If Twins Come Your Way...!

"...Raising twins is harder than raising a single child — no argument about that. But there is more pleasure in it than in raising one, too..."
"...And if one day, dear reader, you become the mother of twins, you will wish you were two; but you will never wish that one of them had not been born..."

When the doctor showed me the X-ray picture he had taken of me, I could hardly believe my eyes. There are no twins in my husband's family, nor in mine. Yet the picture showed, with a clarity beyond all clarity, two heads and two spines within me. My two daughters were born two months after that, and a few days ago they completed their second year. And I believe that my experience with them holds benefit and delight for new mothers.

When I learned I was to bear twins, I hastened to gather all the information I could about twins. I learned that the birth of twins is to a large extent hereditary, though their absence from the family is no bar to their coming. I learned that in every 80 births twins come once; that 70 percent of twin births come early, before term; that at birth twins are smaller than if there had been but one; that one of them is born a few minutes before the other; that their delivery is easier on the mother than the delivery of one; and that the rate of deaths among twins is higher than in ordinary cases.

My husband and I sat down to talk over the matter of the two coming guests. After long thought we decided to adopt the following as our foundations in raising them:

Our two babies must enjoy all the possibilities and advantages a single child enjoys — care, attention, and love; each of the twins must be granted the same care granted the other, with not the slightest difference in the way we look at either; we must regard each of them as a person in her own right, thus barring the seeds of jealousy and the feeling of belittlement from creeping into their souls; we must not encourage one of them to depend on the other; and we must raise them to acknowledge the fact that they are twins, and make them understand the problems that may truly arise from it, so that they will look upon these with understanding.

To guarantee each of them the care and attention she needed, I set about cutting down, as far as I could, my other household duties and my outside activities. To that end I was compelled to reduce expenses in other quarters of the house, and to deny myself some things I had wanted to buy. Often I hesitated to take them along to the market when shopping, knowing that I could go to the market and return in the very time it took to get them ready to go with me. But then I would remember the first rule my husband and I had settled on, and remember that had they been one child I would have taken him along on my rounds; so I would get them ready and take them with me.

The second rule calls for constant attention. So during their infancy my husband and I made a practice of exchanging them when we fed them, lest a preference for one over the other should grow in either of us. Indeed, even now we take care to exchange them when we dress them, and to change their places from time to time at the dining table, in the car, and elsewhere.

I was always careful not to give one of them more care than the other. Often I attended to them together, even in matters where care usually goes toward one alone: when I bathed one, I would bring the other along and talk with her. I always noticed that the first and I enjoyed the bath more when the second was watching us and chatting with us. That is far better than leaving her alone in a neighboring room.

Applying the third rule was no difficult matter. But I believe attention to it will be more important in the future, when my daughters grow up. If I find that one of them would like to wear a red dress, I must let her do so, and not make her put on a blue dress like her sister's.

For each of them has the right to follow her own opinions, tastes, and inclinations.

As for one twin's depending on the other, that is natural — at times even necessary. They ought to play together, stroll and walk together, and share sorrows and joys. But they must not carry it too far. If we remember that their final happiness depends on their ability to separate and for each to mark out an independent life of her own, we realize that a limit must be set to their dependence on each other.

A mother of twins once told me that one of her twins was confined to bed, and the other grieved over him and refused to go to school by himself. The mother recounted this to me with pride, glorying in that affection between her two children. She is mistaken: if the clinging of one to the other persists in that way and to that degree, it will be hard in the future for each of them to form an independent personality and an ambition of his own.

The fifth rule needs no statement of cause. It is enough to say that we expected quarrels to break out between our daughters from time to time. We tried, and still try, to shorten those spells of quarreling, and to make them love each other and appreciate the advantage of being twins.

Following these five rules has profited us greatly; yet there are certain problems that these rules could never solve. I used to think such problems arose with twins only, but I discovered that they arise among single children whose ages are close together — though they are more common, and sharper, among twins.

Among those problems are hair-pulling, and biting. These increased when my daughters grew strong enough to crawl, when their hair grew and their teeth appeared. I made out two stages of it: the first, when one would pull the other's hair or bite her merely out of the desire to grasp things and sink her teeth into them, with no intent to pain or harm her; the second was for the sake of playing with her companion, or to snatch away a toy she had, or to hurt her. This used to alarm me. But our doctor advised me to give the girls fuzzy woolen toys, and to sit them down among the grasses, so that they would take to plucking weeds instead of pulling hair; or to give them buttered pieces of bread and rubber toys on which to exercise their teeth. I seldom resorted to spanking them, for that would have done no good; most of the time I strove not to pay the matter great attention, and tried to understand what moved one to bite her sister, seeking to remove the causes and change the habits.

Another of those problems was the succession of disputes that arose between them. I hold it a grave error for the mother to intervene in every dispute to set justice in its place on the strength of what she has seen and heard. It is hard to be certain which of the two is in the right, especially since the mother cannot always see both sides of the question. Indeed, if the mother makes a constant practice of intervening in quarrels, a dangerous tendency arises in one of the children, or in both: to lose confidence in himself and become dependent on his mother, waiting for her to intervene in the most trifling matters. So my husband and I thought it best to let our daughters decide their own affairs and settle their disputes by themselves. We would leave them alone; often we would hear their screaming rise and pay it no attention, unless it became clear to us that certain harm had befallen one of them, or that the matter had gotten out of hand and called for intervention.

I hear many mothers express their fear of giving birth to twins, lest they be unable to manage them. Raising twins is harder than raising a single child — no argument about that; but there is more pleasure in it than in raising one, too. And the fatigue the mother must bear in her twins' infancy vanishes when she sees them grow a little older, and their dependence on her becomes less than the single child's dependence on her at the same age.

And if one day, dear reader, you become the mother of twins, you will wish you were two — but you will never wish that one of them had not been born.