GRRRRR.....

I know I swore I'm off 'til Monday, but I, alone, just finished the first of probably 2 midnight feedings, and I can't sleep until I get this off my chest. Then I'm done. Really.

Public Notice to Everyone at the Saturday Market:

Yes, you were right. I WAS huge. How nice of you to notice. I had two babies in there, but I got sick of telling everyone. Sometimes I just wanted to buy my escarole in peace.

Now that you can see they're here, there are a few things I need to make clear.

1) They're identical.
2) That means they are BOTH boys.
3) No, we're not disappointed that one isn't a girl.
4) No, we're not trying again so we can maybe have a girl. We love our sons and we don't feel like they're a consolation prize.
5) And even so, it's none of you're business.
6) No, we didn't use fertility treatments. Sometimes these things just happen.
7) And again, none of your business. Would you ask the parents of a singleton how THEY got pregnant?
8) Yes. My mother was a twin.
9) Identical.
10) Conjoined.
11) Yes, really.
12) My aunt died at birth.
13) The leg. And hey, is this in the realm of not your business, also?
14) Identical twins are never genetically passed down through the generations.
15) Fraternal twins are. So the my family link is moot, anyway.
16) Yes, I'm exhausted.
17) No, I'm not a Supermom.
18) I don't do it any better than anyone else would, nor do I have a special aura around called "Mom of twins." I'm just trying to survive, just like you would be.
19) Hey, anyone notice my older son standing here? He'd love to say hi and talk about something else besides how lucky he is to have twin brothers.
20) For instance, he loves to ride his bike and watch butterflies.
21) Please stop touching my kids, at least on the face and hands. All 30 of you who did it today.
22) Really. I'm not a germ-phobe, but we just spent an entire winter indoors, and if they get sick again, I'll be stuck inside again. Crying.
23) Yes, it's really, really hard.
24) I sometimes wish that I still had them both, but not at the same time.
25) I know it will get better. But if you keep asking me to tell you what it's REALLY like, I think I might just burst into tears right here from all of the love and struggle. And really, all I came for was escarole, anyway.

Oh, and to the nice lady who stopped me on the way out? My earnest smile and thumbs up were quite sincere. You seemed so sweet, but I don't speak Mandarin Chinese.

Mommy

With all the talk we've been doing back and forth about what makes a "good" mommy, I thought this would be appropriate to share. Take THIS, Alpha Mom....


MOMMY
by Anna Quindlen

If not for the photographs, I might have a hard time believing they ever existed. The pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the black button eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow ringlets and the high piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the lower lip that curled into an apostrophe above her chin. All mybabies are gone now. I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, and one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me n their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like. Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves.
Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories.
What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations -- what they taught me was that they couldn't really teach me very much at all. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One boy is toilet trained at 3, his brother at 2. When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit-up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing. Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow.
First science said environment was the great shaper of human nature. But it certainly seemed as though those babies had distinct personalities, some contemplative, some gregarious, some crabby. And eventually science said that was right, and that they were hard-wired exactly as we had suspected. Still, the temptation to defer to the experts was huge. The literate parent, who approaches everything; cooking, decorating, life as though there were a paper due or an exam scheduled, is in particular peril whenthe kids arrive. How silly it all seems now, the obsessing about language acquisition and physical milestones, the riding the waves of normal, gifted, hyperactive, all those labels that reduced individualityto a series of cubby holes. But I could not help myself. I had watched my mother casually raise five children born over 10 years, but by watching her I intuitively knew that I was engaged in the greatest and potentially most catastrophic journey of my life. I knew that there were mothers who had worried with good reason, that there were children who would have great challenges to meet.
We were lucky; ours were not among them. Nothing horrible or astonishing happened: there was hernia surgery, some stitches, a broken arm and a fuchsia cast to go with it. Mostly ours were the ordinary everyday terrors and miracles of raising a child, and our children's challenges the old familiar ones of learning to live as themselves in the world. The trick was to get past my fears, my ego and my inadequacies to help them do that. I remember 15 years ago pouring over one of Dr. Brazelton's wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month-old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk, too.
Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleep over. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, What did you get wrong? (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald's drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons. What was I thinking?
But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them sitting in the grass on a quilt inthe shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath,book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.
Even today I'm not sure what worked and what didn't, what was me andwhat was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I'd done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be. The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That's what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts. It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were.

Me again---- I love this. I cry when I read it, and it totally reassures me that I may actually be doing an okay job.

NEKKED

So, there we were yesterday, my husband and I, eating lunch in our cramped little kitchen. I was in the middle of blathering about some sort of nonsense, when suddenly hubby becomes perfectly still, and says, "Oh my God. "

He had the same panicked look on his face that he gets when he needs the bathroom ASAP, so I was mentally ticking back over all the meals we've had in the past 2 days, trying to remember exactly to which one I had added the Ex Lax.

"K is naked in the window!" he announced, dodging from sight.

"What? No way....," I started, getting up to look over to our neighbor's house.

Sure enough, there's K in the upstairs window, full frontal naked, her arms strategically covering her nipples, holding a pair of binoculars. Aimed at our house.

I hit the floor, commando crawled over to the phone, called my to call my friend across the street and hissed, "K is naked in the window! On purpose! ACK!!!"

Upon hearing about the binoculars, my friend helpfully suggested, "Maybe she wants to swing with you."

By the way, we're not into that, but I digress...

After about 5 minutes, K pulled the bathroom curtain shut and went about her day. Or to get dressed. Whatever.

And suddenly I remembered being in her house last week for the first time, and having her announce to me and another neighbor (male) about how she jumped out of the shower last week and suddenly remembered that she left her curtains open in the family room. So, naturally, this being an "emergency", she went (sans towel) to close the curtains on those panoramic windows. "Oh", she said, "I hope no one saw me!!!"

Riiiiiight.