This day, however, I scored. “She shoots, she scores!”
I noticed Chris looking at me oddly. It could’ve been because I was celebrating by playing air guitar with the broom. I shut off the VacPan with my toe. “Did you say something?” I asked.
“Listen to the thumping. What is it?”
I heard a series of uneven staccato beats. Our ceiling light shook.
“It’s just the kids. They’re bunny-hopping their playpens across the room.”
“Really?”
“Yup. They started doing it last weekend during naptime. It’s quite funny to see.”
We snuck upstairs and peeked in their room. Sure enough, William and Vivian were each standing in their playpens, legs wide apart, one hand grasping each side, and bunny-hopping their playpens across the room. It was like a sack race at a church picnic. Once they’d reach the wall, they’d pivot their bodies around and hop back.
William saw us standing at the doorway. Our sleeper-clad hopper paused and then burst into giggles. Vivian followed.
I shook my head. “No more racing tonight,” I said. “It’s sleep time.”
One hour later, they listened. The thumping that remained in my head was caused by reading eighth grade essays.
At various points that autumn, I walked into Vivian and William’s room to find unwelcome discoveries. There was the time I found one child sleeping naked beside a massive log of poo. There was the time I found every article of clothing in a heap on the floor, an indoor pile of leaves to jump in. I’d come into their room to find them sleeping in the same playpen. I’d seen carefully constructed postmodernist sculptures, sometimes on each other’s heads.
Apparently one sleeping twin was too much for the other to resist. One Saturday, when Vivian should have been napping, she took all forty of the board books in her room and dumped them over sleeping William.
“Did you do this?” I asked Vivian, motioning to the collection of Dr. Seuss and Sandra Boynton on William’s face.
Vivian nodded. At least she hadn’t inherited my ability to lie convincingly.
“You know,” I said, “burying your brother in books is not a good idea.”
She giggled. William woke up and emerged from the alphabet rubble. Like a good twin brother, he didn’t care; he smiled at the library in his bed and started to paw his way through Green Eggs and Ham.
Oh I do not like big messes, gosh damn. I do not like them, Mom I am.
Not long after the playpen and book incidents, William and Vivian escalated their bedroom delinquency. Vivian swung from the mesh, stuffed-animal cylinder that hung from the ceiling by a plant hook. Channeling her inner monkey, she grabbed on and lifted her feet. Around and around she went until she fell and cracked her head on her dresser. I heard the scream; so did our friends in Thailand. There’s still a hole in the ceiling’s plaster. Vivian’s head fared slightly better.
William rebelled artistically. He took the nightlight out of the socket and used the prongs to scratch paint off the wall. Not long after these two incidents, we supervised their naptimes. Chris, who worked from home, would lie down on a comforter between their playpens and pretend to sleep. If they attempted any shenanigans, he’d reach out his zombie hand and grab the delinquent’s ankle before the reign of terror began.
Supervised naptime worked well for the first week. And then I took over the weekend nap patrol and was never so well rested. I’d fall asleep before Vivian and William zonked out. It was bliss until I awoke to two giggly faces above me. I put a moratorium on weekend naps, for all of us.
Soon their shenanigans shifted to bedtime. They started opening the closet and pulling everything out. Nothing stopped them. Tired of shoving it all in and attempting to shut the door before more junk tumbled out, I said to Chris, “We need to put a lock on their closet.” What I meant was, “You need to put a lock on their closet.”
This was not one of those items that sat on the fridge’s to-do list for six months; strangely enough, tasks involving a cordless drill rose to the top. Later that day, Chris wielded his second favorite weapon, went out to the back fence, removed the sliding lock, and placed it at the top of their closet.
This worked for one day, until our twins wrenched on the doors so hard that the lock bent. At which point I waved a white towel and got out my second favorite tool: the corkscrew.
Chris had a thing with bodily functions: unless they were his own, he had trouble dealing with them. So in our familial dysfunction, I became the go-to person for all things poo and puke related.
