Triple the joy

I have triplet issues. So I cruise the triplet blogs. Seeking advice. Looking for information. Hoping for the epiphany, a light bulb moment. The sentence and when we faced the jealousy, we did it this way.

But I cannot get past the joy.

It is quite depressing. Light emanates from this monitor screen. Sometimes the light is direct from the divine, so I assume God will provide the solution to that insane jealousy over the cork bottle stopper scavenged from the kitchen floor. Sometimes the light is from a huge, boundless, parental love; that honeymoon of thirty newborn toes, wiggling simultaneously.

I am not saying that this joy is not true. I want these Olympic 3-times gold medalist triplet parent people really to have that total joy in their lives, god given or otherwise. If there were not parents of triplets out there who did not write about how much joy their brood gives them, then I think I would give up entirely. So thank god you are in joy. Continue to be so. I wish it could be packaged up. Then one of you could start up a mail order business, parcel some of it up neatly and send it to me through the post.

Neither am I saying this triple joy is not deserved. I can see people go through years of despair, much deeper than my own, in seeking these elusive children. Shark, Squirrel and Tiger are not IVF. I didn't weep through the years of trauma and misery, nor have those shovey-up bits into my doodah. If I had done so, I would feel I deserved those years of uninterrupted triplet glee. In fact nothing would stop me balancing out the pain with the joy.

But no. Shark, Squirrel and Tiger just came along by themselves. They decided to be. This is a consolation, knowing the human body is capable of spontaneously exploding into mini versions of itself. One in a million. One in fifty thousand. One in a hundred. More conceived than born. More common as you get older. In the end it doesn't matter. I can stare at that skinny thirty something whose career voice is dripping with Dior and I think, one false move from you after a third glass of chardonnay and this triplet life could be yours, sweetie.

But there's still the joy. Perhaps it comes about because parents can rest, have other lives, school their offspring, do not live their life on the triplet coalface, up against it. Many live with help.

Here I am, looking at a real life triplet mom and hoping for some ideas and thoughts and solutions and answers and approaches, and then the author writes casually, like this is real life and so normal, So when I get weary I drop the kids off at my mother's and go and catch up on some sleep! I reread that sentence a thousand times. It makes me feel lonely, like a cold hand is gripping my heart. The day after Shark, Squirrel and Tiger were born, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And because that year an abandoned angel took up residence on the roof, spreading out its malice and breathing its stinky breath, Dig's mother was diagnosed with cancer too. If all the diagnosis wasn't enough, a friend of twenty years died a slow and miserable death of bone cancer. Can you believe that? Three in, three out.

So I do not mind saying that I find, everyday, to be the mother of a triplet set thrown suddenly into this world, screaming and yelling, amidst all the pain, misery and death, that this job of parenting is monumental hard work, both physical and emotional. And it is quite a labour to find support, or even understanding, for the issues we face. These are not three siblings, having difficulties rubbing along. Neither are they a single being with three heads, whose names people can't remember, or faces they can't tell apart. Here are three unique people facing issues about identity, competitiveness, jealousy, power, frustrations of togetherness, frustrations of separation.

And after the joy, there are the fine lines we must tread. Here are siblings who have dedicated their lives to identifying inequalities; the inequalities and unhappiness, the trauma and the pain that you, foolish triplet parent, might create and confer at any unwise, unguarded, unconscious, thoughtless moment. Like when you passed that cork bottle stopper to one side of the table, rather than the other.