Angie Kinghorn

Who let the kids out?

For any of you considering putting your twins on a leash:  a cautionary tale.
This happened over a year ago, but the memory is still appallingly fresh.  One morning, I decided to take Grant and Anne to get new shoes.  Specifically, cheap shoes for playing in the mud. 
With thrift in mind, we headed to Payless Shoes.  Friends of mine in the mothers of multiples group swear by Payless.  There are rumors that the same shoes sold under the wildly expensive Stride-Rite brand are available under different names at this bargain basement store.  Confession time:  until that morning, I’d never set foot in a Payless.  It’s not like my closet is stocked with Manolos or Louboutins, but I do prefer to shop at higher-end stores like Marshalls and Stein-Mart.
For this outing, I decided not to use the stroller, because I’d found what seemed like a fabulous alternative:  the Kinder Kord. 
The Kinder Kord was invented by Joan Lunden (red flag, anyone?) as an alternative to traditional and humiliating child leashes to keep her (nanny) attached to her two sets of twins in public.  The Kinder Kord consists of an adult wristband and retractable cord, and childrens’ wristbands and cords – think retractable dog leashes on bracelets.  It can be configured so that the adult’s wrist is connected to one child, or so that both children are tethered to the adult as well as to each other – think walking two dogs on a split leash in a “Y” formation. 
I thought the Kinder Kords would be perfect for quick trips in and out of stores.  No longer hampered by the gigantic stroller, I’d hook the twins up to the Kords and we’d zoom up and down aisles and all would be fantastic and efficient.  In short, I was completely delusional.
Initially, everything looked like my vision.  Grant and Anne were excited to be out, and they trotted on their leashes like, well, dogs.  We seemed to be in Normal Land until a Payless employee turned up in a t-shirt that might as well have said, “Welcome to Hell.”  This guy, whom we’ll just call “Mr. Toothy” so as to protect his identity, was a nightmare mishmash of British teeth, evil Dracula laugh, an emaciated body, and a knack for disappearing whenever help might be required.  He measured the twins’ feet and then retreated, appearing only sporadically to chortle ominously and perhaps take cell phone pictures to document my parenting foibles and the epic failure of the Kords.
The moment I began trying to shove Grant’s feet into various hideous shoes (no Stride-Rite copies in sight, FYI), I noticed a sudden lack of pressure on my wrist leash.  Anne had simply un-velcroed her wrist tether and was happily browsing the infant shoes about ten feet away.
Joan, do you see the flaw in your brilliant invention yet?  What good does it do to have a freaking leash on your child if the child can just pull the velcro and remove it?!?!?!?
Not five minutes later, the situation was reversed.  While pulling shoes on and off Anne, Grant ripped away his velcro and un-tethered himself.  Fortunately, I managed to catch the back of his shirt before he could go anywhere.  But this child is nothing if not stubborn.  He waited until I was busy helping Anne try the world’s ugliest pair of Dora the Explorer sneakers and broke free again.
“Grant?”  I called, certain he would appear around the end of the aisle.  “Grant?  Grant, come here right now!” 
No Grant.  I felt panic rising in my chest.  “Grant!”  I picked up Anne under one arm like a football, leaving the diaper bag and both kids’ left shoes in the middle of the floor and ran up and down the back of the store, frantically looking down the aisles.  “Grant!”  I was beyond sweaty and beginning to have trouble breathing.  “Grant!  Come here to Mommy NOW!”  Other shoppers ignored me completely. 
Then I saw him at the front of the store, blithely following a couple out the door towards busy South Boulevard.  “STOP THAT CHILD!!!!” I screamed.   The man was actually holding the door open for him.  What planet are these people from?!?!?  “STOP HIM!  DO NOT LET HIM LEAVE!  GRANT!!!!”  Once again, none of the other shoppers even looked up.  By then I was sprinting, Anne still tucked under one arm like a pigskin.  Then out of nowhere, Mr. Toothy appeared, laughing, natch.  I mean, what’s funnier than a woman about to lose her child to mid-day traffic?