This was not in our vows. I always thought writing your own vows was “making it up”; now I think it’s wise. If I were to marry again, I would add this to Chris’s vows: “I promise to share cleaning the bathrooms, including crap that’s smeared on the toilet, pee that’s covering the back wall, and chunky trails of puke from the kids’ room to our room. I will also give you at least one foot rub a week.”
It’s a good thing I’m not single.
I’ve found poo everywhere in our house. In playpens, in underwear, on carpets, and on the tile floor.
All this I handled by hitting my head on the picture window until it bled.
Well, some of the time. Sometimes, I was less composed, like when I was naked. I had just showered. I grabbed a towel off the rack and saw something above the toilet roll dispenser. I squinted and examined it. Poo. Dried, crusty poo. It looked liked some frat boy had tried to faux finish our wall with it.
Both William and Vivian still wore diapers, but I knew their habits of removing dirty ones.
I cranked open the door and yelled, “Who smeared poo on the wall?”
No one answered, so I did what every calm person does in the face of adversity. I wrapped a towel around me and strode down the stairs leaving a trail of water in my wake. I repeated the question.
Both twins looked up from the scribbling they were doing at the table.
They shook their heads.
“Let’s see your hands.”
Nothing but wash-off marker, the biggest misnomer since Easy Bake ovens graced toy stores.
Chris watched my tirade. He’d learned when to shut it, a Pavlovian non-response that prevented most major marital discord.
I grabbed a pail and the jumbo bottle of Mr. Clean and dripped my way upstairs.
Thirty minutes later, I heard, “You OK?”
“I’m swearing my way to cleanliness.”
It was what I did when anger overtook me: I cleaned loudly and swore silently. Usually Chris was the catalyst for my cleaning forays; in fact, I was beginning to think he intentionally pissed me off so I’d scour the house.
First I swore my vows, then I swore my way to cleanliness.
WOULD YOU PUT YOUR PENIS AWAY?
Winter settled in which meant we spent one extra hour every day putting our kids into snowsuits and another extra hour looking for lost mittens. Some people wondered what they used to do with all their time before they had kids. I wondered what we used to do with all our time before we had kids in a wintry climate and before we decided we didn’t need a nanny.
That’s right, I thought. I remember what I did. I went loopy because I had nothing to do except read parenting books and wish I were perfect.
I closed that head movie and wedged boots onto one twin’s feet.
It was 5 PM on a weeknight, pitch black outside, and we were taking Vivian and William to get their eighteen-month vaccinations. Nothing said fun like driving fifteen minutes on icy streets to make your children scream.
We weren’t completely stupid, however. We had a plan. Wars had been won and lost on logistics, so we’d gone over tonight’s mission in scrupulous detail. William would go first. Experience had taught us that he could handle pain. Experience had also taught us that Vivian could handle pain, providing she screamed for sixty consecutive minutes.
William, our beloved introvert, winced when the nurse injected him with the vaccine concoction. Chris dressed him in his winter gear. W
e’d kept Vivian half dressed in her snowsuit. We were planning to do a jab-and-run with her. She sat on my lap and I held her in a vise-like grip. One-two-three-jab followed by an endless ear-piercing scream. I shoved her flailing arms into the top of her snowsuit, and we made our way to the car. Operation Destroy-the-Sound-Barrier was successful.
Days after this, I became sick, as in can’t-go-to-work sick. We didn’t yet have a family physician because it was impossible to find a doctor who was accepting patients in this thriving city that everyone was moving to.
But at 8 AM, we tried. With our real estate agent minding our twins, we set off to find a doctor. We pulled up to an office beside our public library, a place I knew because William and Vivian had slobbered over half their board books. Plus, I’d already paid enough fines to fund the library’s expansion.
The medical clinic didn’t open until 9 AM, but the lights were on. We went in. I told the receptionist my story, which included too much information, like “twins at home,” “new to the city,” “no family within two hundred miles.” She informed me that walk-in hours didn’t start until 4 PM. I nodded while tears welled in my eyes and my body shook from a high fever.
