ’s sake. I particularly love it when the same question is asked after I explain to the asker that they’re identical. They can’t be a boy and a girl. They’re identical!

         Dumbass.

         I read the Twins magazines every now and then (my wife leaves them lying around – God knows there’s enough of them), and they all tell me that I should feel happy and lucky that everyone’s coming up to me and smiling at me and asking about my girls. See the joy that twins bring about in everyone around them, the magazines say. People wouldn’t be approaching me like that if I was by myself, the magazines say. People wouldn’t even do it as often if I had one baby instead of two. Twins are a great conversation starter, a wonderful ice breaker, they say.

         They say.

         Well, yeah, sure – except for the fact that I spent the first thirty years of my life acclimating myself to the fact that people didn’t give two shits about whether or not I said hi to them in the mall, that they didn’t give two shits about whether or not they accidentally bumped into me, that they couldn’t give two shits if I nodded to them in a friendly manner and they didn’t nod back in return. But now, suddenly, I’m expected to handle being Mr. Popularity (not because of anything I’ve even done, mind you) with the grace and aplomb of a well-groomed celebrity?

         I don’t think so.

         Anyway, that’s just in public. A minor pet peeve, but one on my mind at the moment because I was out with them today, giving my wife a break from caring for them for the afternoon. I haven’t even touched on how these two enormous balls of need have sucked every ounce of energy and free time from my home life, as well; how making it to the end of every day with my sanity still intact (even if barely) is an achievement in itself; how the relationship between my wife and I feels as if it’s bound together these days with the tensile strength of a worn-out twelve-year-old rubber band on the verge of snapping. Come to think of it, just about everything these days feels as if it’s held together by a twelve-year-old rubber band on the verge of snapping.

         Or maybe I’m just the rubber band in question.

         I don’t know. I was washing bottles earlier tonight – a chore that’s almost exclusively mine, as far as the tasks divvied between my wife and I go – and I calculated just how often and how long it takes me each day to wash said bottles and clean all our other dishes, as well. On average, I’d estimate each day to require forty-five minutes of said cleaning, but factoring in days where we’ve been at other people’s houses or where my wife has spared me the task for an evening, I rounded down to what I thought to be a very conservative average of thirty minutes per day that I spend cleaning bottles and dishes and the like.

         Now, I’m not even getting into the other unpleasant and undesirable tasks that go along with baby duty yet: the diaper changes, the feeding, the endless cuddling and soothing when said babies go ballistic because their sister stole their toy or some other such nonsense. No, this is solely about cleaning bottles, dishes and baby spoons. Nothing more.

         Thirty minutes per day over eleven months, which calculates to approximately one half hour multiplied by three hundred-thirty four days. An end result of one-hundred sixty-seven (non-stop) hours of washing bottles and dishes over the course of eleven months. Seeing as how a normal seven-day week consists of one hundred sixty-eight hours, this means that I have spent approximately one entire week of the last eleven months doing nothing but washing bottles and dishes. One entire week. This excludes such basic functions as eating, sleeping, showering, using the toilet, or shaving. Nope, just bottles and dishes, nothing else.

         Mind you, I work a fifty-hour-per-week job and am still in the process of getting settled into a new house that we bought over the summer. How I managed to spare an entire week of bottle cleaning and dish-washing while in the midst of everything else is beyond my comprehension at this point. But somehow, I’ve managed to do so. And that, my friends, is the key phrase, I’ve found, in raising two babies at once: I’ve managed.

         Managing. Really, that’s about the best one can do when raising twins. Forget about excelling. Thriving’s a reach too. Getting by nicely? Ha, that’s a pipedream too.

         Nope, about the only other word that might adequately describe being a father of twins is surviving. While realistic and descriptive enough in its scope for the situation, there’s a certain element of desperation and life-or-death peril implied in this word that I don’t quite care for, hence why I don't use it. Surviving is something you do when you’re alone on a desert island with no abundant food source around. Think Tom Hanks in “Castaway.” That’s surviving.

         After all, at least I can always order pizza.

         Managing, on the other hand, implies that you’ve got a monumentally intimidating and awe-inspiring situation under control just enough to be effective. It might be an enormous task you’re undertaking, and you may be struggling with it and putting endless hours into getting things accomplished, but the point is that you are somehow accomplishing them. You may not always be sure exactly how you do it, but in some way, you’re scrounging time from places where there is none to accomplish what otherwise seems incapable of being done. That, my friends, is managing. That, my friends, is raising twins.

         And speaking of "my friends", maybe one day I'll even manage to have a social life again.

         Maybe?