Taos smells like a thousand lilac bushes these days; sweet and purple – with rushing rivers smoothing silver stones, apple trees blooming tender pink and white,  the rackety racking of tractors behind latilla fences, calves nestled beneath their mothers in green fields, warm sunlight past bedtime. The world has exploded from brown and gray into technicolor.  Our little neighbor Mae Louise is two and a half weeks old.

On the day she was born, arriving in quite a hurry after stalling a week past her due date to make her grand entrance, I drove Jack and Liam and Mae’s four year old brother Oliver home from school.  Another family friend picked up Oliver from our house and drove him to the birth center to be with his parents and meet his new sibling.  Oliver’s parting advice that morning to his laboring mother, Beth,  had been to “push really hard.” Jack, Liam, Oban and I visited later, after Oliver had already had a chance to become acquainted with his baby sister.

When we arrived, Oliver was eager to go play in the courtyard with Jack and Liam.  Oban sat outside with them. Through the open window, we heard Oliver say something about wanting to kill someone.

“Did Oliver just say he wants to kill the baby?” his dad, Tom, asked. The nurse midwife, who had come in to check on Beth and Mae, explained that Oliver must be expressing that he did not want anyone to kill the baby, already feeling the protective instincts of an older brother.

“I want to hit the baby in the head with a rock,”   Oliver said, this time much more loudly and clearly, leaving no room for competing interpretations of his feelings.

Jack, Liam and Oliver had all been convinced that the new baby would be a boy. Jack had prepared for the baby’s birth with such eagerness and devotion that you would have thought he was a Magi preparing for the arrival of a king.  He “knit” a new hat for the baby which turned out to look more like a headband, and delivered gifts of dandelions and toys for days before her birth.  All three of them seemed to envision someone who would come out walking and talking and who would blend seamlessly into their neighborhood boy routine, which consists largely of riding bikes, climbing things, and wreaking havoc on red ant colonies.  Jack and Liam continued to refer to her as “he” for two days after meeting Mae.  The fact that the baby turned our to be a girl seemed to add insult to injury for Oliver, who was having enough of a time trying to accept that the fact his life had been so rudely interrupted by the arrival of a baby who his parents dared to love as much as him.

Our family has been going through its own, albeit smaller, transitions.  Spring was christened when Liam, after playing suspiciously peacefully outside for over an hour with Jack, raced into the house, crying and wailing, “I think you’re going to kill me, Mom!”

It took a few minutes to first examine him for blood, and then to calm him to the point where he was able to explain that he had climbed on top of my car and somehow shattered the entire sunroof with his rear end, miraculously without injury to himself or his brother.  I still haven’t managed to squeeze in a trip to Santa Fe to have the sunroof replaced, and find myself routinely picking shards of glass out of my hair while driving.

Jack and Liam will “graduate” from kindergarten in two days.  Liam appears nearly toothless, and inadvertently torments Jack by consistently losing his teeth first, acquiring quite a stash of tooth fairy dollars in the meantime,  and generally remaining a couple of months ahead of his brother in terms of his physical development.  I try to console Jack by reminding him that he was born first, but being born was about the last thing Jack did before Liam, which leaves Jack frustrated to the point of total exasperation.  On top of the teeth, Liam recently initiated the idea of falling asleep by himself in a different bedroom from Jack.   While I hoped Jack might be inspired to rise to the occasion, he instead asked, “So does this mean you’ll sleep with me, Mama?”

Jack seems to try to compensate by overachieving in other arenas.  Last week he quickly talked me into the idea of a spontaneous lemonade stand and true to his entrepreneurial spirit, ran from door to door inviting all of our neighbors, including one elderly friend who is very hearing impaired and who immediately drove over in his jeep to see what Jack was so excited about, fearing an emergency.  Jack has also taken it upon himself to reveal all of his worldly knowledge to Oliver, who, being a couple of years younger, tolerates and is sometimes even impressed by Jack’s lengthy explanations of how to best go down a slide, build a fort, play soccer or sell lemonade.

