Thanks, Ma'am, Whoever You Were

I was driving back home after visiting Georgetown Hospital with the triplets. Barely four months old and SKINNY and BLUE needed their hips and pelvics examined to make sure the cramped quarters of my uterus where they spent 34 weeks wasn’t going to cause them lifelong physical deformities. The sky turned gray-black as we left. The radio announcer warned of a brutal storm and told us to stay indoors. Too late. The already dense rush hour traffic crawled as traffic lights went dead. The triplets started to scream. They were hungry. So was I. I pulled into the Chevy Chase library, loaded SWOOSH and BLUE into the duo stroller and tucked SKINNY into a baby carrier slung around my waist. There were no lights in the library. No power to help the hum of the computers tamp down the sound of three infants wailing. I went into the children’s section and couldn’t decide what to do first. Change diapers? All three were wet. Feed them? Which one first? An old man sitting at the next table looked up from his book and stared. What was he doing in the children’s section anyway? I started to cry. You came up to me, a woman I’d never seen before and said simply “Let me have one.” I handed BLUE over. Pacing back and forth and cooing, you fed him and calmed me. Whoever you were, Thank you.

I was turning Toys-R-Us gift cards into diapers. You looked into the stroller and smiled. Then you noticed the squirming coming from my “shoulder bag” and looked concerned. “Triplets,” I said then gave you a peek at the third baby. “You’re the woman,” you said. “You’re every woman! Errrrr-vry last one of them!” Almost a year and a half later and I still crack up thinking about it. I needed to laugh badly that day. Whoever you were, Thank you.

It was Mother’s Day, the perfect day for the triplets’ first official outing and we went to church. After services you came up to me and told me you’d wanted a girl so badly but you kept having boys. Five of them. Then surprise twins – a boy and a girl. “That’s so wonderful,” I started but you shook your head and wiped tears away fast. “She died after three days,” you said and I had no words. You handed me a pink gift bag packed full of baby girl clothes your angel would never wear. You never told me your name. I never saw you again. Be blessed, whoever you were. And Thank you.

Four days before my babies’ first Christmas I found myself scared and desperate. Ten month old triplets with colds that threatened to never end and a relationship turned abusive. I packed the van with as much as it would hold, asked God to watch over me and my children and headed south. 900 miles. 3 days. Alone, but not really. You showed up in rest stops in Virginia and Georgia, gas stations in North and South Carolina, McDonald’s parking lots in Florida. “I’m alone with three babies, can you please watch the car so I can go to the bathroom?” A dozen and a half of you – travelling alone, travelling with husbands and friends, travelling with little ones of your own – moms and grandmoms. You all said yes. Whoever you were, Thank you.

It’s so much easier to get three toddlers into a place than to get them out. I see that now. But I am not so good at learning my lesson the first time around…or the fifth. So, whoever you were who chased down my runaway boy in the library stacks – Thank you. Whoever you were who left your treadmill workout to help me get the triplets out of the gym and into the van – Thank you. Whoever you were who instructed your five year old to climb up into that blasted McDonalds’ Playland contraption and fetch my child – Thank you.

To the sisterhood of moms and grandmoms and moms-to-be-hopefully-someday who offered a kind word, a joke, a knowing smile, patience, a helping hand to me these last 21 months – Thank you, thank you, whoever you were. Thank you.