“Sit down for a minute,” she said, before I passed out. “I’ll be right back.”
I collapsed into a chair, and Chris rubbed my back before withdrawing his hand for his own coughing attack. A new country meant new germs.
The receptionist returned with a smile. “There’s a doctor in doing paperwork. She’ll see you both now. Follow me.”
We went in together. At the end of both of our examinations, the doctor looked from Chris to me and back to Chris.
She addressed him. “You are sick,” she said. “But your wife is much sicker.”
I had won the competition. If I’d possessed any energy, I’d have danced on the examination table.
Before we left, I asked, “Are you taking patients?”
“No,” she said, “but my colleague is unofficially taking a couple. Talk to the receptionist. She’ll set you up.”
We nearly skipped our zombie selves out of there.
Calgary was becoming home, one stumble after another.
Soon, we were both on the mend with meds in our system and a doctor for our entire family. William was doing what he did best: building towers, kicking them over, and laughing. Vivian was doing what she did best: practicing things like climbing stairs, talking, and laughing at her brother’s antics everywhere, even in the bathroom.
When William and Vivian were toddlers, they shared a bath. This saved both time and water, but destroyed my remaining shreds of sanity. It didn’t take me long to realize that there were many scientific lessons that could be learned by bathing children.
1. Friction, or lack thereof, occurred when you picked up your baby out of the bathwater with shampoo-covered hands.
2. Water temperature warmed when your child urinated in it.
3. Density was demonstrated when your child’s poo sank to the bottom of the tub.
4. Molds were what came out of squeaky bath toys and under the fat rolls in your baby’s neck.
5. Water displacement occurred when water that started in the tub ended up on the floor.
6. Anatomy revealed that girls had vaginas; boys had penises.
7. Several theories were tested, including Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which declared that for every action there was always an equal and opposite reaction. So when kids drank the bath water, Mommy reacted by yelling, “Don’t drink the bath water. It’s bum water.”
8. Saturation occurred when your child’s hands wrinkled because you left them in the bath for fifty-six minutes.
9. Spontaneous combustion was demonstrated by the laughter that ensued when one child farted in the bathwater.
10. Conclusions were offered when you realized your husband should bathe the children more often.
My scientific reasoning didn’t stop with bath time. In the imaginary PhD thesis I wrote on Darwin and Freud, I determined that women were more highly evolved than men because their sexual organs could not be hacked off or injured as easily. Chris doubted my empirical data, which was every bit as reliable as the study that showed trail mix made with M&Ms trumped trail mix made with Smarties, nine times out of seven.
With a toddler son in the house, the word penis is thrown around with great regularity, kind of like the word tampon in a Playtex factory. I don’t care if you call a phallus a wee-wee, a little peter, or a scrumpadoodle, but it’s alive and well in all family units that have Y-chromosomes (by the way, Y = an X that has had part of it chopped off. See? I rest my case).
Most mothers spend part of their day saying, “Would you put your penis away?” or “Can you please go to your bedroom if you want to inspect the goods?”
I too have said this. Sometimes to William. Sometimes to Chris.
MOMMY WILL SNEEZE LIKE DONALD DUCK
IF YOU PICK UP YOUR TOYS
When I was a kid, I was the most popular kid on the block. Since we lived on a farm, I was also the least popular kid on the block being I was the only kid for two miles. Still, my 1970s toys had clout. My Fisher Price collection was impressive, but what my friends really liked was the fact that I had an anatomically correct boy doll. I had inherited this from my older siblings, who were born in the ’60s, that era of free love and penises. This was not a doll in the style of a neutered Ken that most of my friends had; it was a fat plump plastic doll with a penis and scrotum.
As a child, I didn’t use the word penis. And I may have thought scrotum was a bad infection. Some days I still think this. Regardless of what I did or didn’t call these bawdy parts, this doll was the reason I insisted on teaching my kids the correct names for their body parts.