Mr. Toothy blocked Grant’s exit and I grabbed him, half hugging him and half wanting to spank the living daylights out of him.  (And by “him,” I mean Grant, of course.  While I’m sure Mr. Toothy would have been up for it, any such public display would have pissed off my husband and either gotten Mr. Toothy fired or launched him to viral Internet stardom.)  Besides, there were still shoes to buy and only God knows where DSS employees lurk during lunch.
Any sane person would have left at this point, but given the amount of effort it took to get the kids out of the house and into a store, I was not about to leave until we had shoes.  So I re-hooked Grant to the Kord and picked out a pair of shoes for Anne.  We then had three pairs, and it was a buy one get one half-off sale, so naturally we had to look at the women’s shoes before we left.
Anne, ever the fashionista, took one look at the pseudo-leather pumps and sat down, refusing to move.  She was tethered to Grant, though, and Grant seemed really interested in a pair of stilettos about 10 feet away.  I heard shrieking and turned to see Grant motoring down the aisle, pulling Anne along by the wrist.  As in, on her back, red-faced, yelling and kicking her feet while her brother dragged her along the carpet by the arm tethered to the Kord. 
In a shining moment of Good Mothering, I responded to this crisis by picking Anne up and setting her on her feet, telling her to stand so she wouldn’t get pulled along.  I tried on a couple pairs of shoes, attempting to ignore the simultaneous tantrums behind me.  When I turned around, both kids were on their backs on the floor, shrieking and kicking and pounding their fists.  And they would not get up.   Absolutely would not get up.  In order for me to move, I would have to drag them behind me like a sled.  This seemed a less than stellar plan for their shoulders, so I tried to coax them onto their feet.  No go.  Each time, they would immediately flop back down onto their backs and resume their tantrums.
I wanted to flop down and cry with them, but was sweating so much that tears were a physical impossibility.  So I looked at my two year olds having a fit on the Payless floor and laughed like a hyena.  The kids stopped screaming, and muttered to each other in twin-speak.  It sounded suspiciously like, “Wow, it’s working!  She’s about to have a complete break from reality!”
And that was it.  We had to leave.  But on the next aisle, with no warning, Anne literally blew up.  She threw herself to the floor, back arched, screaming, snot pouring out of her nose, tears running off her face.  It was the mother of all tantrums. 
Then I felt something sting my arm.   I looked down and saw the inner whirligig of the Kinder Kord.  That’s right, sports fans, little Anne threw a big enough tantrum that the Kinder Kord snapped open and the steel spring flew out.  And my response?  “Effing Joan Lunden!  How many nannies do you take when you go shopping!”  By this point, we’d pretty much cleared the store, but the few intrepid souls left started to edge cautiously away from us, eyes downcast.
After her explosion and my outburst, Anne was done.  She threw a rag doll tantrum.  (For the uninitiated, this involves sitting down and going completely limp.)  Incidentally, a fireman’s carry is harder than it looks, even with a small toddler.   
You’ll get no ringing endorsement of the Kinder Kord from me.  But I’m not going to slam child leashes as a category.  Watching my child run away from me and almost get pancaked on one of the city’s busiest streets made me realize that in some cases, leashes are a good thing. 
Just don’t buy them from Joan Effing Lunden.

What not to say to a mother of twins

Twin infants (or twinfants, as I like to call them) are evidently the closest thing most people will ever see to zoo animals in a grocery store or other public place.
            There is simply no other explanation for what people say. 
            They stare as if they’ve never seen a baby before, much less two.  And then the barrage of questions begins.  For me, it usually started with,
“Are they twins?” 
Despite temptation, I usually just nodded, and never did say what I really wanted to, which was something along the lines of, “No, I thought it would be fun to borrow a friend’s baby and put it in a car seat that matched my baby’s for a fun-filled morning trip to the Teeter.”
            Sometimes they would skip the twin question and start with,
“Which one’s older?”
I’d say, “He’s a minute older.”  Inevitably, there was a huge pause, and you could see the proverbial wheels turning.  And then, “Oh, so they’re twins?” 
      I know.  Hard to believe, but true.   
            After the initial scrutiny comes the inquisition.
            “How old are they?”
            “Were they born early?”
And then it starts to get kinda personal.
“Did you have a vaginal birth?”
