“How likely is it one absorbs the other?” I ask through sobs. 

I’m 10 weeks pregnant and have just been informed by an ultrasound tech that I’m carrying identical twins. I’m searching for an eject button, probing for an escape from the high-risk pregnancy and high-intensity life I now face. My husband and I have a toddler at home. A house sized for a family of four. A joint family income low enough that tax season feels like a windfall of cash. But the tech maintains her strained smile. “Yours are measuring well and the heartbeats are strong…” 

Then she adds unconvincingly, “But anything could happen?”  

Two years prior, while I was pregnant with my first child, my ex-boyfriend had announced his own twin pregnancy on social media. “PLOT TWIST… TWINS” he wrote in Scrabble letters. His cutesiness juxtaposed with my horror.

“My worst fear,” my sister texted after his post. 

“A living nightmare,” I texted back. 

Imagining his mountain of dirty diapers and sleepless nights 2.0, I felt smug that I never got knocked up by his evidently lawless sperm. Twins weren’t in my or my husband’s genetic history. Surely, I was safe.  

But as soon as I sensed conception with our second child, I felt unexplainable panic. Was it because the twinges of fertilisation came on alarmingly fast? Or that I screwed up the woo-woo method a friend had advised for conceiving a girl?: “Do it once and several days before ovulation.” 

“Please let this test be negative,” I hoped. “Please let me have another shot.”  

Ten days later, I’m etching “big brother” on a white shirt in black permanent marker and forcing it on my 2-year-old. “Let me pretend this is joyful,” I think as I wrestle it onto him, “and maybe, somehow, I’ll start to believe it.” 

But the dread, like my belly, balloons. At six weeks, my clothes stop fitting. At seven, a stranger congratulates me on my noticeable bump. At eight, with pregnancy oozing from my pores, I share the news. 

“I just hope there’s only one in there,” I can’t stop blurting each time. If I say it out loud, I figure it can’t possibly happen. Isn’t it an old adage that things never play out as we expect?  

I’m nine weeks and my therapist can’t understand why I’ve become obsessed with the possibility of twins. “Why on earth would you have them?” she asks. “I’m unusually big and tired,” I say. I leave out how the onslaught of twin content on my Instagram feed feels pointedand how I’m having a recurring dream of running from a two-headed snake. The fact that she finds me neurotic is comforting. Maybe that’s all this feeling is — further evidence of my need for therapy.  

After all, shortly after the fateful ultrasound, I discover that the odds of us having gotten spontaneously pregnant with twins, meaning without fertility assistance or genetic influence, were harrowingly low: roughly 4 in 1,000. No one knows what causes the fertilised egg to split into two after implantation.

“How could this happen?” my father, from whom I inherited my penchant for inner torment, asks me in Weeks 14, 15, 19 and 20. But I don’t have answers. I’m an anomaly. An outlier. Part of a percentage so small it doesn’t warrant the money or research needed to find a cause. And while there are certainly worse anomalies one can be than a “twin mom,” I’m left with the reality of my lack of control.  

I’ve always been a strategiser. My husband believes when a need arises, we then figure out how to take care of it. I think it’s best to prep so thoroughly that not a single need can arise. Blocking potential stresses spares me from future torment of ruminating on how they could have been prevented. It’s a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. But the twin news broke my mallet. There’s no bypass strategy. No circumventing mayhem.

“Is there a world where you don’t keep them?” my friend Courtney delicately posits in Week 13, after my eighth rant about spiralling toward emotional demise. I’m throwing up in the kitchen sink while making my son a PB&J. The thought has crossed my mind, but what if we can’t get pregnant again? What if we do and it’s triplets? What if I always wonder about the phantom family I expunged?

Then the guilt — the awareness of my friends who needed to spend egregious amounts of money to have a single baby. My friend who’d recently lost her child to a rare and aggressive terminal illness.  

Maybe resignation is psychological freedom. The moments that make us think we’ve gained control overour lives only make it more painful when we learn we can’t.

“The heartbeats are strong, but anything could happen,” the ultrasound tech had said. I choose to be miraculously rescued. I choose anything to happen, please.  

“Everything will unfold as it’s meant to.” I’m 20 weeks in and my body and brain are softening to mush. I’m meditating to Deepak Chopra, trying to embrace the fate I’ve passively chosen.  

Does the “meant to” imply a warm benevolent force is guiding us? Or am I “meant to” suck it up and accept what is? I think about the times I’ve touted similar variations of divine faith. “That relationship didn’tlast because it wasn’t supposed to.” “The job didn’t work out because something better is waiting.” Are these more delusions of agency? More proof of my inability to handle my lack of control?

“You know we will be so in love with them,” my husband tells me. Twenty-three weeks and we’re lying in bed while I burp out copious amounts of gas and worry. He’s right, but “in love”isn’t “sane” or “happy.” Isn’t it love’s pressures that cause Natalie Portman to kill herself at the end of “Black Swan”? Isn’t it love’s grief that drives Hecuba to turn into a snarling dog and throw herself into the ocean?

These words also do little to quell my anxiety because I don’t worry about whether I’ll love my children. I worry how much of myself I’ll unwittingly turn away from as I turn toward them. I worry how I’ll ever have the bandwidth to respond wittily to another text. I also worry how aware the random occurrence of their existence has made me of every random occurrence that could take them away.  

Becoming a snarling dog is a luxury. And maybe not having that luxury is what makes me most afraid. Even if I’m shattered internally, and externally drowning in feelings of inadequacy, fearing for my children’s well-being, I still can’t throw myself into the sea.  

Week 25 and there’s so much I hoped to get done before having another child that has fallen to the wayside. Countless to-do list items spun away in a tornado of nausea and hormones. An unread email used to raise my serotonin enough that I’d snap to. Now the only thing that rouses me from my couch coma is my 2-year-old son’s squeaky voice saying “hold you” when what he means is “hold me.” I smile at the irony of his mix-up, feeling held as I wrap my arms around him. I stare at his tiny fingers, imagining two sets of them reaching for each  other.  

“The heartbeats are strong, but anything could happen.” The ultrasound tech’s tepid reassurance rings now as a threat. 

Like the growing babies in me, I realise the march of time has ushered me into a new stage of  development. My desperate hopes for life to feel more manageable — my pleas for “anything to happen” — have transformed into a certainty that the rest of my life will be spent doing everything I can to ensure nothing does.

Thirty weeks and I’m awake at 4 a.m. thinking about how often I’m going to be awake at 4 a.m. I sneak my phone into bed and Google for the 15th time, “Do twins secretly raise each other?” I can’t find any evidence they do, but I learn they can now hear my voice. I try talking to them as honestly as I can.  

“Go easy on me,” I whisper. “Let me pretend I can do this and maybe, somehow, I will start to believe it.”