From an early age, my kids knew penis, vagina, and even nose.
So one evening I was more surprised than Nick Nolte when People magazine named him the sexiest man alive. William was sitting on my lap. I had just finished reading The Cat in the Hat with a British accent when he looked at me and said, “Mommy. Nipples?”
I blurted, “Pardon?”
“Count,” William said. “One, two, free, four, five—”
“Whoa, there,” I interrupted. “Just what are you counting?”
He pointed first to my neck, then his finger lingered on my cheek.
“That’s not a nipple,” I said. “It’s a mole.”
Later that night, after William and his sister were in bed, I searched eBay for an anatomically correct doll. One with both nipples and moles.
Parenting Tip: Buy an anatomically correct doll. It will help your children learn to differentiate moles from nipples, and armpits from butts.
I know some people claim there is no such thing as a stupid question. They lie. Especially when it involves biology.
Every parent is the recipient of stupid questions, but I’m willing to wager my husband that parents of twins get more stupid questions than a politician who’s run out of a strip club wearing half a giraffe costume.
The first time it happened was on the campus of the school I taught at in Bangkok. A parent, a particularly bright British parent, walked up to me and offered his congratulations to me and to Vivian and William, who were asleep in the stroller. Then the parent asked, “Are they identical?”
Before you think this wasn’t a stupid question, may I just say that William and Vivian were dressed in pink and blue. Yes, Chris and I believed in stereotyping them from their first days on planet Earth.
“No, they’re not identical. He—”
He graciously interrupted me.
“But they look identical.”
“Well, they share some genetic material since they both carry my DNA.”
“They really look identical,” he persisted. “Are you sure they’re not?”
I could’ve handled one stupid question. With his follow up, the brash part of my brain took over.
I nodded. “Well, I’m pretty sure. William has a penis, and Vivia
n has a vagina.”
“Right,” he said, mildly embarrassed. “But they do look alike.”
Of course, so do Dora and Diego when you’ve only seen them once.
I’ve had the same conversation multiple times, so many that it makes me wonder what people were thinking of during the sexual reproduction unit in Biology class.
The hillbilly cousin to the “are they identical” question was, Are they natural? The public seemed to have a burning desire to know if twins were conceived by fertility treatments or naturally. As if having sex every day and night for four months trying to get pregnant is natural.
I got tired of this question too. Depending on my snarko-meter reading that day, I gave one of six answers:
1. “Yes, they’re natural. They breathe air.”
2. “Well, they have opposable thumbs, so that’s pretty natural.”
3. “No, they’re not natural. They keep me up all night and make me want to curl up in a ball in my closet.”
4. “Well, we limit their exposure to polymers, but we do allow them to eat processed food, including fried baloney, Spam, and Jell-o.”
5. “No, they’re not natural. They’re clothed, at least in public.”
6. “They’re as natural as your breasts.”
Usually, if I replied with any answer other than the first response, Chris would smile and usher me and our children away.
Parenting Tip: When people ask you stupid questions about your children, it is your right and responsibility to give them stupid answers.
I was one of those pathetic parents who chose to withhold items from my children because it was easier than dealing with trying to limit that thing. Glitter was number one on my list of contraband. It was prohibited from my house, ahead of handguns and illegal drugs. Number two was finger paint; who needs it when you have ketchup, the wonder condiment? Number three was ice cream, possibly because I’d eaten my lifetime quota while living in Bangkok.
When our friend from Texas visited us in Calgary, we took her to the Rocky Mountains. We rode the gondola up Sulphur Mountain and when we disembarked, it was colder than Winnipeg. So, our Texan friend did what all Texans do when they’re cold: she bought ice cream. While my twins had eaten ice cream, they’d never had a cone before. Again, we all knew that as parents we needed to be consistent: if I banned glitter and finger paint due to the mess, then it followed that I must prohibit ice cream cones.
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