I’m not exactly shy, but asking a stranger about the state of her “parts” is a bit intrusive.  I have no room to talk, though, since during the last part of my pregnancy I was discussing the length of my cervix with anybody who would listen.  While we’re on the subject of personal stuff and anatomy, the next one was often,
“Are you breastfeeding?”
I gave the babies a combo of formula and breast milk for 4 ½ months before switching exclusively to formula, so I usually answered this question with, “Yes.”  I tried not to mention their formula consumption to strangers, because many breastfeeding activists feel compelled to berate new moms about the evils of formula.  But that’s a separate post. 
“Wow, do you nurse them both at once?  How do you do that?”
If it were one of my close girlfriends asking, I’d have no problem with this.  But randoms?  Did they really think I was going to give them a demo of the double football hold?
“Did you take fertility drugs?”
            Yes, you read that last one correctly.  I have been interrogated many times by total strangers in the produce section as to whether I took Clomid (no), did IUI (no), or maybe IVF (no).
“Really?  No fertility drugs?  Then twins must run in your family.”
            Sigh.  What do you say to such logic?  I usually said no, that twins do not run in our family (which I thought was true until my father’s funeral, when a distant relative mentioned that someone way back on my mother’s side had a pair of fraternal twins). 
“If they don’t run in your family, how did you end up having twins?”
            Again, I’ve never given the answer which is sooooo tempting, “Oh, we must have had sex twice that day.”  So tempting, but I just can’t do it.  My mama raised me right. 
            We’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg here as far as things not to say, though.  Some others that have infuriated and amazed me:
“Are you sure you didn’t take any fertility drugs?”  Positive, thanks.  And if I had, don’t you think that might be a touchy, emotional kind of subject?
“Which side of your family do twins run on?”  This question comes when someone isn’t comfortable asking directly whether you were on fertility drugs.  It’s the backdoor question, if you will.  I suppose it’s never occurred to any of these questioners that there has to be a first person in a family to have twins. 
“Are they natural?”  No, we’re not referencing the potato chips in my cart, but my babies.  I was always tempted to snap, “No, they’re androids.”  But we all know I have admirable restraint, so I didn’t.  But I know what question these people were trying to ask, which is whether the babies were the result of fertility treatments or whether they were conceived spontaneously.  That’s the key (and correct) word here, people.  Spontaneous.  All babies are natural. 
For this next question, keep in mind that I have boy/girl twins.  They also look nothing alike.  My son is blonde with blue eyes and built like a nose tackle.  My daughter is a brunette with brown eyes and the body of a ballerina.  He’s as pale as Casper, and she has a gorgeous natural tan.  Got the mental picture?  Good.  Oh, and I never dressed them in gender-ambiguous clothing. 
“Are they identical?” 
No, I’m not kidding.  This is the question I get the most often.  The response I wish I could give is, “Did you skip biology class in high school?” 
Instead, I usually say, “No, he’s a boy and she’s a girl.”  Which, amazingly enough, does not clear things up for at least 50% of the people asking questions.  Sometimes you’ll see a light bulb go off in their heads and they’ll say something like, “Oh, then they must be paternal.” 
I’ve tried to gently set them straight by saying, “They’re fraternal.”  But I stopped correcting people after one lady said, “Oh, I was gonna say fraternal, I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe about fraternities or something.  Of course, it’s paternal.” 
At the risk of sounding like Dave Barry, I am not making this up.  
One time, a saleslady peered over the counter at Ulta, scrutinizing the kids in their double stroller.  “They sure do look alike,” she mused.  “Are you sure they’re not identical?”
    “Yes, I’m sure,” I said.  “Because it’s impossible for boy/girl twins to be identical.”
    “Oh, well, I’ve known lots of boy/girl twins who were identical.”
    What, dear reader, do you say to that?  I thought about explaining the mechanics of eggs splitting to form identical twins versus two eggs producing fraternal twins, but decided it was hopeless and left.  And you know what’s sad?  I’ll bet that woman votes.
“Oh, you sure do have your hands full.”  (I usually got this while pushing the kids in the stroller and pulling a grocery cart behind me.)  Thanks.  I hadn’t noticed. 
“I wouldn’t want to be you!” 
It’s really hard not to yell back, “Hey, I wouldn’t want to be you, either!” 
