The Twins Days Festival is really geared toward TWIN MOMS and their offspring. I’m more of a twin mom. Lower case.

We attended at our twins’ request. As we pulled into the parking lot, my boys were excited to see sets of twins in matching outfits. Attendees had decorated their cars as well. “What’s so special about being twins?” my 8-year-old singleton grumbled.

Oh, that’s a fun one to answer at Twins Days.

As we entered the high school where registrations were being taken, I was overcome by a wave of emotion at the throngs of identically dressed twosomes and threesomes. I was excited for my boys. In our quest to treat twins as individuals, I think we often go overboard and treat them as though being a twin is somehow a weakness that needs to be hammered out of them. We frown at sets of twins with rhyming or alliterative names. We tsk-tsk parents who dress their twins alike. We want them in separate classes, with separate friends. It felt good to be in a place where all the pressure to prove I’m fostering their individuality is removed, and their sameness is accepted for what it is.

The sameness is not just accepted, but celebrated. It seems a lot of effort is put into looking identical at the Twins’ Days Festival. These twins all matched completely – haircuts, clothing, shoes, glasses, hairstyles, purses, jewelry, etc.

I’d made a terrible mistake. Two terrible mistakes, actually. First, my boys were not dressed exactly alike. (This is because I am a twin mom [lower case] and just felt proud that I had the same shirt in two different colors clean at the same time.) Second, my boys have very different haircuts, due to a series of unfortunate attempts at saving money on haircuts. (Lesson learned.)

My hope that the boys would be recognized as twins was washed away by a river of candied apple slobber.

There weren’t many sets of twins or trips whose parents had made my mistake(s). Or if there were, they blended in with all the other non-twins. I was asked if my older three were triplets. I was asked if Miss A and P were twins, when G was standing right there next to them. The boys were not obviously twinnish enough, and I felt like I’d short-changed them.

This event highlighted how very lower case I am.

For most of the evening my kids’ social anxiety kept them very calm and well behaved. I received compliments. But as the kids got more comfortable with their surroundings, things escalated until they were having a four-way chasing/wrestling/punching fight that resulted in multiple minor injuries. As the violence progressed, I thought, “If there’s any public place where this probably won’t be unusual, this is it.” Based on conversations with the moms of multiples I know in real life, face-punching is sort of twinspeak shorthand for “hi, how’s it going?” But the whole evening, I only saw one other set of twins punching each other in the face. I have no explanation for this.

So, Twins’ Days made me feel inadequate. It made my daughter feel jealous. But it made my boys feel fantastic. Don’t mock me, but I’ve shed tears over how much they liked being there, and how they clearly identified so closely with all of these other people who sprang to the earth paired with another. It was such a powerful experience that it made me want to convert to TWIN MOM. Whether we subject the whole family to the festival in the future, we’ll definitely take the boys back each year, for as long as they want to go.

My kids, before G shunned his older sister for having failed to split after fertilization.

Aside: I had the pleasure of meeting up with Kim Schmidt, a HDYDI reader and mother to an 8-year-old singleton and 3-year-old twins, all daughters. She’s writing about the Twinsburg festival for American Way magazine, and I hope she’ll let us link it here when the piece is published. She blogged a bit about the festival here.

Next year, HDYDI meet-up in Twinsburg, Ohio!

Jen is a work-from-home mom of 5-year-old twin boys, and two girls ages 3 and 8. She also blogs at Diagnosis: Urine, where she examines the finer points of potty training failure.

This is mind-blowing in any number of ways, of course.  But looking back on this blog, which I started back when they were six months old, one thing that really strikes me is how much the “twin thing” has changed over the last three years.

The last 12 months, the centrality of their twin-ness to my parenting experience has really faded into the background. Oh, it’s still a major factor of my identity as a mom, don’t get me wrong. I will always carry that as a badge of pride, maybe as a war wound, too. I love that my kids are twins.  While they may not be as inseparable as some, they are most definitely close.  They fight, sure. They get on each other’s nerves in ways I find both exhausting and amusing.  But the last year in particular, they really have become each other’s very best playmates and have tons of fun together.  With almost no words spoken between them, a piece of rope will turn into a 20-minute game of chasing and hysterical shrieking.

