The Change brings Hot Flashes

The change into a mama, that is. Just today I found myself drenched in perspiration, and it wasn’t a cold sweat let me tell you. No, I was all hot and upset and sweaty and very near tears. My twins had to have blood drawn for the one-year lead test.

I thought it would be bad, but I was not prepared emotionally to see the needle go into the little defenseless arm, to hear the cries and to see the tears and know I had to keep holding him still for another minute until the lab technician filled the second vial. Nor was I prepared to have it be just as difficult to hold back the tears as I had to hang on the second struggling baby, who had just seen what had happened to his brother, and not being a fool, and knowing what was up, he started crying as soon as the tech took hold of his arm.

This first year with twins has caused me to sweat a lot; outside, inside, at my parent’s house, in public…When I have to wrestle the twins to change them, the one who gets pushed aside so I can attend to the other’s underpants will climb on my back and cry and scream as loudly as he can. He must think I am ignoring him, or that I can’t hear him. Boy, does that cause a hot flash of perspiration.

Other situations to cause a fine sheen over the skin are ones like this: I am out for a walk, and while walking one baby has started to cry and needs to be held. I know how to stop the weeping and make him happy, just carry him. So I put the one boy in the sling and push the stroller with the other boy. But when the second baby needs to be held? Then what? Hot Flash time.

I was on a walk with someone else when exactly that happened. Arms and Maya Wrap were full of Baby A, and Baby B started a fussin’. My walking companion said – “Oh, I can’t stand to hear the baby cry!” Like I can? I was all sweaty and shaky by the time I got home; of course we were at the furthest reach of the walk when all this came to be - OF COURSE. This was a few months ago, and I still find it bothersome that she had to tell me the crying upset her. The implication was – “Doesn’t it bother you?” I guess I really have that British thing going on: don’t make a scene. It’s drilled in from the time one is very young. Case in point: here I am, with two hysterical babies on a walk, on a hot day with a woman I barely know, and rather than ask her to stop and park ourselves on a total stranger’s lawn in a rather chi chi part of town and let her (and the chi chi neighbors too) see me nurse twins until they are calm enough to put back in the stroller to get home sans screams I have to say – “Oh, they’ll be okay for the ten minutes it takes to get home” and smother the inner screams of my own. We can’t make a fuss now, can we? My babies are good British babies too. They are generally very “good” (using the common definition of a good baby to mean a quiet baby), when we are all out together and they save the worst extremes of emotion for the privacy of their own home. And for me to deal with alone. Goody.
Who said menopause caused hot flashes? Mother-pause causes them too.