Category Archives: Relationships

Multiples and Age Hierarchy

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My ex-husband and I decided early on not to tell the girls who was born first, because we thought that introducing an older-younger sibling dynamic to our twins’ relationship wouldn’t be healthy. Reanbean has written on this topic on HDYDI before.

Bangladesh is so tiny as to be nearly invisible on the world map.My family hails from Bangladesh, a tiny country in South Asia, surrounded on three sides by India, and on the other by the Indian Ocean. The culture is a very hierarchical one, and birth order is of great significance. Our having twins seriously messes with that hierarchy. I have a cousin living in Missouri who 9-year-old son is constantly perplexed by how to fit his twin cousins into the family hierarchy. He pesters me relentlessly to tell him who is older, to which I consistently respond, “They’re the same age.”

His question is a practical one. Kinship terms in Bengali hang on birth order. A paternal uncle who is older than your father is your Chacha; one who is younger is a Kaka. A younger sibling calls an older brother or male cousin Bhaiya, while the older sibling just uses the younger’s name. The female older sibling term is Apa. I recently learned that I’ve been committing a major faux pas by calling my brother-in-law Dula Bhai. Since he’s married to my younger sister, I should refer to him by name even though I’m younger than he is.

My refusal to label my daughters as older and younger has really messed with the family order on the Bangladeshi side. I feel for my cousin’s son and his confusion. I’ve been calling my brother-in-law the wrong thing for 3 years now.

Not long ago, I found myself unable to deflect the birth order question. I’ll tell you how it went another day. The result wasn’t the one I’d expected.

 

Sadia is a single mom of 6-year-old monozygotic girls living in Central Texas.

Trust

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I recently had to take an emergency trip from my home in Texas to London, where I was needed to help care for my 2-year-old nephew. A co-worker pointed out that this went against the norm. It’s normally the UK that exports its nannies to the US, he said.

It didn’t make sense to bring my daughters with me, financially or practically. I didn’t want them to miss school. We wouldn’t even get to see London because I was going to have to focus on my nephew. Besides, I wouldn’t be able to get them passports in time. I cut it close with my own passport as it was. It had expired, but, fortunately, I fell within the criteria for an emergency travel credential, a passport substitute, good for this trip only. I drove 300+ miles roundtrip while my first graders were at school to obtain it.

I had to figure out how my daughters would be cared for while I was away. Their father lives 600 miles away and wasn’t going to be available. I don’t have any family nearby. What I do have is the village that it takes to raise a child, the people who are more family than family. These are the people who love J and M nearly as much as I do, from choice, not obligation.

I sent out two text messages, one to our babysitter Angie, and one to our former neighbour Heidi.

Angie used to teach at the daycare J and M attended for over 4 years. She’s known the girls for over half their lives, and is a trained childcare provider. She’s creative, funny, and affectionate, but doesn’t accept any disobedience or lack of discipline.

Heidi’s daughter is two months younger than my girls, to the day, and our girls have grown up like sisters, at least sisters where one sister can’t tell the other two apart. Heidi used to be the person I’d call if the girls wanted to play outside while I was in the middle of cooking dinner. As early as age 3, I knew I could trust them to go out the front door by themselves as long as Heidi knew they were out. I’d just usually end up stretching dinner to feed both families. I taught Heidi’s daughter how to bake, and she taught mine how to navigate the swampy area behind our first home. All 3 girls have known all their lives to listen to both sets of parents as if they were their own, and that the different rules of each house started at the edge of lawn and extended from the sidewalk to the back yard.

Both Angie and Heidi immediately said they could help care for the girls whiIe I was away. I went with Angie, because she could come and stay at our house with the kids, minimizing the disruption, avoiding the packing, and saving me having to find someone else to feed the cats and discipline the kitten. Her nannying schedule worked out to be a perfect complement to the girls’ school and after school care times.

I didn’t just want a babysitter for the kids, someone who would just ensure that they were safe and on schedule. I wanted someone who could fill in as Mom while I was away. Someone who would address their concerns about my absence openly and completely. Someone who wouldn’t take shortcuts to get through the evening, but would instead carry forward the work of raising the girls, discussing the choices they’d made during the day, challenging them to be responsible, building their confidence while emphasizing humility. What a gift to have two such people actually available to us on a week’s notice! There are still others in our community who would have gladly done it, had their work or childcare obligations allowed.

While I was in London, I videoconferenced with the girls on Skype every day, some days twice. I could tell that they were comfortable and happy. Their smiles were genuine, their stories from their day those of typical 6-year-olds, and their trust in Angie palpable. A couple of times, they had worries to discuss with me, but for the most part they wanted to hear about my day, be silly with their cousin, and confirm that I was okay before getting back to their busy lives of art projects and games of pretend.

Angie was the first person I gave a key to my home to after I bought it. There is nothing more precious to me than my children. I’d never leave my kids with someone I wouldn’t trust with my house keys. Anyone I can trust with them, I can trust with all that I own. After all, I’m trusting them with my life.

 

Sadia lives with her 6-year-old daughters in the greater Austin, Texas area. Her trip to London was her first to her home country in over a decade. She was too busy with a toddler and bureaucracy to see much of London.  Still, she was reminded that snow needn’t be too deep to crunch underfoot, that people walk on the left there, and that British biscuits are a far superior comfort food to American cookies. She heard a lot more Portuguese and Spanish than was spoken in London in her childhood, and was happy to learn that 11 years had put no dent in her closeness to her cousins or closest college buddy.

Waiting for the New Year

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The past three years, instead of writing New Year’s resolutions–that I famously had made and not kept–I have chosen a “theme word” for my year. This word gives me focus for the goals I want to accomplish. Two years ago, my word was OWN: as in owning my time so I’m spending my spare time on things that make me happy such as knitting and running, owning my emotions and keeping them in check, owning the fact that my household of five needs to eat three times a day and working with my husband to make sure that happens!