While there will always be benefits and problems that are specific to having twins, my day-to-day life is no longer a series of unique logistical problems in the way it was that first 3, 6, 12, 18 months. Having twin newborns, infants, and young toddlers is so intense and so uniquely challenging, it makes for an entirely different experience of parenting from those who have “just” one. People are incredulous when they ask “how do you do it?”, especially because if we parented just like a singleton-parent-times-two, we’d never make it. We don’t fuss over every little thing, we simply don’t have the time.  That experience is foreign to us.

Today, though, I don’t think my life as a parent of two three-year-olds is nearly so different from my friend with the two-year-old and four-year-old.  Much more these days, I’m simply a parent of two children.  When people start to give the, “oh, wow, twins, that must be so hard!” reaction, they now start to backtrack and realize that it’s not so different from their life as a parent of two, even if they had them one at a time.

The intense difficulty of those first months has not been negated. It forever changed me, primarily in what I think are really positive ways (even if that was in a “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” kind of way).  My kids and their twin-ness will always have something special that their singleton friends don’t.  I will always proudly be a Mom of Twins.

But I’m also just a mom of two kids, like so many others.  The specialness of my experience is fading a little bit, I’m blending in.  I’m OK with that. I’ll never forget where I came from.

But recently, I’ve begun to see her strategy as very, very wise and healthy. Because Tiny and Buba spend all day every day together. And yes, I have some one on one time with each kid throughout the day (as does my husband when he’s on duty in the afternoon while I do some very part time work outside the home), but the other kid is always nearby. On the weekends, we tend to spend our time together as a family, something there really isn’t much time for during the week. Our kids have seemed happy enough with this arrangement, so we haven’t questioned it much.

But last weekend, while we were poking around at a yard sale not too far from our house, my son got very, very fussy. It was clear that he needed to leave. So, my husband pulled an umbrella stroller out of the car, and took off with Buba while Tiny and I stayed to look around. The second the van started up Tiny began to scream and cry, “Buba! Buba!” She didn’t want to stay if he wasn’t staying too. She demanded that I hold her and refused to walk, as she’d been doing since the moment we’d gotten out of the van. Instead of smiling and waving to all the people and cars who came by, she clung to me. And whenever a stranger spoke to her, Tiny tried to bury her head into my shoulder. This was not the Tiny I knew.

I don’t doubt that my twins share a special bond that I’ll never fully comprehend. But seeing Tiny fall apart like that has made me realize that without the one-to-one time, I’m not helping my kids to see themselves and each other as individuals. And  I really want my kids to feel confident and happy when they’re apart as well as when they’re together. But I don’t know how they’ll learn to feel that way if we don’t ever give them the opportunity to practice.

And now, here’s Sadia!

- – - – -

The other day my husband said, “You’ve been reading a lot of parenting books. Don’t you think you’re a good mom?”

“It’s not that,” I told him. “I think I’m a pretty good mother to Jessica and Melody. I read these books because I want to stay ten steps ahead of them. I want to be challenged by other people’s ideas. They’ll either help me recommit to the parenting philosophies and practices I already subscribe to, or they’ll make me rethink how I parent.”

Abigail Pogrebin’s One and the Same is a book that has challenged me as a mother of twins, causing me to change my parenting in some ways and dig in my heels in others. I hadn’t yet heard of the book when Abby asked me to review it several months ago, but I’m sure I would have bought and devoured it by now even if she hadn’t.

Abby is a journalist and an identical twin herself. She set out to write about twinship, and explores the myriad experiences of twinhood in depth. One and the Same balances intimate stories of individual sets of twins with patterns identified by researchers who study twins. Much of the writing is intensely personal, but it speaks to the mystery, joy and challenges of the universal twin experience.

I was particularly intrigued by the way that twinship can impact marriage. Abby describes it beautifully. She says that being Robin’s twin has given her, “a congenital clarity of what it is to be wholly close to another human being.” Some of the twins Abby interviewed drew parallels between the twin relationship and marriage. I hope that the compromise skills that my daughters are learning to survive life with one another serve them well should they choose to marry. On the flip-side, Abby points out that during her time at the Twinsburg convention, she notices a high number of twins, mostly male, who have never been married. Might women be put off by the intimacy and affection that twin brothers share?

