A Mother's First Test

The other mother waiting in the hospital's patient pickup area was cradling her newborn, transfixed, oblivious to everything around her. Celebratory balloons floated above. She glowed. She was going home with her baby.

Maggie Beirne's arms were empty.

Her babies -- twins Betsy and Martin -- were still in the preemie ward, encased in plexiglass incubators under heat lamps. Wires ran from their bodies to monitors. Alarms sounded whenever their heart rates dropped. They were born nine weeks early at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring. They were whisked away to intensive care so quickly that Beirne didn't even get to hold them.

"It takes a mother and her baby three seconds to bond, and we didn't even get that," Beirne said last week.

So today, Mother's Day, Beirne will visit her children as a mother, although she doesn't entirely feel like one yet.

She won't until she -- and not a team of nurses -- is the one to care for them. Until she takes her babies home and places them in the bassinets that now sit empty. Until she can rock them to sleep, uninterrupted by doctors and nurses.

Waiting for her ride home, Beirne turned her head so the other mother wouldn't see her cry.

* * *

One morning in the fall, Beirne felt sick to her stomach, which was odd. She never got sick to her stomach.

Several days later, Beirne, 30, a social worker for the D.C. government, stopped at CVS on her lunch break and bought a pregnancy test. It turned a light shade of blue. After just a few weeks of trying, she was pregnant.

Pregnant with twins, she and her husband, Kevin Beirne, soon discovered. The nurses pointed to two distinct blobs on the sonogram and said, "You have another one."

"Another what?" Kevin Beirne asked, dumbfounded.