As spring moves along, though, there is evidence of things settling, germinating and taking root.  We finally braved dealing with the insurance company in order to schedule a  repair of the sunroof,  and they’re going to throw our windshield (which was cracked when a tractor spit up a stone) into the deal too.   Today, at school, Jack and Liam will have a Ride Away ceremony with their teachers and classmates.  The graduating kindergarten students will “ride” horses they have made over to the first grade classroom, symbolizing and celebrating their metamorphosis. Jack, who still sneaks into our bed in the middle of the night, is beginning to actually prefer falling asleep without Liam nearby.

And yesterday, I even overheard Oliver saying to Jack and Liam,  “Hey guys, have you seen my baby sister?  She has such pretty lips!”

Jack and Liam are skiing. After years of dragging them up to the mountain a few times every winter, carrying arm fulls of miniature boots and skis and mittens and hats and goggles, attempting to feign cheerfulness while coercing them up the magic carpet conveyor belt and down the hill, we couldn’t be more shocked. It seems like just yesterday that Liam would inevitably plop himself down in a pile of snow, refuse to move and wait for hot cocoa, while Jack would insist on skiing straight down and throw his body into a spinning hockey “stop” at the bottom.

This winter, however, on the very first day we took them skiing, they both figured out how to actually manage a proper stop, and with that, in one of the unexpected and astonishing learning explosions that seem to keep coming lately, they became skiers. In the few months since the miraculous appearance of their power wedges, they have taught themselves to turn well enough that we can ski with them on “green circles and blue squares” all over the mountain. They eagerly study the trail map as if it is a portal to another world and keep a running inventory of all conquered runs, with such menacing names as Honeysuckle, White Feather and Bambi. Not only are they skiing now, but they adore it and they beg us to do it, and we’re trying not to blow it by letting on just how happy it makes us when Jack asks, “Mama, how many days left until skiing?” or when Liam asks “How old do you have to be to ski Kachina Peak, Dad?”

I suppose we could have forced ski school upon them, and Taos Ski Valley’s ski school is renowned as one of the best, but a frigid day and an unfortunate bathroom incident turned Jack and Liam off from it permanently. Besides, Oban and I met while teaching skiing, so we know what can happen there. Oban once lost one of his young students in a half frozen river next to the return trail, and did not notice until returning to the base. (I’m sure this is what must have made me realize he was almost ready for fatherhood.) Luckily, someone else did notice and she was rescued by the ski patrol before he realized where he’d lost her.

Back in those single days, Oban and I listened to Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall album every time we drove to the ski valley in his 1988 Jeep Grand Wagoneer. “That’s what you call old school!” I tell Jack and Liam (borrowing a line from Obama) who demand to listen to Justin Timberlake for the drive up, particularly the song they call Flashing Lights. It makes me feel strangely content to hear Jack sweetly singing from the back seat: “She looks like a model, except she’s got a little more ass…”

And we are proudly relishing every moment of skiing like a family of ducks, with Oban in the front and me in the back, trying to protect our singing, skiing children from all those pesky grown-ups lumbering down the slopes with boards strapped to their feet, aware that there is only a brief window of time before Jack and Liam realize what big dorks they have for parents, and want to ski only with their friends. For now, they’re stuck with us, skiing to the Bavarian Lodge for hot cocoa and chicken schnitzel and dancing as DJ Little Will mixes our favorite music; Prince, Beastie Boys and if we’re lucky, Michael Jackson.

I have tried, as much as possible, to keep my political views away from my children because they are frighteningly impressionable right now. It concerns me that I could easily indoctrinate them in just about anything including racism, ethnocentrism, religious fanaticism, at this age. However, they have been quite excited to learn as much as they can about the new president-elect.

Jack came out of his room the other night dressed up in a tuxedo shirt and pin striped vest, passed down to him from his older friend Joey, who just loves to look spiffy.

Liam: “You look exTREMEly handsome, Jack.”

Jack, beaming: “Thank you, Liam.”

Liam: “Jack, you look like Obama!”

Jack, straightening his posture: “I do? Thank you, Liam!”

