🌱 Built from the Inside Out

A mother. A miracle. And a moment caught on camera.

They say the Universe doesn’t give you more than you can handle. I say the Universe gave me triplets just to prove a point.

Being pregnant with triplets was one of the hardest, scariest, and most mind-bending things I’ve ever done. And that’s saying something, because I already had twins.

I thought I knew the game. I had been there, done that, changed the diapers two at a time, juggled bottles like a bartender on a Vegas strip, and still managed to make it to work with one eyelash glued on straight. But triplets? Triplets laughed in the face of my confidence.

I didn’t have enough arms. Not enough hips. Not enough breath. If I could’ve grown suction cups and sprouted eight limbs like a maternal octopus goddess, I would’ve ruled the world. But I couldn’t even roll over in bed without sounding like a forklift backing up. By the end, walking was a victory. Powerwalking? That was a past life. I was lucky to waddle across the room without needing a snack and a nap.

Everything hurt. My skin stretched. My ribs ached. My lungs felt like they were folding in half to make room for three tiny humans throwing a rave in my belly. I was growing life by the pound and losing pieces of myself in the process.

You don’t realize how sacred the little things are until they’re gone. Like breathing deeply. Or bending over. Or putting on your own underwear without planning it like a tactical mission.

The wildest part? I didn’t even know you could have triplets without fertility drugs. Apparently, it’s rare. Like, one-in-ten-thousand rare. But I guess if you count cannabis and Heineken as fertility treatments, I was ahead of the curve. Lucky me.

Twins already ran in my family. And I was already a twin mom. This pregnancy started out as twins too. But then one of the eggs split. Just like that, I had one fraternal and two identicals partying in my uterus. Plot twist.

Our first ultrasound changed everything. The tech looked at the screen, went quiet, then called in the doctor. They couldn’t see a membrane between the identicals, which raised the possibility that they could be conjoined. My heart dropped into my shoes. Thankfully, a membrane appeared at the next scan. But after that, it was always something. More tests. More doctors. More news delivered in that too-calm voice that makes your blood run cold.

There were long talks about risk and reduction. Gentle warnings dressed up as facts. One of the babies showed a marker for Down syndrome. Dilated loops of bowel, they called it. It might be something. It might be nothing. They said we could do an amniocentesis, but with multiples, that could cause a spontaneous abortion. So we waited. We hoped. We breathed through it.

Barely.

And in those moments, staring at the ceiling, heart pounding, belly rising like a mountain, I wanted nothing more than a hit off a joint. Just one. Just enough to soften the edges and quiet the noise in my brain. But I knew that season of life, that sacred time incubating souls, would pass. I knew the high would have to come from somewhere else.

So I turned to breathwork.
To meditation.
To the kind of stillness that cracked me open and kept me sane.

I learned to get high on presence.
On air.
On faith.

Eventually, the stress got to my body. My doctor wrote me out of work. Bed rest became my new full-time job, and it wasn’t exactly restful. My ribs screamed. My back wept. I couldn’t find a comfortable position if my life depended on it. But there were two seven-year-old boys at home, watching it all. And those boys? They never once made me feel guilty. They hugged me gently. They brought me water. They made me laugh when I forgot how.

It was seven months of anxiety and awe. Seven months of growing babies and growing faith. Seven months of holding it all together with love, willpower, and a giant pregnancy pillow that deserved its own zip code.

And somehow, we made it through.

The triplets were born at 33 weeks and 3 days. It was perfectly poetic.
Three babies. Three threes.
They came into the world via C-section, each weighing around four and a half pounds. Tiny but mighty.

I had delivered the twins naturally, one after the other, and somehow that felt easier than what I went through this time. A cesarean isn’t just a birth, it’s a surrender. A planned paralysis. They numb you from the chest down, lay you back under bright white lights, and slice through your body with calculated grace.
Layer by layer.
Skin. Muscle. Womb.
They moved my organs like puzzle pieces, setting them gently aside on a tray, while three human lives were pulled from the home I had built inside me.

