Twin Town
"Twins are so much easier than just one baby", said no parent of multiples EVER.
Someone at work fired that in my direction today. Now I'm not trying to outdo anyone in the 'my kids are more challenging than your kids' stakes, but I'm not having it. Oh no. I'm lucky - I have two healthy girls, who were two healthy babies with a short pit-stop in the neonatal unit. I'm not complaining, but twins aren't that simple. It's not just one extra tagging along for the ride.
Depending on what type of twins you're having, you might be making fortnightly trips to the hospital for scans during pregnancy. You may be told incessantly that there's a high chance of X, Y or Z happening to your babies. You may have it drummed into you that they will be born early, you might be jabbed with steroids to mature their lungs, you may visit neonatal unit. You may feel railroaded into a caesarean section, an induction, an epidural, because that's how things are done or because it's perceived to be safest. You might feel stripped of choice. You might not.
You may dodge the rigmarole of "double trouble", "rather you than me", "ooh, was it buy one get one free", "are they twins", "are they natural", "how do you tell them apart", "well done for getting out of the house with them", and my personal favourite "I had a twin, she died".
Getting out of the house is tough, but not impossible. You just don't need to be congratulated by strangers every time you achieve it. My girls had the perfect party piece of letting me get one baby in her car seat and into the car, then fetching the second one in her car seat, only to find the first one had had a nappy explosion. We would then all traipse back into the house, me loaded up like a donkey, to sort out said explosion. By the time she was changed and back in the car and twin two was fetched again, there would be an almighty stench and possibly a stain seeping from her nappy. Argh. I do look back now and it makes me think that getting the girls out at the crack of dawn for an early shift is easy going. I can load them up and they don't tend to have poo explosions as we're leaving. I have also developed a superhuman ability to carry a staggering amount of paraphernalia and I laugh in the face of people who ask me "are you sure you can manage all of that?" Pah, I am a mother of twins, I can carry anything. I can change a nappy and baby-grow one-handed, cook dinner, hold a conversation, and feed the other baby all at once. That's how I roll, a multi-tasker out of necessity.
Feeding, however, was something I didn't master, at least not until we were thinking about solids and then it was plain sailing. It was a minefield. In a week when midwives have come under fire about not supporting women's choice with feeding, I would like to make it clear that I am a midwife who is passionate about women's choice. Their fully-informed choice. I discuss the evidence with women and then support them in their choices. I support women to breastfeed, express, cup feed, formula feed, whatever they want to do. No fuss, no guilt, no pressure, as my colleagues do too. I also want to make it abundantly clear that my experience as a mother was worlds away from this. When my babies were born, they were taken to the resuscitaire and wrapped. No skin-to-skin for my healthy 36-weekers, it wasn't even offered, and a breastfeed in the first hour of life wasn't mentioned. Funnily enough, one got taken to the neonatal unit because she had dropped her sugars. Later on the ward, a midwife stuck her arm through the curtain waving a bottle of formula in my direction. No conversation about how I might want to feed my baby. Tired and bleary-eyed, I stuffed my baby full of formula, wondering what her sister might be getting on the unit. The next day, when both my girls were back with me, a support worker barrelled into my room and announced we were going to tandem feed. This was no mean feat with carpal tunnel - I had limited feeling and mobility in my hands and wrists, and didn't trust myself to prop them both up. How I was meant to latch them on was beyond me.
Fast forward a few weeks and I was pumping, feeding, winding, pumping, feeding, winding, pumping.... continuously. There was absolutely no let up from the monotony of the routine and the tedious demands of these two tiny humans. When a health visitor got involved, I breathed a sigh of relief. Mike might have been the only person throughout pregnancy, birth and beyond, who actually asked me how I was feeling and how I wanted to feed. Mike had been a midwife and he was astute. A ninja of the health visiting world, he was savvy enough to know I was teetering on the edge, looking down into the abyss. Unfortunately for Mike, I was "clever" enough to cheat when he issued me with the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression questionnaire. Nice try, Mike. I am a constant overachiever and will score a perfect zero. Was I feeling down? No Mike, I'm loving life. "Did I want to die?" Hell no, I'm as right as rain. Keep 'em coming Mike, I can lie to you all day long. Genius.