Well, then.

Oban co-coaches Jack and Liam’s U-6 (six years old and under, in soccer speak) soccer team. I put on their cleats, shin guards, and socks. I’m not quite sure which one of us has it worse.

Every Saturday morning, our house is full of nervous, testosterone driven soccer anticipation. Liam and Jack get jacked up on pancakes drowned in maple syrup. Oban drinks an extra cup or two of coffee. Uniforms are donned. Soccer balls are gathered. And then we wait approximately five hours until our 2:30 game time.

When we first saw this year’s soccer schedule, we thought 2:30 seemed like an ideal game time for our family. All four of us are night owls, and if you happened to stumble into our house anytime before eight A.M. you’d think we were all passed out and hungover from a wild party the night before, splayed out on a strange arrangement of beds and futons. The way I see it, we’re all still making up for years of sleep deprivation. Our friends don’t bother calling our house before nine. And if our team had been given the 8:30 A.M. slots, well, I think we would have signed up for a different sport altogether. But waiting until 2:30 in the afternoon every Saturday now feels like some kind of karmic punishment for our indolence and sloth.

After we have somehow managed to kill the first few hours of the day, generally by breaking up the arguments and fights that erupt between Jack and Liam after their blood sugar drops, I try to force lunch into my sons who would both much prefer to subsist on chocolate milk between the hours of nine and five. Of course the butterflies in their stomachs only serve to further suppress their appetites and make all food more appear more “ixgusting” (Jack and Liam speak for “disgusting.”) I then allot an entire twenty minutes to put on Jack’s cleats, shin guards and socks. I am not sure that Mother Theresa herself could accomplish this objective without occasionally wanting to strangle Jack with his own shoelaces. Not only must Jack’s bunchy soccer socks remain perfectly smooth without a single ripple or bump, but they must also be folded down at the exact angle that Jack believes all real soccer players wear their socks while the shin guards stay poised at the specific height that will allow them cling to his calves without squeezing too tightly. Complicating this issue is that the widest part of Jack’s concave legs are his knees. His cleats must then be laced to precisely the same tightness on both feet.

Jack is generally absolutely beside himself by the end of this process, frustrated by my complete incompetence as a mother, and I need to step outside for a few deep breaths of fresh air in order to calm down. I then remember that it’s my turn to bring snack again and desperately forage for appropriate food in our our pantry and frig while Oban switches the boys’ booster seats from my car to his, since all three of them have an unspoken agreement that we should drive in the more manly vehicle to the soccer fields while listening to loud, hard rock music on an XM radio station.

When we finally get there Jack and Liam race like gladiators to the grassy field. While Oban tries to accomplish a variety of coaching missions, including luring Isabella, who hates playing soccer, onto the field without appearing like a pedophile and stopping the other Isabella, who loves playing soccer, from pushing kids on the opposing team without offending her parents, and reminding Marlin of which side our goal is on, and corralling our star players Milo and Ricky so we don’t entirely slaughter the other team, Jack and Liam’s only objective is to outscore each other.

In their matching uniforms, no one can tell them apart on the field. All the other parents on the sideline look at me or Oban’s mom to figure out who to cheer for when one of them makes a break for the goal. In U-6, no score is kept. And although I couldn’t care less who wins or loses after a season of straight losses last year when our team was by far the youngest and tiniest, I sit on the sidelines holding my breath, hoping beyond hope that some sort of divine providence will grant Jack and Liam the same number of goals, so that neither will leave the field despondent.

Oban and I have tried everything to quell their competition. Our protestations of “But you defended the goal!” and “You passed so well!” or “ It’s about having fun!” have been met with either blank stares or exasperated grunts. Feigning total ignorance of the number of goals scored by each of them hasn’t worked either, because of course they both keep perfect track of that themselves. We’ve even considered putting them on separate teams, but figure they would still compete over goals scored in their separate games and even worse, they would have to play against each other.

