One and the Same (17 page)

She acknowledges that complaining is taboo because twins are considered such a blessing. “Guess what?” Bayles says. “There are moments when you really wonder why you did it. You're supposed to be happy.”

Back in class, Bayles segues to the upside: “Once the good stuff starts happening, you are so thrilled that you had two or three babies. Now let me give you the good stuff.”

Someone in the room exhales, “Please.”

The “good stuff”: Twins will have built-in play dates, Bayles promises. They'll be socially advanced because they've learned how to share and interact early, and the family becomes a gang unto itself. “You will think it's the most wonderful thing in the world. As much as it's work, you will find yourself standing over their cribs and crying with joy. I can't tell you how many times we found ourselves just weeping because we're so happy to have them.”

Bayles's last subject of the night takes me by surprise.

“Those of you who had siblings,” she says, addressing the room: “Was there a favorite in the house that you knew about? Because we knew, in my house, who the favorites were. Was it obvious to you who was the favorite in the house? Come on! Don't look at me that way. There's a point I'm making here, so please answer me.”

No one does.

“The reason I'm bringing this up is because when you have two babies at the same time, there's one baby that complements your personality, and one that doesn't.”

What?

“You may find something in that baby's personality that you find more attractive than the other baby's personality. … If both my sons were crying on the floor, there was no question in my mind who I would have gone to first. Because one of my sons has a very complementary personality to me, and the other: We have different thoughts and ideas about how things should be done. And so luckily enough, he complements my husband. Which is how it all worked out for us. … It became almost obvious to everyone that Aaron was my husband's favorite and Zach was my favorite. To the point where we made a big boo-boo—and I learned from my mistakes. On weekends when we split up to do errands, my husband and I always took the same kid. And then you don't really get to know the other kid as well.”

She encourages the parents to keep a journal that includes who took which baby each weekend in order to make sure to keep things
even and to find ways to connect with your less favorite child. “The son that is my husband's favorite actually loves the theater and I love the theater, so we have found a way to connect. Whereas I'll take my other son to sporting events.”

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 filled 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.”