And then there are the things that people say when you’re pregnant and they find out you’re having twins.  In addition to being quizzed about how I got myself into my condition (see questions pertaining to fertility treatments above), I was confronted with the following:
“You’re having twins?  Ohmigod, my condolences.  I’m so sorry.” 
I was so shocked by that one that I was, for once, speechless.  It’s not like I was an unwed teen with an unwanted baby.  I was a happily married woman who was excited to be having any baby at all, and thrilled to be having two! 
“You’re having twins?  Oh, wow, I’m glad that’s you and not me.”  Yep, me, too.
“You’re having twins?  That’s so cool!  Two for the price of one!” 
Let me tell you about two for the price of one.  Ain’t no thing.  Twins means two cribs, two pack-n-plays, five billion diapers, four potties at last count, two baptismal gowns, six car seats (two infant, two regular for my car, two regular for my husband’s car), two high chairs, two booster seats, two swings, two bouncy seats, two exersaucers, ad nauseum.  Then there’s the stuff to come:  in a few years they’ll need booster seats for the car, so at least two of those.  Plus twin beds.  And then college for two at the same time.  Not exactly a blue-light special.   
“You’re on bed rest?  That must be so awesome, to get to just lay there all day and do nothing.”
Every time someone said that to me, they should have been thankful I wasn’t allowed to get up.  Though it’s highly unlikely I could have delivered the beating I would have liked without also delivering two babies.
Oh, yeah, bed rest is fun.  Those anti-contraction drugs that make your resting heart rate go over 120 beats per minute?  Better than a roller coaster!  Those other anti-contraction drugs you have to self-administer via a pump in your leg?  Way cool.  I mean, how often do you get to stick yourself with a needle and walk around with tubing hanging out of your body? 
There’s a lot more to that can of worms, but I sense a separate post later, so I’ll shut up for now.
And so I’ll leave you with my number one, yes this actually happened to me, don’t you dare say it to anyone you know with multiples:
“They sure do look different.  Are you sure they have the same father?”

Rethinking the “Good Mommy”

          New moms get bombarded with parenting advice, both from “experts” in the field and from other mommies.  Many new mothers are stepping off the corporate ladder or out of competitive fields, and their ambitious natures are often channeled into their new endeavor:  becoming a Good Mommy.  Unfortunately, in our culture, people tend to measure the degree to which one is a Good Mommy based on how completely the mother in question has subjugated herself to her children.  Tending to the needs of your children is laudable, but becoming a slave to them at the expense of your self, your marriage, and ultimately, their own well-being, is not.           
Please don’t misunderstand and think I’m criticizing stay-at-home mothers who have given up their careers.  I’m not.  In fact, I am a stay-at-home mother, and have given up my career.  To be perfectly honest, were it not for my extended bed rest, having twins, the twins’ serious acid reflux, plus postpartum depression, I may well have taken my Type A self down the road to Good Mommyhood.  Instead, our early struggles meant that from the start, I was behind on all the things that Good Mommies are supposed to do.  The twins’ room was minimally decorated, and certainly never touched by a professional designer.  I didn’t take cute baby outfits to the hospital for them to wear in the nursery.  From the very beginning they drank formula as well as breast milk.  Despite all the encouragement to have them “room in” during my hospital stay, we chose to send the babies to the nursery at night so we could get some sleep.  We didn’t invite everyone we knew to the hospital to see the newborns.  I was hardly the picture of glowing maternal peace and joy.  Rather, I was vomiting every five minutes and trying to recover from an ileus (a truly heinous postoperative complication.  Trust me, you don’t want to know).  I didn’t pick out elaborate smocked duds for them to wear on the short trip home, either.  Being wheeled out of the hospital, I felt my subconscious hiss for the first time, “Bad mommy.” 
            The first time my kids sat for a professional photographer, they were over a year old.  Almost everyone else I know did professional portraits of their newborns, then more portraits every three months.  I didn’t come up for air from the three hour long pump-feed-change-clean pump-sleep-get up again cycle for about three months, and then I thought about photography for all of thirty seconds before dismissing the idea.  My kids’ reflux was so bad that even with medication, they were constantly spewing.  Not just a little spit-up, mind you, but Poltergeist-style projectile vomiting.  One memorable day my daughter went through nine onesies.  Before lunch.  So a trip to a photographer would have required about a dozen photo-worthy outfits for each child, plus either raincoats or multiple outfits for both mommy and daddy. 
