Francesca Segal’s memoir is a moving and poetic one recounting how her twin daughters were born ten weeks early. They weighed only two pounds each and were kept in hospital for fifty-six days under intensive, supervised care. In the UK 60,000 babies are born prematurely each year. 11% are ‘very premature’ delivered between twenty-eight and thirty-two weeks. This is the category that the twins sat in. Every day that went on, their chances of survival became more likely.
This book educated me on such a shadowy world of parenting that few new parents face struggles of every day. It’s such an uncommon and distinctive narrative about the start of motherhood that’s very often concealed from society. ‘Taking my unready daughters from within me felt not like a birth but an evisceration.’ Francesca was told by nurses when she was and wasn’t allowed to mother her babies and faced the heartbreaking challenge of returning home to sleep at night without her newborn children. ‘Leaving my children each night is an amputation, over and over.’
One of the most warming elements of the memoir is how Francesca shows the power of female friendship in trying times when she befriends Sophie and Kemisha in ‘the milking shed’ through their related struggles. I loved reading their group WhatsApp conversations showing support and hope for one another. They faced setbacks and breakthroughs together. Francesca writes ‘Into my head drifts the phrase, It takes a village to raise a child. We as a culture have lost that village. In need, the women of the milking shed have built one.’
Francesca also formed a close-knit bond with the nurses and doctors on the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit). They threw a big celebration on the ward for World Prematurity Day complete with presents for Francesca and Gabe from A-lette and B-lette. (Before the twins were named Celeste and Raffaella on day twenty-two, they were referred to as A-lette and B-lette.) Their nurse Amelia, who was facing the hardships attached to having a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend, was one of the most significant caregivers for Francesca in her memoir. Francesca helped support Amelia through her romantic relationship while Amelia helped her back by guiding her through the intensity of birthing twins prematurely.
Eventually, on day fifty-six Francesca was permitted to take her twin girls home to start her life as a fully-fledged and independent mother. I was absolutely thrilled that the girls fought through and came out the other side and they are now happy, bouncing toddlers. Francesca has since had another daughter who luckily arrived at a later stage in pregnancy than the twins!
I wish I could include some of my favourite, heartfelt passages but they’re too long to insert into this post. This is where book recommendations in podcasts get the upper hand. I’ll leave with this sentence Francesca uses to describe how it felt having the twins delivered so soon before they were fully developed. ‘The exquisite transgression of their forming selves exposed, caught in the act of becoming.’