I wept my way through the chapter on twin death. Abby interviewed a man who lost his twin in the Twin Towers on 9/11. She also found a number of people who thought they were singletons and developed an inexplicable fascination with twins, only to discover that they were the sole survivors of twin pregnancies. I look at my daughters and can’t imagine how one could navigate her life without the other.

The only part of the book that I didn’t like was, ironically enough, the one that dealt with parenting twins. Whereas Abby spent the rest of the book showing us how different and unique each experience of twinship is, this chapter spoke in generalities, many of which failed to resonate with my experience as a mother of twins. Like Abby, I take exception to the experts’ assertion that every mother of multiples has a favourite child. From time to time, each of my kids drives me nuts, and from time to time, one needs more of my attention. The love, though, is equally infinite. The takeaway of the chapter was that the challenges of raising twins, especially in the early years, outweigh the joys. I disagree. Yes, it’s often hard, but good parenting is hard, no matter how many kids you have.

The parenting lesson I took away from One and the Same is that twinship does not have to compromise individuality. Twins don’t have to choose between their twin identity and their personal identity. A singleton myself, I recently realized that I had assumed that emphasizing my daughters’ twinship would cripple them as they developed their individual identities and interests. Abbie shows us that does not have to be the case. Being a twin is part of what make my daughters, Jessica and Melody, unique. However, One and the Same doesn’t shy away from the reality that there are pairs of twins out there for whom their twinship defines them. For instance, it quotes Debbie Ganz, who, with her sister Lisa used to run a restaurant in which all the waiters were pairs of identical twins. “A guy once said to me, ‘I don’t want to know about your twin thing: what are you like?’ I froze and started to feel upset. Because I couldn’t answer him.”

One and the Same is the most astute book I’ve come across that discusses the twin experience. I would have enjoyed it equally, although differently, if I’d never met a twin in my life.

Q and A with Abigail Pogrebin

Abigail Pogrebin was kind enough to answer a few questions that occurred to me while I was reading One and the Same. This is what she had to say.

Sadia: You share intimate and sometimes heart-breaking details about how you feel about your changing relationship with Robin. Has she read your book? What was her reaction? What about your parents’?

Abby: I didn’t feel I could write this book without Robin’s blessing (and her editing – she’s a formidable journalist) and so I showed her a draft as soon as I finished it. I admit that it wasn’t an easy read for her at times, and she even challenged me in some places, which I think made me revisit certain sections and rethink them. But the truth is that Robin was incredibly supportive of the book, both privately and publicly. I was grateful that she agreed to go on the Today Show with me and that she worked so hard to prepare for a special event we did together last fall in New York in which she interviewed me about the book before an audience of 200-plus; she made it a wonderful evening. Most importantly, this book made us closer in ways I can’t quite explain. It’s like the truth finally was on the table and we could get on with this phase of our relationship.

As for my parents, they were also tremendous boosters, but feel somewhat baffled by why twinship can end up being complicated when it felt so simple to them during our childhoods.

Sadia: You’ve described twin romance beautifully, and have been able to convey how normal and natural that intense relationship is, even if much of society is unable to comprehend it and sometimes views it as pathological. My husband and I see that romance growing in our own daughters. Do you have any advice to parents like us on how to prepare our kids for resistance they may get from others regarding their twin relationship?

Abby: My only advice is to talk about it ahead of time, to discuss the fact that their twin romance can be intimidating, excluding, or off-putting to other people and sometimes they may want to keep their intimacy to themselves, if that makes sense.

Sadia: Many parents of young multiples are careful not to refer to their children as “the twins” or “the boys”, because they want to help the world see their children as individuals, and not just members of a set. If your children had been twins, would you object to them being referred to as “the twins”?

Abby: Yes, if I had twins, I would object to people calling them “the twins,” because I do think it has a cumulative negative effect over time; it  underlines their two-ness as opposed to their singularity. It may seem unimportant, especially when the twins are young, but I know I hated the term growing up. It felt lazy to me when someone called us that; is it really so taxing for them to say our names when they’re talking about us?

Sadia: If you could give parents three pieces of advice on nurturing both their twin’s closeness and their independence, what would they be?

Abby:

1. Spend separate time with your twins. Even if they resist doing things apart.
2. Encourage different activities, lessons, playdates, pursuits.
3. Let their insularity be. It has its own magic, and at the end of the day, the intimacy wins.

