On my birthday last week, I was at Brain, Child Magazine’s Brain, Mother blog discussing two other birthdays – the day my twins were born and the day they came home. I talk about the scars my twins’ NICU stay has left on me, but not on them. It’s a piece I thought about writing for many years, but had not collected my thoughts. The essay is here.
The day after my twins were born, my mom handed me the birth certificates the nurse had brought in earlier. I had put them aside, too consumed with the status of my tiny preemies, a few floors down from me in the neonatal intensive care unit, their tiny bodies engulfed in tubes, where they would stay for two months. “They cannot be Parker A and Parker B forever,” my mom said to me now, referring to the nomenclature doctors use for twins in utero and in the NICU. Those little beings in the incubators did not seem real to me at that moment, but she was, obviously, right.
I realized I had no second name, first or middle. In fact, I had no middle name for the first twin. All I had was Natalie. Continue reading Naming Twin A and Twin B, Too Soon
Debunking Twin Myths
Twins for Kate? The princess’s hyperemesis gravidarum (a condition worthy of further research) has led to speculation that she is having twins. It is true that a multiple pregnancy is associated with a 7.5% increased chance of HG. My own anecdotal evidence is a bit different — I had significant nausea and vomiting with both of my pregnancies, and it was actually worse with my singleton the second time around than my first twin pregnancy. But, people are speculating about where the royal baby was conceived, what the princess should eat, the name of the royal baby, the maternity styles we will see, so it is not surprising that our endless appetite for royal gossip on both sides of the pond has fueled twin talk.
With this speculation about twins, though, comes the misconceptions about twin zygosity and twin inheritance that have persisted (she could have twins because William’s uncle Charles has identical twins!), even among skilled medical professionals, even as twins have become much more common, increasing 76% over the past 30 years to 3.3% of births in the U.S. Continue reading Debunking Twin Myths
The Motherlode blog grappled with this, and while my emphatic answer was yes, as pointed out in the blog, many adult twins said they wish they had not been separated. My twins would have never wanted to be separated – they were 5 years old and they had spent virtually their entire lives together – so I am glad NYC DOE made this decision for me. As I said in my comments to the post, my twins made great strides apart, and though it is much more confusing for us as parents to deal with double sets of instructions and trips and worksheets that are similar enough to make one crazy, it is much better for them to be separate during the school day.