One and the Same

by Abigail Pogrebin

  I’m stunned that Bayles would normalize the idea of preferring one child. Apparently, I’m not the only startled one. “I remember once that I was teaching this to my very first year of twins parents,” Bayles recounts, “and some mother took great issue with this conversation. She came up to me and said, ‘I can’t believe you spent any time on this at all. It was just disgusting.’ I said, ‘Okay, that’s your opinion.’ Three months later she called me and said, ‘You were right. I have a favorite.’ I said, ‘I know you do.’ It’s really hard not to, when they both come at the same time. They always tell you never to compare your children, but guess what? When you get babies at the same time, you compare them all the time.”

  It’s the only time I speak up in the class: “Isn’t it hard for Aaron to know that you prefer his brother?”

  Bayles considers. “I’m sure it bugs him a little bit, but he knows his daddy is on his side at all times. He’ll run to daddy first. He does know there are things that we have that are very special that Zach and I don’t have. So you try to bring those points out.”

  In our subsequent interview alone, I bring up her homily on favoritism. Why raise the prospect at all?

  “I raise it because I think everybody feels very guilty about feeling favoritism toward one versus the other; both kids are crying and they always run to that one baby. I just think it’s important. I certainly knew in my family who was the favorite. We all knew it. I don’t think that it hurt. I don’t think any of us suffer from it. My mother and I have an amazing relationship now, but I wasn’t the favorite. Do you have a favorite in your house?”

  “No,” I reply, feeling like it’s the wrong answer. “I really can’t say we do.”

  “Congratulations. That’s unusual. There’s usually one child who sticks out in every mother’s mind as being the better child or the best child or the one that’s most amenable. I would have to say that the toughest one in my house is the one that I have the closest relationship with, while the other one is so easy. It’s frightening how easy he is. And he’s not my favorite. He’s just not.”

  “How can you say that?” I ask her. “Imagine him hearing that.”

  “Well, he knows that Daddy is crazy about him. And he feels it, too, from his end: I don’t think he feels a connection to me like Zach does. I don’t understand it, either, to be honest with you. I don’t know what it is.”

  “You are admitting a preference as a mother,” I say.

  “Absolutely,” she admits.

  “That’s the most taboo thing you can do.”

  “I know,” Bayles replies. “But if I had a choice—if I had to make a choice—say I was getting divorced and they told me, ‘You can only take one boy—Sophie’s Choice—I know who I’d take. I actually know who I would take.”

  It makes me squirm: The Sophie’s Choice reference is an upsetting analogy, and I also can’t help but take her candor personally. I’m not going to be the Twin Avenger, but I can’t imagine how it would have felt knowing I wasn’t my mother’s first choice.

  “It is a very difficult thing,” Bayles acknowledges. “I’m crazy about both my sons.”

  I couldn’t get Bayles’s lecture out of my head. It irked me that parents were paying four hundred dollars to learn they’d inevitably prefer one child. I sought a second opinion when I went to visit clinical psychologist and twins specialist Dr. Eileen Pearlman in Santa Monica. An identical twin herself, who married a fraternal twin, Pearlman founded TwInsight, which offers counseling, workshops, and psychotherapy for parents of twins and twins themselves.

  Pearlman confirmed Bayles’s perspective: “I don’t think parents love twins the same,” Pearlman told me. In fact, in her coauthored book, Raising Twins: What Parents Want to Know (And What Twins Want to Tell Them), she lists twenty modern myths about twins, and number six is: “When parents have twins, they love them both equally.” “Sometimes a parent identifies with the twin who is more like them,” Pearlman explains. “Often parents relate to the twin who relates to them more or likes them more.” So she doesn’t counsel parents to resist this partiality? “I tell them just to acknowledge it,” Pearlman says calmly. “It’s normal. When you take away the judgment, ‘I’m being bad,’ then it takes away the tension from it.”

  She says the first few months of infancy can lead to a preference. “Maybe one baby is the better eater, so it’s an easier child. Maybe one is always complaining.”

  Indeed, there is evidence that because so many twins are born premature and have a low birth weight, parents sometimes prefer the more robust twin. The Multiple Pregnancy textbook cites researcher Jane A. Spillman’s 1991 study on “The role of birth weight in maternal twin relationships”: “Spillman observed that 72% of mothers had a favorite twin, and for 84% of them it was the heavier of the pair. A mother looking after one baby attends to his or her needs without consideration. In contrast, a mother of twins must constantly choose which one is more upset, which one should be picked up first, which one is hungrier, etc. and this forces her to make distinctions.”

  “That’s why I talk so much about labeling,” Dr. Pearlman continues. “I tell parents, Stop the labeling: ‘This one is the fussy one.’ ‘She’s so easy.’ Don’t label.” She sees parents lean on labels because they don’t get to know twins as quickly as they would singletons. “They bond with them, but it takes a little longer with twins because they have to get to know two children at once.”

  It’s something I never focused upon: the idea that parents of twins might have a harder time connecting individually with each baby because two are so much more demanding in terms of basic needs and constant care.

