To look at them, you wouldn’t
necessarily figure them to be brothers let alone twins. There is a significant
height differential, while one has his mother’s blue eyes, the other my brown.
The only physical trait they share, is the same coloured hair tone. But twins
they are, ‘double trouble’ and ‘double the work’ we were cautioned. Not one bit
of it, except at the very beginning. Double the fun was my experience as the
main child-rearer.
But those first six months were indeed
challenging. They were born five weeks premature so were very small and
impossible to wind them after feeds since their systems were so underdeveloped.
Feeds could last three quarters of an hour, the vast majority of which was
trying to expel the air from tiny pockets in tiny bodies. With two mouths to
feed, it would be virtually constant during the night once you include
changing. My wife and I hit on the strategy of sleeping in separate rooms, with
a Moses basket in each. In the middle of the night we’d meet in the kitchen on
the way to the fridge, and zombiefied all we could muster was “Yours awake?” and
a grunt in the affirmative. When the feed frequency slackened off a tad, my
wife and I adopted a new approach; I would do the midnight to 5am shift and she
would take over from then. I was a lifelong insomniac, so being up through
those small hours wasn’t that discombobulating to me, but in 1998 there wasn’t
much on through-the-night TV to keep me company.
“It will get easier” counsel those who
have been through the process before. And it does. They started to go through
the night without feeding. They graduated from Moses Baskets to cots in their
own room. The separation anxiety expressed through crying could not possibly
work on us; with twins there was no real option to resort to the easy life
option of taking two wailing babies into the parental bed. We were strong by
circumstance only. We avoided virtually the entire ‘Terrible Twos’ simply
through adopting the strategy that whenever one of the boys threw a tantrum, we
went and lavished love and attention on his brother. Pretty quickly they
learned that there was no benefit to having an almighty strop, whether through
our impervious attitude, or glancing over at his twin to see that he didn’t
seem to be labouring under the same perceived injustice.
While battling to get on a bus or tube
train with a double buggy always presented a challenge, we benefitted from the
fact that they were both at the same developmental level and sharing similar interests.
If you have young children of different ages, it is much harder to split your
focus and keep them both entertained at their respective levels of interest and
ability. Ours could genuinely play together. And I think they were able to
entertain each other at a much earlier age than if it were two differently aged
siblings. My twins represented two-sevenths of their junior football team and
with such a block vote, perhaps it wasn’t wholly surprising that I ended up
managing their team. We did probably err in doing too much for them that they
should have been doing for themselves. For when you’re just trying to get out
the front door to meet an appointment, the tendency is for you to put on their
coats and shoes just for speed. Sometimes that would extend back to getting
them dressed completely. It probably explains how one of them to this day is
extremely lazy and expects others to do everything for him, but then his twin
is the opposite so, where does that leave the Nature versus Nurture debate?
We were members of TEMBA (The Twins
And Multiple Births Association) and met up with other families of twins in our
locality. It was a really useful support network, but could be a bit sci-fi experiment,
when you’re sat in somebody’s lounge among a constant parade of different
identical twins passing in front of your eyes. Mind you, if we thought we had
it tough with twins, meeting parents of triplets soon put that into
perspective. We settled for our twins as our complete family in one fell stork
swoop, as we did think that it would be incredibly hard for a younger sibling
to break into the tight bond between twins and could end up feeling isolated.
To help twins develop their own separate identities, the advice is to dress
them differently and to try and do activities with them individually as well as
together. I would offer one further instance of this, in that when I talked to
them, I was very careful to address each one directly and not to just aim my
words somewhere in the space between them. Even if that meant I then had to
repeat what I had just said to his twin, it was good discipline to find some
different words.
The only time their being twins has since posed a problem was when it came time to choose universities. I ended up doing a mini
tour of the United Kingdom as each were visiting five or six. Open days that
were scheduled for the same day at opposite ends of the country and my wife
would divide the escorting duties with me. But when they both attended the same
university open day, only for different courses, then it proved trickier as
each demanded that I attend the key presentations with him and I couldn’t split
myself in half. Those days did not run smoothly. Fortunately they have solved the dilemma of graduating on the same day at opposite ends of the country, as one decided to transfer so is now a year behind his twin.
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