            I decided we could live with snapshots, but I envy the gorgeous artistic shots gracing most of my friends’ walls.  Even now, we have some great pictures, but I never seem to find the time to frame and display them.  My inner self clucks at me whenever we see friends’ photos.  “Bad mother,” she says. 
            When the twins’ first birthday rolled around, we didn’t throw a party.  I couldn’t begin to wrap my mind around invitations and decorations and favors and entertainment.  It was all I could do to get dressed and not cry.  We invited about five friends over for champagne and cake, and all I could think was, “Wow, we did it.  We kept them alive for an entire year!”  Naturally, when they were massacring their cake, I burst into tears.  It was a short party.           
Postpartum depression changed my parenting philosophy in a hurry.  Before the twins were born, I envisioned an idyllic “what to expect” world in which they played educational games instead of watching television.  But reality crashed that party in the form of infants that cried and cried and cried and could be calmed only via Baby Einstein DVDs.  Clifford the Big Red Dog and Dragon Tales provided my only opportunities to shower.  So, television it was.  Cartoons seemed a decent price to pay for a clean, sane-ish mommy.  Believe it or not, television actually has some redeeming qualities.  Both of my kids learned about hibernation from Curious George, and they learned the alphabet from a combination of Super Why and foam letters that stick to the tile around the bathtub.  But that still didn’t stop the inner voice from berating me, “Bad mommy,” it said.
There were also days when the crying and the diapers and the spit-up and life in general got to be so much that I couldn’t take it.  Thankfully, when that happened, I was strong enough to put the babies in their cribs and leave the room.  Several times I ended up sitting on the front porch with the dog, baby monitor in hand but turned down low so the flashing lights would alert me if the kids were screaming.  I would never intentionally hurt my children, but experiencing postpartum depression showed me how easily it could happen, especially if an affected new mother didn’t seek the appropriate help.  Let me tell you, when I was sitting on that front porch because I simply had to get away from my children, my inner voice shrieked her disapproval.  “Horrible mother!  What do you mean, you need to step away from the children!”    
Never did I think I would look upon postpartum depression as a gift, but lately I do.  It shook a lot of the Type A-ness out of me in my early parenting days, and I’m a better parent and wife for it.  It’s counterintuitive, but with parenting, sometimes less is more, and feeling bad means you’re doing good.  As I write this, I’m listening to my son cry in his room.  Not because I’m a masochist and get my kicks from tormenting small children, but because he broke several rules and I sent him to his room.  Even now, there’s a small voice inside, quieted to a whisper, “Bad mommy.  Be nice and let him come play.”
But if I gave in, if I decided to be nice and let him come play, he would learn nothing.  He might be happier this afternoon, but that does not a good mother make.           
            I watch other mothers swab every available surface their tots might touch with Clorox wipes, and I remember the many times I found the twins eating spider webs on the floor by our bay window.  At various times they also ate rug lint, crayons, pieces of the foam cushion on the bottom of the dog crate, stuffing from a couch pillow, yard debris tracked in by the dog, dryer lint, one copy of “The Velveteen Rabbit,” and two copies of “Goodnight Moon.”  My son drank stagnant water from a bird bath using half a plastic Easter egg during an egg hunt, and on one memorable day, tried to eat a used rectal thermometer probe cover.  The recent articles about dirt consumption promoting a healthy immune system in children quieted my self-deprecating voice, just a bit.  Enough that it can concede that perhaps this explains why my children don’t suffer from allergies.     
             The gift postpartum depression has given me has taken a while to see, and even longer to be able to articulate.  In a nutshell, it’s this:  I’ve learned that the Good Mommy my children need is a happy, healthy mother in a healthy marriage, and for that to happen, the children cannot be the center of my life.  My health, and my relationships with God and my husband must be in harmony and must take priority.  (See, doesn’t that make you want to instinctually yell, “Bad mommy!  Putting yourself before your children, what are you thinking?”)  The kids do not need to be micromanaged, and they are happier when they are well disciplined and well behaved, no matter how un-fun discipline may be, and no matter how much I don’t enjoy it.
