There’s a weird freedom attached to being a mom for a few years. It’s the type of freedom you don’t know to dream about when you were lying awake in your childhood bedroom trying to dream dreams like all the Disney characters do. The type that you didn’t know you wanted. The type that finds you sitting in the quiet alone at a loud bar. People talk and yell all around you as you happily hear none of it, mind none of it, and you’re just so pleased to be by yourself and noise is so much a part of your existence already that the noises you are actually able to ignore feel welcome, yet foreign. They might as well be speaking another language, although you walked only a half mile to get here. 

This is the freedom that finds you wearing clothes you grabbed in the dark so that you are warm enough for a light spring rain and inconspicuous enough that no one looks at you. The freedom of looking at members of the next generation and thinking, huh, I have no idea how to dress like that, nor that we were supposed to. This is the freedom of anonymity within the city you’ve lived your entire life. 

This is the freedom of waiting four minutes to be served and when no man-bunned tenderbar says hi within your made up timeline, you just leave and you find somewhere friendlier because there’s no posse following you and your time is the most precious it’s ever been or ever will be. Which brings you back to the reminder that you aren’t free, and don’t want to be, not really, not at all. Because this is also the most loved you will ever ever be. 

Kendall and Lincoln turn one today. One year ago I was getting ready for work when the “water” fell out of me right next to the dining room table. It’s been a year of being a mom of twins and a mom of three and a co-parent with three kids and a fish flopping on a deck in hot sun and an expert and a sobbing mess and a clueless, humbled human in the most human-ish situations. 

It feels huge that these tiny people are a full year old. They’re still tiny, as strangers often comment, and then I smile like I don’t want to just kick them in the shins on the spot. Tiny, but my goodness are they wonderful, magical, whole beings. I feel this birthday more than any I have felt for myself and not just because my birthday is December 27 and easy to ignore. I feel it in my milk ducts. I feel it in my feet. I feel it in my head and my heart and my soul and every single cell. I really do feel it in my feet. We got twins through a complete calendar year. I am still pumping three times per day. Kendall eats like a bodybuilder. Lincoln climbs and leaps without considering the consequences. And they both laugh and babble and call birds “clock,” like “caugggg.” They use one another as step stools and squee in the mornings when they see the other one in the crib across the room– “Oh you’re here again?” 

I had to come to the bar alone just to put on paper that we did this. Chas and I have raised twins from April 12 to April 12. I have leaned on the help and loving kindness of others more than ever in my life. Grandparents and Arlo and family and friends have made this possible. I am floored by the love and support we have received. Kendall and Lincoln are more interactive, verbal, silly, and loving for all of the hands that have held them. And frankly, Arlo is alive and well because of all of the times he’s been taken in by this same collection of people. Gratitude is a silly, insufficient way to describe what I feel for how much support we’ve received this year. Another type of freedom: being able to ask for and accept help. 

I love to give tips and advice to other people, probably to their annoyance, and maybe to their peril, but I submit that there is no advice and there are no tips that can prepare one to be a mother of three, or a mother of twins, or even a mother or parent at all. And there is no freedom like taking a short pause from being a mother, and sitting in a bar. By yourself. Typing your feelings about motherhood wearing a holey sweater, carrying a sequined backpack as people talk absolute gibberish around you as you intermittently stare at photos of your children and know so deeply that this is the most you will ever be loved.