The thing Mike did achieve was releasing me from the anguish of the unsustainable feeding routine. I'd come to dread the hungry cries of the tiny people that had invaded my life. I have a photo of a tortured-looking me trying to feed two small humans and I'm dead behind the eyes. Vacant. Mike gently suggested I might need to knock expressing on the head before I threw myself over the edge and into the abyss. The girls weren't latching well, my boobs hurt, I was managing to express pathetic volumes and I hated the breast pump more than I can put into words. Moving to formula was a momentary release from the chaos and tedium. Would it have been easier to breastfeed one baby and not twins? Probably. Did I get enough support with feeding? Definitely not. Did I beat myself up for not managing to feed my babies? See above comment about being an overachiever. Enough said. I was rapt with guilt. I thought it was my job to soldier on and struggle through. Failure. I look back now and think that it didn't really matter.
I will say this, when you have twins and no other children you can at least leave them on a play mat and nip out of the room, confident that an older sibling isn't going to try and cave their heads in with a plastic toy. The other bonus is that you generally have to take both to the same place. You don't have that juggling act of one needing to be dropped at nursery at 08:30 and the other needing to be at the school gates five miles away at 08:45 with you invariably stuck in traffic that is snaking its way slowly through rush hour.
My girls have just turned seven, and the battles now are different. I don't think it's easier or more difficult than having two singletons, it's just different. They are the best of friends and the worst of enemies, as most siblings are, but they have to contend with the added frustration of sharing a face and a birthday. At the moment mine are in the same class at school, at their request, although the classes are being mixed next year. I'd like them to be separated, but I dread the fights when one gets issued with the teacher that resembles a Disney princess and the other gets the teacher who looks less like said princess. I'm also not sure I can coordinate two sets of school admin for two kids in two separate classes. I need a PA to keep up with what I'm meant to be issuing the girls to school with as it is. I don't think I'll cope if school trips are on different days. Gulp.
A this point it's worth mentioning that twins are hilarious. Belly laugh hilarious. You need to witness the expression on other people's faces when they fight over who's taller, prettier, blonder, whose feet are bigger (half a size in it). They are eight minutes apart in age. Never have eight minutes been so significant in terms of ascertaining a pecking order. Twin one is President of Twin Town because of those eight minutes. They push me to tell them who I love more ("Please mummy, we won't mind if you choose one of us"). Needless to say, my brain is addled by seven years bringing up twins but I am not daft enough to be drawn into that one. It's funny though, because I do love them differently. Equally but differently. One pushes all my buttons, she reads, draws, and is a thinker prone to fits of frustration. The other is crackers, twisting, twirling and cartwheeling through life. Every time I feel as though I'm getting my bearings in Twin Town, the earth shifts and we have to renegotiate our route. Picking my way through Twin Town is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, but I love my girls ferociously and this is the first time I can honestly say that I wouldn't change it for the world... although a map would've been nice.
For anyone with multiples in their lives or about to burst into their lives, or for students, midwives, health visitors caring for families with multiples, get to grips with resources for parents of multiples. Find a local twin group, read the info from TAMBA, find things out and do your research. I laugh off a lot of my experiences with my girls and I can be quite flippant, but that's my protective armour. Having my babies sent me on a downward spiral that I wasn't ready for, and it's caused years of agony and endless sleepless nights. I've experienced guilt by the bucketful, or more accurately in great gulping waves crashing over me, and I could write a hundred pages on feeling like a parenting failure. I wish I'd got help when the girls were little, because I don't remember their first birthday (or their second one come to that), I don't remember what they were like when they were little. I remember unhappiness and solitude, isolation, shutting people out and plastering a manic smile on my face in an attempt to not get found out that I was faking it. My experiences of having twins began to change when I was at university training to become a midwife. I had chance encounters with two of the most incredible, strong and determined women I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. Both are mothers of twins, and both have given me some amazing opportunities to face my demons head on. Forever grateful.
