you don’t have anything to prove as a mother

One of the best decisions I made as a twin mum happened when the twins were around three months old. It didn’t feel like a decision at the time. It felt more like giving up.

A few weeks earlier, my mum had asked, “Shall we go for a walk and get coffee with the boys?”

She thought she was asking a casual question. It made my blood boil.

No, we can’t. We can’t even walk for fifteen minutes before one of them starts crying their lungs out. In theory, grabbing a coffee sounds lovely. In reality, I’d spend the walk calculating how quickly I could get home, pushing a double buggy while trying to soothe two screaming babies at once. I’d come back through my front door already completely depleted.

Then I’d wonder whether I was doing something wrong. Other people were out walking with week-old babies. I barely left the house for months.

It took me until around three months postpartum to understand what was actually happening. The realisation was so simple: I’m not running the same race.

My life was n…