It was all new terrain. Strange. Sacred. Brutal.

But then, there they were.
Tony. Dalton. Cole.
Three tiny boys who made our family feel impossibly full.

The recovery was a beast. My body was broken open and stitched back together, and there was no time to rest. No pause. No gentle postpartum cocoon. I had newborns to feed. A healing belly. Twins at home who still needed bedtime stories and help with homework. I was a mother of five overnight.

Cole, our littlest, was rushed into emergency surgery just hours after birth. We knew it was coming. He was the one with the dilated loops on the ultrasound. It turned out to be jejunal atresia—a bowel obstruction in seven different places. The pediatric surgeons worked their magic, cutting, stitching, repairing. He lost nearly half his small intestine, but somehow he kept his light. The road ahead would be long, but there was a road.

The other two triplets only stayed in the NICU for ten days. Cole, though, came home and went back again and again—for eight months. He lived between hospital walls and our home. We juggled it all with wild-eyed love and sleepless desperation.

The days blurred. Feedings, car rides, oxygen monitors, medical charts. The twins had basketball and school projects. I was making bottles with one hand and tying sneakers with the other. Ben worked overtime just to keep the lights on and the formula stocked. And me? I was the pulse of the house, the keeper of the chaos, the one holding the whole thing together.

Even though we were doing it as a team, I often felt like I was doing it alone. I was the caregiver, the scheduler, the worrier, the one up in the middle of the night whispering to a baby with a feeding tube while trying not to wake the others.

There was no room for a career. Not then. Not with three infants and daycare fees that would eat my entire salary. So I stayed home. And even though I missed working, I knew this was where I was meant to be.

It was messy.
It was overwhelming.
But somehow, we made it work.

And thank God, cannabis was back in my life. After nine long months of breathing through it, I could finally exhale. I found my rituals again. A slow puff on the back deck while the babies slept and the twins played in the yard. That first hit brought me back to myself. It gave me the pause I needed inside the chaos. It helped me mother with more presence, more softness, more clarity.

Life got better once Cole came home for good. We still had health scares, doctor visits, sleepless nights, but the rhythm was different. Our family was whole. And once all five boys were under one roof, things got beautifully chaotic.

The twins became helpers. Protectors. Gentle giants to their tiny brothers. I watched them grow into themselves, watched the way they carried their baby siblings and made space for their needs. We were raising good kids. Kids who knew what family meant. Kids who understood sacrifice and softness in the same breath.

And I knew that I was doing something right.

I was breaking cycles.
Doing the opposite of how I was raised.
Creating the kind of home I used to dream about.

And as if all that wasn’t wild enough, the whole damn thing was caught on tape.

We had the triplets at a major city hospital, the kind you see on medical shows. One day at a prenatal appointment, a cameraman overheard I was having triplets and followed me into the hallway. Within hours, a production company was begging us to be part of a documentary series they were filming about high-risk pregnancies. I went into labor that same day. The timing was cosmic.

Ben and I agreed. Why not? We were already on the ride.

So there we were, birthing triplets on national television. Every cry, every stitch, every sacred second captured on camera. The footage aired on TLC and Discovery Health, and it still plays 23 years later.

Every year on the boys’ birthday, we watch it.

They laugh, we cry, and I usually slip out to the back deck while the popcorn’s cooking, just to light one up and take it all in.

Sometimes I sit there, eyes full of smoke and wonder, and I think,
How the hell did I do all of that?

And the answer comes quietly, every time.
Because I had to.
Because I was chosen to.
Because those five beautiful souls chose me.

And together, we grew.

✨ Before you Roll….Ask Mary Jane!

She’s been through the grinder and came out loud, lit, and ready to help.

Drop your questions in the comments or shoot your shot in the inbox. No bullshit. Just blunt advice from someone who’s lived it, left it, and is building something better.

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