So, when Jack tries to hide the tears falling down his cheeks at halftime during the third consecutive game of Liam scoring more goals than him, I pull him aside and hear myself say, in a shamefully conspiratorial tone and contradicting just about everything his coaches have taught him, “Stop passing. If you want to get as many goals as Liam, just get to the ball, take it down the field. and kick it in.”

He listens. And it works. Jack scores. And anytime Liam scores again during that game, and in fact only after Liam scores, Jack runs to the ball, dribbles it down the field and kick its in.

And we all go home happy. Oban drinks a beer.

We can work on passing next year.

As fall approaches, I find myself flooded with memories of Jack’s illness and hospital stay last autumn. I wrote this before I had a blog in December of 2007…

Jack looked like a hostage while being wheeled on a stretcher into the back doors of the ambulance. “Look,” I said lamely to my precious, barely five years old and utterly terrified son as the driver shut the windowed doors, “we’ll be able to see out the window and watch where we’re going.” Quietly, I corrected myself. “I mean I guess we’ll be able to see where we’ve been…”

I sat down beside him on the bench seat next to the stretcher, buckled my seat belt and began waiting for this two and a half hour journey to Albuquerque, through snaking mountain canyons and across high desert mesas to be over. Propped on pillows, Jack stared angrily out the window. His was not a childlike, tantrum kind of anger but more like that of a trapped animal; still and primal. I searched his eyes for evidence of my playful and curious son and recognized only his will and his courage.

My head and heart were throbbing. I was certain I could feel the weight of every mother who had ever watched her child suffer and who had ever worried bodily, with her skin, her jaw, her teeth… Here we were again. The last time he and I had gone through this together, Jack was still inside my uterus. That time we drove in a car. A routine ultrasound had revealed a cyst on his umbilical cord, blocking his blood and nutrient supply, putting him and his identical twin brother at risk. I never knew until this time that riding in the back of an ambulance is like sitting in the back of a pick-up truck.

“I’m here with you. It’s going to be alright,” I said, laying my hand on him, every time he grimaced or cried out in pain, as he did over every bump in the road across 150 miles, increasingly more so as the morphine and sedative he had received earlier before his third cat scan continued to wear off. I whispered these words to him countless times, and every time I felt like I was lying. Yes, I was with him and I would be with him through whatever was to come but I didn’t know that it was going to be alright. Enough had already happened, seemingly in an instant, that I could peer into the crack between everything being alright and nothing ever being alright again. I thought of my son Liam, Jack’s twin brother, being driven in our car by my husband Oban somewhere behind us in the vastness of New Mexico, as the October sun dipped behind the mountains. That very day, Liam had watched me sob so uncontrollably on the phone with my sister (shortly after a nasogastric tube had been incorrectly inserted in Jack) while driving him to get his lunch that my sister had to force me to pull over in a church parking lot, as Liam sat helplessly strapped in his car seat.

I thought about how, just a couple of days before, my pregnant friend Erin had sent out a group e-mail, requesting a recommendation for a book that she could enjoy in her “fragile, emotional state.” She had attempted reading Interpreter of Maladies, a story about the disintegration of a marriage following the birth of a stillborn son, and couldn’t stop crying for hours. I e-mailed her back and explained that when my twins were two I had made the similar mistake of reading Angela’s Ashes, and couldn’t get past the point when a toddler boy dies and his twin brother spends months looking out the window, waiting for his return. “ I mean, come on!” is what I wrote in my e-mail.

And here I found I myself standing ironically on the precipice, trying to avoid staring into that crack, that fissure in the ground that had seemed so impenetrable, that could remain a tiny fracture or could open more and swallow us all whole.

It had all begun so commonly. I had a brief and insignificant stomach virus. Liam seemed to experience it even more mildly, and then a couple of days later, Jack came down with it. After a few minor bouts of diarrhea in twenty-four hours, it was over. A day later he went back to preschool. That afternoon, he began to complain of stomach cramps and acting strangely listless. The next day, I watched crippling pain rise up in him from his abdomen to this chest. It came in waves that reminded me of labor but it looked like he was having a heart attack. My typically stoic son, worried that any admission of illness might mean medicine or a trip to the doctor, looked up at me and said, “Mama, I think I’m going to die.”