  The renowned late pediatrician Elizabeth Bryan writes in Multiple Pregnancy, “It is known that mothers of preterm twins … tend to have less physical contact and talk with their twins less. … The traditional transcultural image of motherhood portrays dedication to one baby at a time. Mothers of multiples may understandably feel deprived of this experience, and frustrated by the sheer impossibility of giving undivided attention to either child.”

  My cousin Alisa tells me the early months with her premature twins were crushing.

  “It was miserable,” she says unambiguously, sitting on an armchair in her graceful modern apartment overlooking Central Park. “Nobody slept. Eli cried; he had gas. He would only be walked around; he wanted to sit in the thing with the vibrating seat. And I was just pumping milk.”

  At the time Alisa and I talk, Eli and Grace have become adorable, hyperarticulate, spark-plug four-year-olds, who show no discernible trace of how delicate they were at birth. But the memories of those early, draining months are still fresh in Alisa’s mind. “People said, ‘Oh you’ll get on a schedule with your twins.’ What schedule? The whole thing was just such an endless cycle! It never ended. Every day was so much like the last. It was like the worst Groundhog Day. We spent so many days in the house. It was hard to ever get the babies outside, even in the nice weather. Every time you’d get them ready to go out, someone would poop or you’d have to pump again. There was really not much joy for the first months. Everyone tells you the infancy is going to go so fast. We’d say, ‘Really? You come to my house tomorrow. And come the next day. And then come on day three. And you’ll see it’s NOT going fast at all.’”

  The experts call it “twin shock”: the slap in the face that many mothers of twins feel after they get their twins home, no matter how wanted or loved the twins are. Alisa had wanted a baby desperately at thirty years old, and after five IVF attempts, two miscarriages, and $150,000, Grace and Eli were a gift from God. But that didn’t stave off the melancholy.

  “I was so depressed,” Alisa admits. “I didn’t even realize it at the time. But in retrospect, I was. It was just so daunting. And then, physically, I was not myself. The hormones I’d just stopped taking after the pregnancy made me have night sweats for six weeks; I was changing my clothes all through the night.” Her weight—normally, waif-thin—had ballooned. “I fille
d up with tons of water. So after I gave birth, I actually felt huge. When I was pregnant, it didn’t bother me, being so gigantic. I thought it was funny. I did not think it was funny after I gave birth. I was pretty upset. So I was depressed about the way I looked and I had all these hormones. I started feeling better at the fourth month or so, but the first three, I was like, ‘What did we do to our life? What were we thinking?’”

  Needless to say, she wasn’t experiencing that new motherhood euphoria you hear so much about. “I didn’t have that initial falling-in-love feeling the minute I had them,” Alisa admits. “I just didn’t. It was like a terrified feeling of ‘Are they going to be okay?’ For a while they were so little, I was scared to bathe them. They were just fragile.” [Eli was three pounds, five ounces; Grace was three pounds, fourteen ounces.]

  That feeling of being in control didn’t happen till they were eighteen or twenty months old, Alisa says. And then it was just barely. “For us, age two was so different. They talked and made sense. Before that, when we went to the beach, all these other kids would be sitting playing calmly with buckets; our kids would just be running crazily in opposite directions. And this idea we’d heard that ‘Oh, your twins will play with each other’? All they did those first years was fight over toys. So if you were sitting in any room, it was just a constant ‘No, you can’t take this from her.’ We were constantly giving one thing to the other.”

  No one prepared her for this. “Only other mothers of twins know what it’s really like,” she says. “There are a lot of mothers with that eighteen-month gap between children, or a fifteen-month gap, and their life sucks, too. But it’s not the same thing. They’d already been a parent by the time they had the second. They didn’t have those two infants at exactly the same time. It’s a different ball of wax. Every parent goes through new-parent shock, but with one baby, you can deal. We never realized how much support two little babies needed.”

  I ask her if, during the worst of it, she thought about those mothers who didn’t have the luxury of baby-sitters or housekeepers. “Oh, I couldn’t imagine.” Alisa shakes her head. “I do have a friend who didn’t have that support. She had a nervous breakdown—for real. She went on Paxil. She lost about thirty pounds. She’s a mess. Chain-smoker. It really killed her.”

  Alisa says she encountered few mothers of twins who fit the profile of blissful new mom. “There have to be a few out there who are feeling blissful,” Alisa replies. “If you have twins who go full term and they come out at big weights, I think you have a very different beginning than if you have premature twins. Our first two and a half months were with babies who shouldn’t have been here yet. That’s a different experience.”

  Did she feel a sense of inadequacy? “I felt bad that I didn’t enjoy it more,” Alisa admits. “I was envious of the people who had single babies. And then I’d immediately scold myself: Don’t think that way, because God forbid something should happen to one of my children. … But I was envious of that mom pushing that one baby in the stroller, relaxed, listening to her iPod while the baby slept. We just never had that kind of calm moment when the baby takes a nap next to you in bed. Never happened. Not once.”

  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.”