One and the Same (18 page)

I ask if she felt a pressure to be cheerful because others expected it of her. “It wasn't like I had the kind of mother who came in and said, ‘Why are you so down in the dumps? This isn't hard at all!' My parents were like, ‘Oh my GOD, here we go again today.' They were in it with us every step of the way and they needed their own breaks. We were all so beaten up from the whole thing. … I didn't feel bad for the
children;
I think the children were very well taken care of.”

I ask Alisa what advice she'd give to other mothers of twins, especially those who resorted to IVF to have them. “I'd tell them, ‘It's
going to get better at six months, but it really only gets better closer to two years. It's going to be a hard first two years. And make sure your husband is on board to be an equal parent.' I also got a lot of on-line support from other twin mothers, and I did meet these other miserable twin mothers in the park. Nowadays, when I'm out with my kids and see people with little twins, I say, ‘Don't worry, it's going to get better!' And they shout, ‘WHEN?' I'll ask how old their twins are and they'll tell me, ‘Five months.' I'll say, ‘Not for a while!'

“You have to be prepared that your life is going to be harder than you imagined, and don't feel bad about yourself if it is, and it's going to get so much better. And then, because it will have been so bad, when it gets better, it will be like the biggest weight has been lifted off of you. So when people are complaining about the terrible twos or difficult three-year-olds, you're just going to be laughing. Because your hardest days will have been over.”

I ask Alisa if she had it to do over again, would she want twins?

“Now that it's all over, it's great. We had this unique experience.”

And would she wish it for Grace and Eli—the experience of having their own twins someday?

“I can't even conceive of this idea that they're going to have sex.” She laughs. “Much less have children. Much less grow up and make their own sandwich.”

The answer to whether twins would wish to parent their own twins seems obvious to me: I would be unhesitatingly thrilled if my son or daughter could have that adventure. But apparently, that's not so obvious to everyone. When I met Liora Baor—the Israeli social worker who counsels parents of twins and has twin boys herself, she told me, “Most twins say no. Most twins, when you ask them, ‘Would you wish your own children to raise twins?' they say no.”

For what reason?

“They've heard about what it takes to raise them,” Baor replies.

It's a recurring theme in the presentations at the 2007 International
Twins Conference in Belgium, where I met Baor: the quiet truth that raising twins can be so overwhelming to some mothers that they struggle more than they let on; society doesn't give them permission to be as despairing, or shell-shocked, as they sometimes are.

“Going through IVF is not a picnic,” Baor tells me. “It's depleting all your resources. Mainly the psychological ones. The successes are not high with IVF, so it can take many cycles. Up to fourteen. Twenty. It depends how much you can endure. By that time, you are building an expectation. And then you come to the moment and you deliver the twins. And because it's a pressured pregnancy, doctors tend to deliver them early, so as not to have any risks. And most of the time they are born premature. Premature babies are small, not social, not nice. They do not smile so soon as the others and it's hard to interact with them. They don't know how to give cues to the environment like a full-term baby when they are hungry or they are wet. And the whole day they are crying. The couple have now become parents very early—earlier than they prepared themselves. Not only that; they are saying to themselves, ‘Even this—the birth itself—we couldn't do normally.'”

In other words, they couldn't get pregnancy right and now they can't do infancy right? Baor nods. “It's a roller-coaster.”

Fathers are less discussed but are also impacted. Parent coach Sheri Bayles warns her dads-to-be that they're going to be much more hands-on than they might have been with one child, because moms can't do it alone. Dr. Bryan says fathers often feel the added financial burden of supporting two kids—and all their needs—at once. They also get frazzled from interrupted sleep before a workday, and exhaustion can strain the marriage.

My mother, Letty, had zero twin shock; just twin rapture. I can just imagine how annoying her testimony would be to those mothers who struggled, but I know she can't invent angst she didn't have. “I remember so many times putting you down for your naps when you were in bassinets, and sitting and reading a magazine and saying,
What is hard about this?” Mom recalls, curled up on her couch in my childhood living room. “You both just slept. You were only troublesome between maybe four and six o'clock in the afternoon; but if one cried, the other didn't. So it only meant dealing with one at a time. And whoever cried first kind of co-opted the crying for that day. But I remember sitting down in the living room and saying, I really should go back to work; this is not hard.”

Paris Stulbach, a former television producer, started Twins & the City in 2003, a Manhattan support network whose members swap advice in cyberspace and during dinners on the Upper West Side. (The Web site quotes Walt Whitman: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”) “I felt very alone at the beginning,” Stulbach says about why she created the group. “I was a mess. The babies were a mess. The house was a mess. I was a hormonal train wreck. I couldn't possibly eat and drink and sleep enough to take care of two infants. A few weeks of living like that, and my confidence was shattered. You feel like you're failing all the time.”

There's nothing like veteran parents of twins to tell the uninitiated how to deal with feeling isolated, which car seat to buy, how to keep two children from running into the street, or whether to separate twins in preschool. “The advice covers everything from the worst situations—people whose babies die—to which neighborhood restaurants are twins-friendly,” Stulbach explains.

I ask her what she personally wonders about when she looks ahead to her twins growing up. “Whether there is a price to pay for having a mother who was not at her best for the first few years,” she says.

In
Multiple Pregnancy
, Elizabeth Noble, author of
Having Twins and More
(2003), writes, “‘Twin shock' can overwhelm the best-prepared mother. … At all costs, the ‘supermom' image should be tossed aside.”

Liora Baor offers perhaps the most realistic counsel: “I don't know if you know of Donald Winnicott, a British pediatrician,” she tells me,
“but he said that
There is not a good mother; there is a good
-enough
mother
. You just have to expect less.”