Sadia: We have a set of triplets in our extended family. I can’t help wondering how having more than one same-age sibling would affect relationships between multiples. Do you know any higher order multiples? How would you compare their relationships to those of the twins you interviewed?

Abby: I don’t know any triplets myself, but I did interview one in my book and her story is worth reading – it appears in the chapter on competition. It amazed me that a triplet can feel like the third wheel when the other two triplets are twins.

Sadia: You quote Joan Friedman’s distinction between being known and being noticed, as it pertains to twinship. Could you please explain this distinction to HDYDI’s readers? You acknowledge that her distinction resonated with your sister’s experience of being a twin. Do you ever feel less “known” because you were a twin

Abby: As twins, you’re often “noticed” because you stand out – especially if you’re identical. It’s an oddity, a novelty, people notice you, look at you longer, compare you. People are curious, they confer all sorts of ideas about what your bond and relationship must be like. But most of the time, they don’t really get to know you; even the people who see you regularly –relatives, friends, teachers. They don’t necessarily make the effort to get to know who you really separately (and yes, it may take more effort to ascertain those differences.) They seem content with the superficiality of your twinship. So they notice you, yes, but they don’t know you.

* Disclaimer – Although Ms Pogrebin did contact Sadia to ask her to review the book, Sadia purchased her own copy. This review was not influenced in any way by the author.

And they totally feed off one another. It used to be that if one was being a bit naughty, the other one was a perfect angel. But those days are gone. Why would anyone want to quietly read books when instead you could join your sister/brother in overturning a book bin and then use it to stand on to reach the light switch and flick the lights off and on a thousand times?

I’m attempting to seek help within the pages of 1-2-3 Magic and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids will Talk, but so far, acquiring the books is as far as I’ve gotten. I realize that impulse control will not be setting in anytime soon, so I just need some more tips regarding what a parent can do when toddler misbehavior is on the rise. I’ve already removed certain items not suitable for toddler hands, talked about (and modeled) appropriate uses for the furniture, used natural consequences when possible, and done my best to redirect my kids to more appropriate activities. Perhaps we’re just into the new reality of life with two two-year-olds have have to ride through this phase until the next one comes.

So here it is, MoMs to Be and New MoMs.

The Hard Truths (and hopefully some laughs too!) on my 22 months of twin mommyhood:

- Your friends with singletons DON’T truly understand or relate. Seriously.   Join a MoMs Club, find a friend with multiples you can email to ask questions, email one of us at HDYDI!  Knowing you’re not alone HELPS.

- Getting up at night to feed more than one baby (2,3, 4…) is SO TIRING.  This sounds horrible, but when I was so delirious and going on hardly any sleep, I would have to literally pray myself out of bed.   I wanted to take care of my precious newborns, but my body didn’t want to move.  Once I was up, it was a sweet time with my girls.  It was also when I started reading the Twilight series (haha) since they girls would have to sit up for 15 min after eating due to reflux.  Twilight also helped get my tired self out of bed.  Laugh if you will, but the books are a sweeeeet love story and very well written.

- You WILL have moments (or perhaps every moment for a while…) where you are overwhelmed and wish you had more than 2 arms and 2 hands.  Trying to balance multiple babies is HARD.  When you feel overwhelmed, try to find the FUNNY in it.  And it could always make a good blog post.  My first night alone with the girls was a comedy of errors.  Like- pump spraying milk everywhere, screaming babies, even finding a screw in the crust of my pizza??!!.  Oh and my first time to take them to the doctor by myself?  It’s truly my most embarrassing mommy moment!!!  The main lesson I learned that day was you must adjust a Double Snap n Go to fit your brand of carseat.  Otherwise, your children will be standing on their heads… :/  Either laugh or lose your mind.  Your choice.

- You may feel out of control sometimes and that’s okay.  At the beginning, it’s new and a learning experience.  At the toddler stage, they are trying to gain indepence.  And really- you just feel that way… you’re still the mama.

With raising multiples comes tears- both of frustration and pure elation, JOY, constant moving, not much sitting, organizing, balancing, full arms, overflowing hearts, and a special, wonderful experience that I woudn’t trade for anything.

Have a Hard Truth to add?  Do tell!