They had ruled out the appendix. Fluid continued to build in his abdomen. He could not eat or drink. His CRP, a non-specific measure of infection in the body determined by a blood test, was extraordinarily high. Intravenous morphine didn’t seem to take the edge off his pain. After a night and day of invasive tests at our local hospital, the doctors were sending us to a university children’s hospital because they couldn’t figure out what was happening to Jack.

Just as when we had been sent from our small town of Taos to an Albuquerque hospital with a neonatal intensive care unit five years earlier, Liam was again along for the journey and though they no longer shared a placenta, I knew his future was still inextricably tied to his brother’s. The night and day Jack had already spent in the hospital was the longest they had ever been apart since their month spent as preemie infants in the neonatal intensive care unit.

By the time we reached Albuquerque, I was kneeling on the floor of the ambulance holding Jack. When the driver lifted Jack’s skinny body from the stretcher into a hospital bed, he wiped tears from his bloodshot eyes. “You and your brother come visit us when you’re all better and we’ll take you for a ride, OK?” he said.

We spent six sleepless days and nights in the hospital. Liam slept at a nearby hotel with Oban and my mother, who had flown in from New York. I slept on a chair or curled around Jack in his bed, trying not to tangle his IV line. Between his pain and the constant waking by the nurses to draw blood from his impossibly tiny veins, nights became a slow kind of torture. By the third day, Jack had the strength to walk a few steps. We pulled him in a red wagon to the toy room. Liam, frustrated by Jack’s exhaustion, persistently tried to engage him with whoopee cushions and ice pops. On the fourth day Jack was isolated for contact precautions while his blood was tested for viral hepatitis. Little by little, his blood work began to normalize and his team of doctors cautiously surmised that he had fallen prey to an enterovirus that had impacted his gallbladder, pancreas, and liver, causing those organs to leak the fluid that had collected in his abdomen. He had a low grade fever for three days as the virus made its exit. I waited fearfully to see if the same symptoms would appear in Liam next. They never did.

We carried Jack, still too weak to walk, around the Albuquerque plaza in a pirate costume we bought at the nearest K-Mart for Halloween trick-or-treating on his first afternoon out of the hospital. At the doctors’ request, we stayed in a motel near the hospital for two more days – and then drove back home for a couple more weeks of recovery. At first embarrassed by his illness, Jack eventually came to embrace his heroic status at school and seemed to exude a newfound quiet confidence. He was eager to laugh and play. Liam, who had thrived during Jack’s hospital stay, fell apart. He was volatile, clingy, and plagued by nightmares. After watching Ratatouille, he cried,“I don’t like that movie! That mouse lost his family!”

In the span of the next month, our family endured an onslaught of medical annoyances; Liam had a severe case of croup, I sliced my thumb open with a kitchen knife and needed six stitches, my elderly grandfather was hospitalized for dehydration. Through talking about each of these more manageable experiences, and with the help of an art therapist, Liam seemed to begin to work through the emotions he felt surrounding Jack’s hospitalization.

Then, the three-and-a-half year old brother of one of Jack’s and Liam’s classmate, who had begun stumbling, feeling dizzy and exhibiting unusual behavior, was taken for a cat scan. He was ultimately, dreadfully, diagnosed with an inoperable tumor that had invaded his brain stem, at the same children’s hospital we had so recently left. Liam came home from school and told me, “Luna says Pablo’s dying because his brain is growing too fast. Luna says he’ll be in the hospital for infinity days.”

I had to catch my breath. I could no more guard Liam from this reality than I could have shielded Jack from the virus as it twisted through his body, or Pablo from his cancer. As much as I yearned to protect what I saw as the sacred bond between my young twin sons, life was already teaching Liam that not everyone is made better at the hospital and that his worst fears for our our family had been, in fact, possible. Yet somehow that sober confirmation seemed to validate Liam’s experience, and in the end, reminded me that deep love cannot exist without deep courage, twin qualities that together create something akin to grace.