            My children are cherished and adored.  They want hugs and kisses every day, and they want to pray every night.  Things aren’t perfect, and most days I am not at all sure of what I’m doing or how it will turn out.  Twenty years from now, my kids won’t have professional baby portraits of themselves at 3, 6, and 9 months, but I hope and pray that if you ask them, they will tell you that I was, in fact, a good mommy.  
So if you see my subconscious wandering around, please tell her to shut up, already.  

A beginning

Like the commercial says, everything changes when you have a baby.  But nobody really talks about the seismic event that shakes your life to the core when you have more than one baby at the same time. (My guess is that mothers of multiples are simply too busy chasing after their children to sit down, much less put pen to paper).  When you have twins, your world narrows to the twilight zone between half-sleep and the fugue state of waking fatigue.  Days are indistinguishable, and you’re never sure whether the baby you hear crying is real or a figment of your remaining brain cells.  Decisions are an impossibility, pain and a hospital grade breast pump are constant companions, and your skin shines taught from swelling and is constantly sticky from night sweats, leaking breastmilk, or spit-up.
            My friends and family thought I had it all together.  Postpartum depression felt like a shameful secret that I only began to share when the worst of it was over.  During those dark days, I cried with no provocation, suffered from panic attacks, felt like a failure of a mother, and was ashamed.  What right did I have to be miserable when I had two beautiful, healthy babies?  I learned to put on a pretty good show and act like the supermom I thought I should be, but most days I felt like a mosaic of my former self, held together by caffeine, Touche Eclat concealer, Spanx, and Valium.  I suspect at least some of my friends, even those with singletons, were in the same boat, but admitting that mothering is difficult to the point of tears is to feel inadequate, so no one talks about it.  It is disconcerting to suddenly find yourself fat, leaky, blurry-eyed, and at the beck and call of tiny infants that seem to excrete ten times their body weight a day, and with no one to talk to about how, while wonderful, this experience is incredibly hard.  We are the daughters of first wave feminists, raised to believe we could do anything and everything we wanted, raised to expect that we could have it all, do it all, achieve it all.  To stumble seems disrespectful to our mothers’ generation, who fought so hard to claw their way up corporate ladders with business plans in one hand and baby bottles in the other.
To be honest, the first month of my twins’ life is a sleep deprived blur, punctuated by vivid memories in which I can smell the sweet warmth of their silky hair and milky breath as they were cradled to my chest, but I can also still feel the pain of a fresh c-section incision and the mental agony of a traumatic birth with complications.  My body felt alien and the engorged breasts and constant pumping left me extremely sympathetic towards and slightly jealous of dairy cows.  They at least had someone to clean their pump equipment!  My feet were so swollen that I had to wear slippers to my follow-up ob appointments, but I hardly noticed—I was too busy trying not to cry when my doctor asked me how I was doing.  I was shocked at the blast of icy air that greeted us when we left the hospital.  Thanks to three months of bed rest and a week in the hospital after the birth, I had no idea fall had given way to a harsh winter.  The world had gone on without me, and from that moment, I felt a little bit behind and totally unprepared.  What followed was a year full of the highest highs and the lowest lows.  Somehow, we got through it.  It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
            During the first 18 months of their lives, writing (not to mention a saintly husband, antidepressants, and a very good therapist) saved me.  When your baby dumps the dog’s water bowl on the floor for the fourth time of the day and he, his sister, and the dog end up soaking wet again, you can cry.  Or you can laugh.  Mostly I chose (or at least tried) to laugh, but it was often laughter through tears.  Each time I found myself in the middle of a twinfant crisis, I’d get through it by thinking how I could transform it into a funny story to email to my family, or in letters I wrote to my babies.
            Now my “babies” are three years old.  I have been flogged by postpartum depression, but in the end I’m proud to say I kicked its ass.  But my father died in September, so now I’m in the business of dealing with grief so that I can one day kick it to the curb.
            My tools are assembled:  I have my husband and family, my faith, my writing, a therapist who pushes me to rip off the band-aid by writing more, and last but not least, I have bourbon.
            God is good.  All the time.