It was through sheer luck that I was still around when the twins were born three years ago. For weeks beforehand, their mom had been steadily adding bedding to her side of the bed, trying to find some degree of comfort in a body that was almost as much them as it was her. It started with pillows, then a foam pad, then another pad, then more pillows, then an air mattress, then a sleeping bag, and so on, until the eve of their birth found my wife sleeping on a tower of bedding so high, if she had rolled I would not have survived. It was like sleeping next to a triple-decker sundae topped with a Hummer.
Toward the end, my wife didn't sleep at all. Nights became a form of torture--dark, quiet times (the last ever heard in our house, I hasten to add) that allowed her the hours she needed to focus on exactly how miserable I had made her. To this day I don't know how she resisted tipping herself off her tower of cushions and ending my sorry life. I'm not sure I would have been so strong.
In that same vein, it was through sheer luck that I was still around to see the Lila and Victoria's third birthday a few days ago. The odds were not good. A year ago, just before the girls turned two, a few friends of mine put together a modest betting pool, with each of them choosing a range of dates during which they won if I (a) ran away, (b) was incarcerated, or (c) chained myself to a radiator and set fire to my house. For a while, option b was looking good, and I probably would have done something drastic to make it happen until someone reminded me that being in prison would not significantly increase my chances of using the bathroom alone and unmolested.
To the best of my knowledge, no one put a betting pool together over whether the twins themselves would survive. I'm not sure if that's because no one wanted to be so tacky or if they just didn't think I'd do anything that would actually endanger the lives of my little girls. Like blink.
