- Leila Green is a 41-year-old mom of 2-year-old triplets living in England.
- She had to learn how to feed and get three babies to sleep alone, which triggered anxiety.
- Mom guilt has been a constant battle she is now fighting back against.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Leila Green. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I remember a paralyzing shock running through me when I found out I would be having triplets. My husband and I went for a scan to check for a heartbeat, sitting in the same waiting room we previously sat in the two times we found out I had miscarried.
Lying down on the table to be scanned by the sonographer, I could tell something was up. I desperately tried not to freak out, recalling the bad news we’d had in my last two pregnancies.
The sonographer flipped the monitor for us to see. “We’ve got heartbeats,” he said. “There are three of them.”
I struggled with guilt
We planned that I’d have a C-section with 28 doctors and nurses in the room — a team for me and a team for each of the babies.
Although I knew in advance that the babies would be taken straight to the NICU, I didn’t realize how traumatic it would be to be separated from my babies. We’d been a team — the three of them in me — for months, and then they were just taken away. It felt so wrong.
A few days after they were born, two of my babies had to be moved to a different hospital, while the one other baby and I stayed in the original hospital. That was the worst day of my life. I just didn’t imagine this would be my start to motherhood.
Five weeks after they were born, I brought two babies home, leaving my one child who needed more support in the hospital. This is the point where mom guilt set in for the first time.
I could never be in more than one place at a time. If I was feeding the babies at home, I wasn’t feeding the baby in the hospital. There was never enough mommy to go around. There didn’t seem to be a winning option — I just felt I was always letting one of them down.
Finally, at nearly six weeks, all of my babies were home. My husband and I were new to parenting and didn’t know what we were doing with one baby, let alone three.
We hired help
We set up a cot and a changing station downstairs and upstairs.
Feeds, a combination of breast milk and formula, happened every three hours. They all fed at the same time. I’d breastfeed one while the other two fed from a bottle in their bassinet. We used a muslin blanket to prop the bottle in place for the two in the bassinets, arranging that they could turn away when they didn’t want anymore.
I had huge amounts of anxiety around feed times. Whenever someone wanted to visit, I tried to make sure they came during a feed so I wasn’t doing it alone.
From a very early age, we had a strict bedtime routine and overnight schedule — something suggested by a maternity nurse we hired to help us for a week when we all arrived home. We were militant and inflexible because anything that would give us a minute more sleep was worth doing.
We tried to keep them all on the same schedule overnight, which meant when one woke up for a feeding, we fed them all. Otherwise, we’d be getting one back to sleep just as another woke.
Those moments in the middle of the night, when I was just exhausted and wanted to sleep — I felt like I was going to break. I remember times when one would roll over or whack each other in the face, waking everyone up — it was soul-destroying.
I needed 6 figures to cover the costs of day care
One of our best decisions was to hire a nanny to come in from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. a few mornings a week. That way I knew, even if I had a terrible night, I could catch up on sleep if she was there.
Once the kids turned 1, I started looking at the possibility of returning to work. I had co-founded a company alongside my brother. I worked out that I would have to make at least £85,000 (around $109,400) just to break even on the nursery fees.
While I know a lot of women will do this for a number of reasons, I decided it wasn’t something I was willing to do.
My career had been an integral part of my identity, so I had to go through stages of grief until I finally accepted it was over. It was a huge cost I paid in having triplets.
Because we live in the UK, we qualified for 15 hours of free childcare in September 2024 when the babies were 2.
I’m using the time for exercise and building a new brand, “F*** Mum Guilt,” which will host events for moms about mom guilt.
It has been amazing to have the time and brain space to think about and build a brand from scratch — to have time to do something for me and other moms.
Now that they are toddlers, we’re facing a new set of challenges.
The other day, the three of them worked out how to push a brother over the stair gate at their bedroom to go downstairs, pull a chair up to a top cupboard to get the cookies, and then bring them back to distribute to the two left behind. It’s like they are ganging up on me.
The relentless illnesses have also been a challenge. Whatever one of them gets, they all get. Theoretically, they are enrolled in 15 hours of childcare, but they seem to rarely be there because they are always ill.
Most of the time, I’m just firefighting — sorting out everything that needs to get done. I naturally think about all the things I’m failing at, but when I have moments to reflect on the last two years, I consider that I have raised three babies at the same time. And now I’m raising three toddlers. That’s pretty incredible.