I ask Alisa if there was anything about watching Robin and me grow up that informs the way she's raising Eli and Grace. “The only thing your parents have said that really made an impact on me is that the one thing they really regret is not spending separate time with you. So in the smallest ways, we've done that. On weekends, we switch off. We do different things. I can see one day going on a trip with one of them and then the other.”

Pediatrician Dr. Elizabeth Bryan observes that often “parents are reluctant to separate their twins even for short periods, so that they might spend quality time with each one. Others find that even short separations are hard to organize for practical reasons. Still others believe that by letting someone else, even a relative, look after one of the babies, their ‘special' status as a parent of twins may be diminished or their competence questioned.”

Robin and I give one piece of advice to parents of twins:
Spend separate time with each twin
. It seems so simple, but our parents never did it, and Robin especially feels that this oversight cemented a feeling of our having been blurred together.

When I ask my mother why she and Dad never took us separately, she looks pained. “Because we didn't think that way. We just thought in terms of the family. I feel I should have been aware of it because I should have been smart enough to figure out that something is gained when you're alone with a person. I should have realized that. I didn't. … I don't know. It never occurred to us. It always was a matter of “Let's.” Not: ‘You come with me and you go with him.'”

She said they realized their mistake in one powerful instant when I was eighteen and they invited me to go with them for a weekend at a bed-and-breakfast. “You said you were uncomfortable coming along because you'd never been alone with us. It was like somebody shot us between the eyes; we couldn't believe it. ‘How
could this have happened?' We never noticed that we had never been with one child.”

“It was clear that you felt you had a performance level,” my father recalls, “and you felt that, without Robin, you wouldn't be able to hold up your end in terms of pleasing us, as if that was anything you had to do. So that was a real realization that we'd missed something. I think we were always so careful to have equality of treatment that it turned out to be undifferentiated. We'd never done anything individually with you, all this time.”

Dad adds, however, that we also “bought into the constant togetherness. Anytime there was the slightest deviation between you, you girls would accuse us of being unfair. So it was mutually reinforcing. Like if you would have an experience that was better, the other would resent it.”

Dr. Joan Friedman, author of
Emotionally Healthy Twins
, who has a bohemian style with long blond hair, says parents must insist on separate time with each twin, even when the twins balk. “If you haven't introduced alone time really early, you're going to get resistance,” she says. “The parent has to believe that having that separate relationship is crucial.”

She is adamant about this because she says individual time gives rise to distinct relationships, which gives rise to concrete identities. “If you don't, as a parent, make a solid attachment with each twin, then you're left with the twin parenting the twin,” she explains, which means one twin's overreliance on the other for a sense of self, one's confidence, one's place in the world. “Because of the parents' failure to work hard toward developing a separate relationship with each child, the children, by virtue of their proximity and their developmental age when they're growing up together, end up attaching more importantly to each other, and they shut the parent out. ‘I want to go with my sister; I don't want you to take her and leave me home.' The twinship ends up becoming so powerful, and parents are afraid of it. They're afraid if they do anything to disrupt it, they'll ruin the twin
attachment. … So by virtue of the parents not understanding what each child needs, the twinship becomes powerful, and the parents get left out. … My discovery is that, while it may seem counterintuitive, when both twins are securely attached to the parents, the twinship becomes a more cherished, healthy, balanced relationship. The counterintuitive piece is that if you separate twins as much as you may have to—in order to encourage that parent bond—then people think you're hurting the twinship.”

She says her patients report the same regret my parents have. “I can't tell you the number of times a mother says to me, ‘Why didn't I ever take them separately? Why didn't I think about it? I could have left one home.' These women had nannies; they could have done it. But they didn't want to. In their minds, they'd be breaking up something so wonderful that they couldn't justify doing that. Or their twins resisted the idea and they listened to them. Even though everybody knows—it's not my research—every attachment theorist tells you every infant needs alone time with its mother.”

Jean Kunhardt, cofounder of the Soho Parenting Center in Manhattan, echoes Friedman. “The intimacy dance is such a one-on-one thing, it's a
monogamous
thing. My biggest urging to new mothers is to really take the time to have an individual moment with each twin. Twins demand it less because they don't need it as much. So it's the quiet moments of engagement with your baby that are sometimes missing with twins.”

Skipping one-on-one time seems to backfire both ways: Twins miss out on forging a clear identity, while parents miss out on a specific intimacy.

Even back in 1954, psychologist Dorothy Burlingham wrote in her study of identical twins that mothers can't connect to their twins until they get to know them apart from each other. “Several mothers have plainly said that it was impossible to love their twins until they had found a difference in them,” Burlingham wrote.

According to psychologist Michael Rothman, one way mothers of
twins compensate for the disquieting feeling that they don't really know their twins apart is to categorize them. If they can tag them, they must know them. “Labels or personality styles are assigned to each twin and scripted by the mother and family quite early,” Rothman writes, “likely as a means to soothe their own anxieties.”

Joan Friedman agrees. “The labels are created in order to convince yourself you have a separate attachment. And if you don't do the work and
really
have the separate attachment, then you've just created sort of a myth that helps you define one child in relationship to the other. … That's the difference between being
known
and being
noticed
. If you're not
known
through your attachment to your parents, then you're noticed because you're
like
your twin or you're
different
from your twin. It's not about who you are, but how you compare to this other person.”

Being known versus being noticed
. I realize that this is what Robin had been trying to tell me—that twinship had made her feel noticed but not known. She was never sure if friends really knew us, or even if our parents did, and so the fact that we always got noticed by people, and still do today, is no consolation. Friedman tells me that not feeling “differentiated” can make a person feel lost. She speaks from experience. “My sense of self was organized around my sister, so once she and I were apart in college, I had no idea who I was. … I think that's an extreme case, but it gives you some sense of what can happen if your identity is only organized around the twinship.”