Friday, April 17, 2015

Twins: On the Job Training




Guest Blogger, Tara Sheehan, Mother of Twins

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore but let there be spaces in your togetherness. And let the winds of heaven dance between you -- Kahlil Gibran

This morning as I was watching the Today Show, I had to smile when I saw the parents of the newborn quintuplets, born in Texas, getting their 15 minutes of fame in with Matt Lauer. They seemed bright-eyed and eager and so excited and I thought to myself, you’re in for it. And you don’t even know it. Now having twins (my boy/girl twins are 4) pales in comparison to having five (!) babies but I can certainly understand not knowing what you don’t know. That’s the best way to enter into something as profoundly life changing as having 2 kids at once. Or 5. You figure it out along the way.

There are so many things that people tell you about having twins – before they’re even born, well-meaning people are peppering you with expectations. Some of them were true (or at least true for me) and some were not. The special twin language? I never saw evidence of it. The scary grasp of basic biology that strangers at the grocery store show when they ask if your boy/girl twins are identical? Heard it more times than I could count. From friends, even. Some expectations took longer to make themselves known. I remember my son’s speech therapist telling me when the twins were 18 months old that we/they were so lucky to have built in playmates. At the time, I didn’t feel so lucky (I don’t care what they say about the terrible 2’s or 3’s, I did not like 18 months…. At all.).


But now I count on that fact every single day. My twins love each other and rely on one another so much; in fact, I worry about it a little bit. Nate was sick earlier in the week and I kept him home from pre-school. Grace went off solo to school. We had a nice day together (despite the sickness) but Nate said he missed Grace more than once. It was probably about 5 times. By about the 4th time, I did say, “what about me? I’m here!” But then, I stopped being a baby and thought, I love that they love each other. In fact, I hope they’re always like they are now – thick as thieves. But it brings up another concern: are they too attached?

What’s going to happen when they are separated in school? Are they going to have a hard time adjusting? I suppose like everything else with parenting, even twin parenting, it will work itself out. I remember spending great periods of time worrying about my infant children sharing a room and one crying and waking the other one up. It never happened. In fact, to this day, one can be making a racket and the other will sleep right through it. They shared a womb for almost a year; I guess they worked out the noise thing long before they burst on the scene. I hope this fear is the same, it amounts to nothing.

For those new parents of the quintuplet girls (can you imagine having 5 girls at once?), they will be experts at this before they know it. And all the books they read and advice they were given might have made them feel prepared but it probably didn’t. You don’t know anything at all; and that’s good. They’ll muddle through, like every set of new parents before them, until they don’t remember a time they didn’t have 5 little girls to care for. I wish them well in their journey. And I hope they have lots and lots of diapers.

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