For the (t)Win

"We depart as two,
Wee-hee, wa-hoo!
And return as four,
No less, no more."

That was the Facebook status update I wrote on Wednesday as my wife and I prepared to leave our home for the hospital to commence our induction. The twins, it seemed, were running out of room in my 5'0" wife's womb, and they weren't going to cook till today-- their scheduled due date.

Returning as four almost didn't happen.

They almost kept our little girl at the hospital due to jaundice. Hyperbilirubinemia, they call it. Thanks to my stupid blood type, our daughter's red blood cells were breaking down and a substance called bilirubin was forming, and she had that tell-tale yellow tint to her skin. So, on our first night together as a family, they took our daughter from us and sent her upstairs to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for phototherapy.

There was talk of sending me, my wife, and our son home, and keeping our little girl.

It's a funny thing. You meet someone for the first time and, instantly, you can't bear to be separated from them. The thought of going home as three, and not as four, ripped me apart inside, and it did that and more to my wife, whose insides were already ripped apart anyway. A very sympathetic nurse pushed our discharge time back hours upon hours so they could test our daughter's bilirubin number to see if it would go down before we absolutely had to be kicked out of the hospital and, finally, it did. And we left as four.

Our tiny house is positively crammed with Fed-EX boxes, cards containing beautiful sentiments, gifts, diapers, burp-cloths, impossibly small socks, and the uncommonly sublime smell of babies (just changed babies, that is).

They say you lose a part of you when you become a parent, and that's true. I'd like to say that I don't mind that loss, because I'm so in love, but that's not true. Well, the I'm in love part is true, but I do mind the loss. I think that's what I was mourning when I broke down and cried hysterically on Sunday-- or Monday night-- I forget which. On my knees in the living room, sobbing hysterically, inconsolably, shaking, clutching at my wife as if I were adrift in the Atlantic and she were a life-raft. And, really, she is. It is her ceaseless love and support that keeps me afloat, that keeps me rising at 3am to stumble blindly about the house and change diapers and feed children and do the dishes and take out the recycling and miraculously find time to get a haircut from the man who gave me my very first non-mommy haircut.

Our son is gaining weight. Our daughter is losing her yellow. My wife is amazing me at every moment. And I am still here, a piece of me lost, and the gains are just beginning.