Jackie Clune, 42, is an actress and stand-up comedian. Three years ago she gave birth to triplets: Frank, Thady and Orla. Here she recalls her shock at learning she was pregnant, and how she coped with their battle to survive
I didn’t ever think I was going to have children. It wasn’t something I yearned for. Then I met Richard and suddenly felt very settled. I had my first child, Saoirse, when I was 37 — a dream baby. Then, 11 months later, I fell pregnant again. Rather casually, I left the first scan until 14 weeks. When they told me there were three, I was absolutely horrified. But then this innate Pollyanna sensibility kicked in and I thought: “It’ll be all right.” I’m not a worrier, which is lucky, because I could have worried myself to death over this. I phoned the Twins and Multiple Birth Association. The first thing the woman said was “Congratulations, you’re a very special lady,” which appealed to the diva in me enormously.
I tottered into my appointment with a foetal medicine expert saying: “I’m having triplets! I’m special!” He then explained all the risks: placental failure, miscarriage, chromosomal abnormality, early labour and the possibility of them not surviving their first few weeks of life. After that I didn’t feel special any more: I felt like a cat producing a litter.
It took months to get my head around it. We didn’t have any money. We’d just bought a big house in north London and didn’t know how we were going to pay the mortgage. I was doing bits of stand-up, but our income was pretty low. By 20 weeks I looked full-term. By week 30 I was hiring mobility scooters at Asda.
I couldn’t get upstairs, couldn’t sit, couldn’t stand, couldn’t sleep. It was just atrocious. I begged to be delivered at 31 weeks because I couldn’t breathe.
I felt as though I had a family of labradors sitting on my chest, and it was scaring me. By the time I delivered at 35 weeks, my stomach measured 55 inches and I’d lost my sense of humour completely.
There were 20 people in the operating theatre for my caesarean. Boy number one, Frank, was whisked past me to the Nicu [neonatal intensive care unit]. Then his identical twin, Thady, disappeared. Their sister, Orla, the smallest, was fine, but by 10 o’clock that evening, 12 hours later, I still hadn’t seen the boys. I’d been told a day in the womb is equal to a week in an incubator, but it hadn’t hit me what that actually meant.
Finally, a paediatrician said the boys’ lungs were very immature and they’d both been intubated. When I eventually saw them they had wires everywhere and huge tubes stuck down their gullets. At first we were told they’d be there for a few hours, which turned into weeks. The doctors tried to take them off their respirators, but they couldn’t cope. It was days before I even touched them.
I’d shuffle round to deliver expressed breast milk, and when I came back Orla would be lying silently in the dark, which made me cry. It was as if she’d got used to the idea that she had to share me.
After a couple of weeks the boys’ nasal tubes were taken out for a few minutes to let me breast-feed. Then, one day when I’d just fed Thady, I turned round to pick up Frank and I heard a nurse behind me say: “Call a doctor!”
In those seconds Thady had stopped breathing and was changing colour from pink to blue. He was rushed away and I watched as if it were an episode of ER.
It felt like an out-of-body experience.
I’d felt guilty I hadn’t bonded with the boys, but in that instant I was so upset and shocked and shaken, the floodgates of maternal love opened. The Nicu was a place of extraordinary emotional extremes. One night, a mum lost a baby. I was awake and heard her screaming, and In the morning the cot next to Frank’s was empty. The other extreme was the baby born on Christmas Day weighing under 500 grams. He’d been there five months and I never once saw anyone visit. A nurse said: “Sometimes the mothers never come back.”
When I brought them home, people said: “How will you manage three newborns and a toddler?” But having a five-year-old and three three-year-olds is much harder. I’ve also done a few big runs: Mamma Mia! when they were seven months old, and now Billy Elliot, and I’m pathologically tired. The boys battle constantly. It can’t be easy having a brother who looks just like you and who has the toy you want. I’ve tried to be a bit existential about it, but you still want to brain them. When I was pregnant they were all crunched together, nose to cheek, elbows sticking in each other’s bums, and they’re still like that — they move in a huddle, battling like mad. Thady is the most difficult. He screams and cries and throws himself on the floor and it’s hard not to get wound up — he really does push you over the edge. But somehow I’m able to take a step back, because everything that happened informs my relationship with him. I remember the day I saw him nearly die and something in me goes: “It’s okay. He’s having a tantrum, but he’s here.”
Jackie Clune is now appearing as Mrs Wilkinson in Billy Elliot: The Musical at the Victoria Palace Theatre, London
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