I sometimes think that there’s a code that people with kids learn, something akin to a secret handshake or just the telltale evidence of a smudge of finger paint on the hems of our jackets. In our house it’s the joke of CBeebies theme songs – you imagine walking past a fellow parent on a dark corner under the amber glow of a fluorescent lamp. The other person smells vaguely of baked beans and jacket potato and may or may not be bearing a badge that reads “Number 1 Mum!” on the pocket of her handbag. You assess her and get the code ready.

“Do you know it’s Springtime?” you say low under your breath.

“Hear it in the windchimes,” comes the affirmative, and you know that the operative you are dealing with is indeed a parent.

The comments about search engine hits to my site intrigued me earlier this week. I am floored that so many found this site via my IVF posts, just like I’m floored that this site is one of the top Infertility Blog Sites out there as well. When I look at my life, IVF was a huge part and an insignificant part. It was everything and nothing. I think sometimes that it’s like what they say about childbirth – you go through it and suffer but then promptly forget the pain. When I read my archives from the IVF periods I can’t remember most of it. The posts are detailed and troubling, full of things like leg cramps and discomfort and bananas and spotting, all with a line of desperate fear and surging hope running like a thread that connects every post to the one before. If I search my memory I remember the strangest things – buying the first set of bibs that I ever bought. Being offered a seat on a full tube as my stomach had popped and I was clearly pregnant as opposed to presenting the clear signs of curry binges. I remember the big things, too, like screaming in pain in the bathtub as I suffered kidney infections and contractions and midwives tiptoing around me, their faces full of concern as the NICU was prepped in the background for a pair of preemie twins. If I look back further I remember the tubes and vials of injections that needed to be mixed, I remember the endless excuses for work to get to the clinic for scans, I remember the wanting, the constant fucking hoping, that came with each and every cycle.

I remember it all and I have forgotten it all. It is huge and important and it is a blip. IVF gave me my dreams on a plate and yet it is my dream of the past. I was asked recently what the twins will know of the IVF treatment and the answer we have is simple: Nothing. We discussed it and I know this sounds crazy and unlike me, the one who brushes her heart off her sleeve on a daily basis and parks it on a platter before the world, but we think that the role that IVF played in creating the twins is (from the twins’ perspective) not relevant. It doesn’t matter (to them) how they got here, what matters is that they are here. What my body went through to get them is part of my past, it doesn’t have to be part of theirs. We know that fertility treatment is a common enough experience particularly in our part of England, which has the highest twinning rate in the country courtesy of such treatments, but if there is a chance that they could feel strange or unusual or different or uncomfortable because of it, then why tell them? I would rather they not have to wonder about the details, to not have to know that their creation was a chance, a long shot, a sodding fucking miracle of two crappy eggs that created the greatest children in the history of the world, that a technician with latexed hands gave rise to two of the single most important people that I’ve ever had the privilege of getting to love. I would rather they simply assume they were created and carried out of love, because they were.

Last week a consultant was needed for a portion of the work I’m doing. He was in and out in a week, a nice man in nice ties and nice suits as nice consultants often are. The first day he came in he was super early and full of bounce and cups of coffee.

“Blimey you’re here early,” one of my guys exclaimed while happily taking his cup of proffered caffeine.

“I’m staying in the area all week to work. It’s like a holiday! I am able to sleep past 5 am!”

“Sleep issues?” came the reply.

“5 month old twins,” he replied with a grin, “I’ll bet you have no idea!”

I sat back in my swivel chair and looked at him, nursing my coffee. I smiled, my hands laced around the corrugated cardboard. “It gets easier,” I say, violating my sacred rule to not give advice to twin parents. “When you get one on a schedule the other soon follows.”

My team – previously unaware I had twins myself – look at me.

“You have twins?” the consultant asks with surprise.

“I do. They’re two and a half, so I remember those early days,” I say, even though truth be told I don’t really remember them all that well.

He smiles and nods at me in an appreciative way. We compare smaller notes – sexes, ages, if they were preemie or not, all of it the common parlance of parents with multiples, the “where are you from?” intro questions that Americans who meet up ask to find common ground, the “horrible weather, isn’t it?” that the British align themselves with.

Later the consultant and I meet by chance by the lift. He smiles at me and we talk more of twins. We then wait for the lift to arrive in companionable silence. The doors open and he stands back to allow me in first, and he follows suit.

He looks at me, as though weighing up whether to take a chance. He nods to himself, deciding to take that leap.

“London Bridge Fertility,” he says, looking at the lift panel and pushing the button.

I smile a little bit and feel a part of my heart tug in a way I hadn’t felt in a few years, not since standing at a kitchen counter injecting myself, not since laying on a hospital bed counting follicles. We don’t tell people in our real life that we’ve had fertility treatment because we’re both fairly private, but something in this feels different, perhaops because after this week I won’t see this consultant again and when he goes my reveal goes, too.

“Woking Nuffield,” I reply, looking straight ahead.

“It was our first round lucky,” he says, still looking at his feet.

“It was our fifth and final,” I reply.

He looks over at me. “A lot of heartache, that.”

I smile and look at him as the doors slide shut. “Yes and no.”

I have twins.

So do I.

Do you know it’s Springtime?

Hear it in the windchimes.

-S.