Sawt al-Mara — page 35

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.