Hello parents of twins! My name is Johanne, I’m 27 years old and live in a small town in West Zealand. My boyfriend is Martin, 30 years old. Together we have twin girls Ellen and Esther, 3 months old.

They were born on 9 April 2024 at Roskilde Hospital. It was a planned caesarean section that went as it should, for better or worse. 😉

First of all, I’d like to say that this post is not about the pregnancy, the birth itself or breastfeeding. All of those topics are great and amazing achievements, no doubt about it. I just know that it’s not at all my place to pass on stories about these things.

I have a much greater need to tell you about the time after.

When you are having/have had twins, you first and foremost have to “get used” to the fact that you are in a very special situation. In my case, it’s my first children, so I haven’t experienced motherhood before.

When I was pregnant and had to share the happy news that Martin and I were expecting twins, the first thing people said was: “Wow, you’re going to be busy!”

To call it a phrase might be an overstatement, it was more of a statement of fact. I had no idea what we were getting into, so I just smiled and said, yes we are. Which turned out to be brutally honest!

But the day came when the girls arrived! After many long hours in recovery, I was finally reunited with what would now be my family. Or at least my one daughter. The other was not allowed to leave the neonatal unit.
I was hospitalised in the maternity ward until I could go to the toilet myself. Martin was graciously allowed to carry my little Esther down to me so I could see her.

In what was supposed to be the most beautiful moment in the world, there were 6 people looking at me while I sat with a tiny little girl I didn’t even know yet. I’m not sure if I started crying because I saw her, or if I actually started crying because I felt so pressurised. And that’s exactly what I want to do with this blog post – talk about the PRESSURE.

I thought I’d give you a brief insight into my personality. It promotes understanding 😉

I have always taken pride in being proper when it comes to meeting new people. And here it is important to emphasise that there is a big difference between “not being able to speak up” and orderliness.

People often confuse these two things. I’m also a person who doesn’t work in clutter. Both clutter in the physical environment, but also clutter in my head. I know myself really well, so I know exactly how to bring out the best version of myself. This is regardless of whether guests are coming or not. When I find myself in busy situations, I quickly establish a little ‘structure’ in my head.

I quickly figure out what my priorities are, put them in order, and then I act. This is my strategy and it has been for many years.

Well, now that all that’s in place, I think we can start talking like the damn pressure coming from outside… Excuse my “French”

We were hospitalised in the neo for 12 days. My little Ellen weighed 2100g when she arrived. She was simply not big enough for us to go home with her.

The 12 days in the NICU were the hardest I have ever experienced. Not because of the ward, the nurses, (seriously! We had the best nurses around us! Huge kudos to the neo ward at Roskilde!) Or the ward rounds every day. No, we felt like the yolk in an egg.

What was really hard was all the people who wanted to visit us. Our families and friends. Both Martin and I have big families, so that’s a lot of people who suddenly had to be involved in our hospitalisation. All this despite the nurse’s recommendations to keep the visits to a very small minimum. When you’ve just had two beautiful girls, you want to show them off to the world… or so you think.

In retrospect, I’m incredibly sorry we agreed to all those visits. We were hospitalised for 12 days, we had 2-3 visits every day, with each visit consisting of 2 people at a time. This means that in one day I dragged my two girls through meeting about 6 new people. In addition, about 4-5 different nurses, doctors, midwives or cleaning staff came into the ward.

You can calculate how many people the two premature girls met in just one day.

Then came the days at home. Our families and friends had come to realise that our family could handle all these visits. In fact, we figured we could, as it had become a kind of strategy and structure in our everyday lives.

But before long, mum had to start smoking again. Something I haven’t done in 5 years, because just coming home with two babies that require your full attention 24/7 and all the work around them is equivalent to two full-time jobs.

I couldn’t breastfeed, so we had to start bottle feeding while we were on neo.
The labour of providing bottles, mixing breast milk, scalding bottles, scalding pacifiers, providing the right amount of d-drops, iron drops, lactic acid bacteria and lactulose.

All this on top of looking after the girls when they woke up, changing them, comforting them, because no-one had told us how many stomach aches these drops can cause. We found that out the hard way.

Our first time at home was not cosy, it was awful! We had two very sad girls, a home that needed to be kept somewhat functional, two pets that also came home after staying with family members during hospitalisation and, of course, there were all the visitors that had to come, up to several “teams” a day.

We could cope with this method for a few weeks, that is, until the girls were about 1 1/2 months old. After that, I had to give up.

As I said, I had started smoking again, which makes sense as it’s a familiar pattern in my nervous system. As time went on, I started getting more and more palpitations in the evening. Naturally, I got nervous and immediately quit cigarettes again.

But I soon realised that it had nothing to do with the cigarettes. I was experiencing my first tentative signs of stress. Something I thought people would be very accommodating, but the hard truth is; people don’t come to visit you, help you, or relieve you. They come to see the babies.

People quietly started to offer their help when I articulated how hard it all was. They had been doing that all along, but the thing is, you don’t really need help to hold the babies.

…You need help mowing the lawn, walking the dog, unloading the dishwasher or maybe just taking the top off the huge mountain of laundry that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. It’s very different how people receive such a message, some embrace it and spend time folding our laundry. And that’s worth its weight in gold!

Some started coming unannounced, I think everyone can imagine how uncomfortable it is when you, like me, create a little structure for the day when it’s busy.

I don’t lie down and sleep when the girls are asleep, I have to keep the home running. It’s not a chore for me to keep my home in order, on the contrary. It’s where I gather energy.

When someone suddenly appears at the front door and wants to come in, my structure breaks down and I quickly stop the task I’m doing, because as I said, I take pride in meeting people properly.

When the otherwise pleasant but unannounced visit is over, the pressure comes… the crazy, all-consuming pressure you are left with in your body. Because now you have to run fast. The girls wake up and need food, care, love and development stimuli for the appropriate age.

Your dog has been out in the garden for what seems like 4 hours, and the rye bread sandwich you thought you were going to eat on the edge of the tumble dryer while folding laundry is now completely out of the picture.

So, what I’m trying to get at is, NOTICE how little and how much you as new twin parents can be in.

Well, there are probably a lot of singleton parents who have been in the same situation as me, I have no doubt about that. The thing is, as twin parents, you have two babies whose basic needs are the same.

They don’t realise they are 2, they can’t override their needs, so when the need arises, you have to act incredibly quickly, creatively and in an assembly-line fashion.

I sat with a singleton parent one day and expressed the very heartbreaking inadequacy you can feel as a twin parent. The mother said to me: “whether you have one or twins, I think you feel equally inadequate.”

My immediate reaction was that of course you probably did. Then I thought about it as I sat with both my girls, completely inconsolable due to their pain and tears rolling down their cheeks.

Hmm, I thought, I have to choose one. Who should I comfort first? Whose need for motherly care and love is greatest? Was it Esther, whose abdominal tension was so painful? Or was it my little Ellen, who turned out to have a cervical vertebra that was so crooked that it took four visits to a therapist to straighten it out?

That, my friends, is inadequacy!

Having written, read and taken note of all of the above, I have to say that being a mother of twins is an absolutely amazing life situation to be in! There is no greater life-affirming status than motherhood! Good luck to all the parents of twins reading this! I’m rooting for you! We are so cool!

Written by: Johanne