Today the boys begin Safety Town, a pre-kindergarten program designed to teach safety basics like crossing the street, learning one’s address and phone number, calling 911, etc. I harangued the school into telling me the boys’ classroom assignment for kindergarten, and we went by and met their teacher. They liked her, liked their classroom. I’m overjoyed that they’ll be together, and so are they. For kindergarten, in our district, parents can note on the registration form whether they’d like their children placed with or separated from any other child. For multiples, the school makes certain the request is honored.

My boys are very close, and struggled in preschool when they were placed in separate groups, especially in the beginning of the year. By the end of the year they still disliked being separated, but were able to participate and keep from crying. We have all-day kindergarten here, so the full days 5x/week will be a big adjustment from three 2-hour days at preschool. I knew I didn’t want them to tackle that adjustment separately.

But I’m already worrying about first grade. I’d planned on separating them after kindergarten, but then my daughter had such a wonderful first grade teacher that I’d really like all my other children to have him, too. I started researching keeping multiples together after kindergarten, and found some interesting information supporting keeping multiples together until they request to be separated.

This sentence, in particular, caught my attention:

But as soon as I got myself all worked up about not having enough help, I suddenly started hearing from baby-loving friends, neighbors, and colleagues who wanted to help out with whatever they could once the babies arrived. It was great to know that I now had people who wanted to help, but I was worried that they would all show up at the same time and knew that I needed to find a way to manage all the offers.

After researching a bit, we decided to use the Lotsa Helping Hands website to organize all the helpers we had, as well as all the things we wanted help with. It was fabulous. All I had to do was email the link for our site to those who’d volunteered to be of support, and they could sign themselves up as a helper. I listed dates and times for meal deliveries, baby care, rides needed for appointments and such, and our wonderful volunteers would sign up to help with whatever tasks they were able to to. Best of all, I didn’t feel like I needed to specifically ask any one person for help.

Our Lotsa Helping Hands community definitely played a huge part in saving my sanity during those first few weeks of parenthood. We used this site for roughly the first three months after Tiny and Buba were born, and then our need for it gradually faded away. But I wish I had this type of community set up all the time. Especially last week when I was really sick and struggling to manage caring for myself and caring for my now two-year-old twins. My mind drifted back to those Helping Hands days, and I thought How awesome would it be to be able to post Childcare Needed 9am-12pm and have someone magically appear just so I could take a nap.

So how did you manage those early days with your newborns? Did you have tons and tons of help or get by mostly on your own? And what, if any, supports do you still have in place for times when you need a helping hand with your older babies, toddlers, or preschoolers?

My twins were born via c-section, just seconds apart. On their birth certificates, the time of birth is listed as 8:22am for both. So, when people ask me who was first, I usually just say, “They were both born at 8:22am.” If pressed for more details, I’ll usually share that Tiny is twin A, but what I feel like saying (especially if it’s a complete stranger asking) is, “Why do you care?”

I guess I’ve become more bothered by this question as Buba and Tiny have gotten older. When they were infants, it just seemed as though I was sharing a fact about their birth. But now that they’re older, it feels more like a label of their personalities. And I really want to avoid that as much as possible.

But what I’ve really been wondering about lately is what I’ll tell Buba or Tiny if they ever get around to asking that question. I suppose I could just answer honestly and matter-of-factly. After all, if they were singletons, there would be no possibility of keeping their birth order a secret. It just is what it is. But is it somehow different for twins? From reading numerous stories of twins (recorded in One and the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I’ve Learned About Everyone’s Struggle to Be Singular), I get the feeling that it is.

How do you feel when you get asked the “which came first” question?  How do you answer it? And will you (or have you) shared birth order information with your multiples. Do you think it makes any difference whether they (or anyone else) know or not?

Thanks to you- those who write (or have written) and those who comment- I know how to help my children get the sleep they need, how to take them out into the community, as well as how to travel with them far and wide. You remind me that being a mother of twins brings different kinds of challenges, and that it’s normal to sometimes wish I’d had just one at a time. I know that I have benefited tremendously from being a part of the HDYDI community and it really makes be wonder how they did it- all those MoMs who had children back in the days before the Internet was born. I can’t even imagine it.

So this weekend, I will absorb every smile, every gift, every greeting card that celebrates my role as a mother. It is the most challenging, most exhausting, most rewarding, most fulfilling job I have ever had,  and I can no longer imagine my life any other way.

Happy Mother’s Day!