A Mother's First Test
A Kensington Woman's Twins Were Born 2 Months Too Soon. For Mother's Day, All She Wants Is to Bring Them Home.

By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 14, 2006

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.

Not wanting to know the babies' sex ahead of time, they called them Baby A and Baby B. It became clear to Maggie Beirne that Baby A, "who ruled my belly" and kicked before bedtime, was going to be the rambunctious one.

There was a time when Beirne never imagined becoming a mother. It seemed like so much work -- the tantrums, the diapers, the mess. Now she can't imagine what life would be like without them.

Two weeks ago, Beirne suddenly didn't feel right. She wasn't overly worried, but the doctor said she had better come to the hospital. She threw a few things in a bag just in case, but she didn't really think she'd be giving birth. The nurse informed her it was happening. Now.

"Did you feel that?" Beirne remembered the nurse asking her.

"No," she responded.

"You're having contractions."

She couldn't be. It was too early. The babies weren't due until June 26. It was only April 29.

"I'm not having any babies today," she insisted.

* * *

They came out needing urgent care. Betsy weighed 4 pounds 10 1/2 ounces. Martin was four pounds even.

After Betsy was born, the nurses brought her to Beirne for a quick kiss before carting the baby away. Martin, in worse shape, was taken away so fast that Beirne only caught a glimpse of him after he was put in the incubator.

Their lungs and digestive systems were underdeveloped. They were fragile, susceptible to infection. Beirne was scared. Preemie babies have a high risk of developing medical complications and long-term disabilities. But babies born at 32 weeks have 98 percent survival rates, and doctors have told Beirne that her children are progressing very well.

After seven months of carrying them, "knowing their movements," she said, "their moods," she felt helpless. She ran a fever after the delivery and couldn't see her children again until the next day. Friends who visited were spending more time with the babies than she was. "It was awful," she said.

It wasn't until two days after giving birth that she was able to finally hold them.

"It was calming and wonderful," she said. "It was the most peaceful feeling."

One day last week, her husband held Betsy, and Beirne cradled Martin, feeding him from a bottle. She was transfixed, speaking more a maternal hum than actual words -- a mix of "hmmmms" and "ooooohs."

For the moment, she was oblivious to the tubes running from his nose and mouth to a monitor that measured his heart and respiratory rate and his blood-oxygen level. There was nothing but this little boy with ears no bigger than nickels, and a nose the size of a blueberry. This little boy, whose head didn't fill his mother's palm, who grabbed at the air and slept with his mouth open.

Then suddenly, the monitor squawked. Beirne's head snapped up, her eyes wide. A nurse rushed over. Feeding can cause their heart rates to drop, she explained. Nothing to worry about.

Then visiting time was over. Another nurse broke the moment: "I hate to be the mean one, but we're closed."

As she placed her son in the bassinet and turned to leave, Beirne began to tear up.

* * *

Later that evening, Beirne and her husband walked into their Kensington home. There were the bassinets in the guest room. A teddy bear waited in one, lizard puppets in the other. Upstairs there was Raggedy Anne and Andy, and clothes, blue for him, pink for her.

"Thank heaven for little boys," one shirt read.

The car seats were still tucked away because Kevin Beirne couldn't bear to "drive around with an empty car seat," he said.

Almost everything reminds them of what is not there. And so they wait.

Maggie Beirne makes lists. Dressers need to be cleared out. They need more diapers, the crib needs to be assembled.

She writes it all down.

And she daydreams: It's a summer evening. She and her husband are walking down the street, pushing Martin and Betsy in a stroller. They amble past houses with jungle gyms in the yards and basketball hoops in the driveways. They stop and chat with neighbors.

She is a proud mother, walking with her family to the park.

That's the fantasy. Which will no doubt happen. Her children should be able to come home in two or three weeks. But there will also be more worries, and fears. The angst of sending them to school for the first time. The waiting for them as teenagers to come home from a party. The broken bones and arguments.

Motherhood, as Beirne already knows, isn't just about the good times, but the strength to endure the bad as well.