I Lost My Newborn Twins — Five Years Later, I Saw Them at a Daycare

PART 1

My labor was brutally difficult.

Thirty-one hours, then an emergency surgery, then a second surgery for the bleeding they couldn’t stop.

I gave birth to twins, two little girls.

Six pounds one, five pounds eleven, born four minutes apart at 3:12 and 3:16 in the morning at Lakeview Memorial, in a city I have since taught myself not to name.

We looked so alike.

They even had different-colored eyes, just like me — one brown, one hazel, the Baptiste eyes, my grandmother’s and my mother’s and mine, a thing so rare the nurses came in from other floors to look.

I held them for eleven minutes.