Just before every word I say becomes obsolete, I feel compelled to answer the questions people have asked me about raising twins. They ask me questions like I have been privy to some secret society; they are curious. My twin daughters are just about to enter their senior year of high school, and this is the closest I will ever come to writing a commencement address.
Everything between birth and the first day of school remains a blur. But what remains in my memory are very specific things each of them said and did. I have no confusion about who saved a dead shrew in her jewelry box at age 3, believing it was alive, and hiding it from Mommy until the house smelled wretched. I have no confusion about who needed to kick the washing machine, howling at the top of her lungs, until her blankie was clean.
And while all my memories are specific and very intact, my daughters test me every time they open an old photo album. They look back at pictures of themselves and they don’t know who is who. I do. And before I forget, I will label all the photos for them.
When my daughters trotted off to their first day of school, the school principal insisted that all twins would be separated. There were six sets of twins in my daughter’s age group. Neither I nor the school principal seemed to have any sense about if this was “best” or not. People who had never had twins, and people who did have twins, and people who were twins, kept insisting that I needed to force them apart.
I had doubts and a gnawing feeling that twins have some additional developmental steps around separating. I observed my daughters like a clinician and concluded that separating is something that twins go through in stages. It can’t possibly happen all at once. (This theory proved to be true.)
Like an intriguing psychological experiment, I decided to stop trying to separate my daughters. In third grade, they were placed together in a whole class that looped together with their same teacher for three years. My daughters emerged from that experience as best friends. They have remained very good friends to each other to this day.
No, I didn’t ever dress them the same, nor did I give them rhyming names. This is mostly because I would have been too confused. They had plenty to sort out with each other to find their own separate identities.
Mostly they had to sort out how they look the same on the outside and have different feelings on the inside.
An odd thing that they’ve had to deal with is that they have very similar interests. They test nearly the same on standardized tests, including the WASL, and it seems uncanny.
They resolved all this similarity by drawing a line in the sand on one interest – one will do this hobby and the other will do that one – and they did all the rest of their activities together.
They also created a distinctive style with their hair and clothes, as many twins do.
I drew a line in the sand on not allowing the hair and clothing to be taken to an extreme. Nothing that bordered on Cirque du Soleil attire.
As a parent, I was inclined to apply all my rules evenly like paint. I probably did this very well cause my kids never once whined about issues of fairness. Never once. Can you imagine how fair I must have been to accomplish this?
As my daughters became teens, the most important thing I noticed was that they each needed to have time alone with me. They didn’t request this, but as a mother of twins, mind-reading and planning ahead is a survival skill.
I noticed that as they were figuring out their identities, as every adolescent does, they needed private conversations. Their different feelings on the inside became louder and more apparent.
Now as they approach their senior year, I find myself swinging from wanting to stuff little pieces of them in my jewelry box, to wanting to go outside and kick and scream at the washing machine.
Sarri Gilman is a freelance writer living on Whidbey Island. Her column on living with meaning and purpose runs every other Tuesday in The Herald. She is a therapist, a wife and a mother, and has founded two nonprofit organizations to serve homeless children. You can e-mail her at features@heraldnet.com.
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