Last year’s word was LEARN. (You can read about my goals from last year here). I wanted to learn how to be a great parent, learn how to balance everyone’s needs, learn what “I” can do to make our family successful. Looking back, using the word LEARN led to a good year. Our family had its seasons of sadness, including the death of our beloved dog, and seasons of joy, with different  jobs for my husband and myself. I feel that we ended the year in a better place than we began.

Facing 2013, a word for this year has been much tougher to find. In September, my twin boys started kindergarten, and all three kids were in school full-day. I jumped into a part-time job and a few volunteer opportunities and quickly burnt out. A wise mom-of-twins friend counseled me to stop, wait, and think. I learned this lesson the hard way. After eight years of stay-at-home parenting and five years of twins, I needed to sit in my empty house and listen to the refrigerator hum. Wait in silence for what to do next. Wait for inspiration.

So this year I am applying the word WAIT to my life:

WAIT and see if my three kids will stop yelling at each other and solve their problems themselves
WAIT and let my nine-year-old advocate for herself with teachers and coaches, instead of jumping in to solve the problem
WAIT and sit on the sidelines, and encourage, and cheer as my kindergarten twins enter the world of elementary school sports
WAIT before I sign the kids up for every enrichment class, field trip, summer camp or other opportunity offered–they all need their space to breathe.

I hope that waiting will give us a slower and but still full year. I’m excited to get started.

If you would like to learn more about choosing a word of the year, please visit
the website of the wonderful Ali Edwards for inspiration.

Leslie H. is thrilled to be writing at HDYI, sharing the parenting experiences of trying to navigate life with a spunky 9-year-old girl and two loving and adventurous five-year-old boys (who happen to be twins).

Pure Love

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My 6-year-old daughter, J, had something important to tell me on our drive to school last week.

Mommy, M is the importantest person in my life. I love you and Daddy and Grammy and Grampy, but I love Sissy the most. If she died I would be so sad. I don’t want her to ever get cancer and die. (Note: Two close friends lost their dogs to cancer in the last year, and it hit J hard.) She is the importantest person because I love her and she is funny and we play together and we were born together. I never want to be away from her and I love her.

I used to wonder if my daughters knew what an exceptional gift it was to have a twin sister. Now I know.

Sadia is a single mother of 6-year-old monozygotic twins, J and M. She lives and works as an IT professional in the Austin, TX area.

Self-Categorization

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When I started writing for HDYDI, I knew where I fit among the other authors. I’m a mom of identical girl twins, school-age ones at that, which places them at the older end of the HDYDI spectrum. I parent in an excessively intellectual fashion, I know, and figured that I could share with you the neuroses that come from over-thinking matters of parenting. I felt that I was representative of multi-cultural families of multiples, and could bring the perspective of a military wife and working mother, as well as that of a foreigner in the US and one raising her children in a religion other than her own.

I now find myself in a new category, one I never imagined I would be: a newly single mom.

My divorce was a clean and quick one. My ex-husband and I continue to put the well-being of our children first. Learning to co-parent in light of the loss of all the other aspects of our relationship has been, I confess, rocky at times. Still, despite some moments where my pain gets the best of me, I know that my ex-husband wants the best for our children. I know it couldn’t have been easy for him to see me move them back to the Austin, TX area with me following the divorce; he remains a 9-hour drive away in El Paso. As I explained to my mother to give her an idea of distances involved, that’s twice the distance between London and Paris. Still, he has been nothing but supportive of my decision to return to the community J, M and I still consider home.

So, hello everyone. My name is Sadia and I’m a divorced mother of twins. I’ll be writing about co-parenting at a distance with a former spouse, and how it differs from long-distance co-parenting within a marriage.

Paired Imagination

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I’m not a huge fan of driving—I put off learning how to drive until I was 25—but I do love overhearing my daughters’ conversations in the car.

Yesterday was Movie Day at the summer day camp our 6-year-olds are attending. The kids were invited to bring pillows and blankets, and the older kids were put to work first thing in the morning dividing a massive quantity of popcorn into single servings.

J and M decided to take their bedtime friends with them for Movie Day.

Posed toys

The girls asked me to photograph their toys to acknowledge their first day of school, and added hair accessories before posing them, to mark the occasion. The blue Care Bear is M's Fuey, the other J's Fuzzy.

Before getting into the car, J had a serious discussion with her lovey, Fuzzy, about what she could expect at school.

“This is the first time she’s gone out to the world,” J explained to me, dead serious.

“Fuey’s been to school with me before, but this is a new school for her,” M added.

In the car, there was a discussion of how to ensure the toys’ safety. The girls finally settled on using the tightening straps on their carseats as seat belts for their toys.

“Fuzzy needs a baby seat,” J explained. “She’s only zero. She’ll be only zero forever.”

“Fuey only gets to 7 years old,” M chimed in. “Right now she’s 6, no 5. When she has a birthday, she’ll be 6. On her next birthday, she’ll be 7. But the next birthday, she’ll still be 7, because of magic.”

“Yes,” J agreed, “Magic keeps Fuzzy zero. It’s okay, little Fuzzy. You’ll like my friends.”

I know that most kids build extensive and vivid imaginary worlds, but I love that I get to hear my girls doing it. In addition to their toys having very real personalities, both girls have distinct imaginary friends who, on occasion, they lend to Sissy for the purpose of populating a game. My favourite of their imaginary friends is Dustin, M’s friend, named after a coworker of mine. He has a habit of refusing to answer to “Dustin,” instead choosing alternate names to go by on a nearly daily basis.

What do your kids’ imaginary worlds look like? What do you overhear them discussing?

Sadia, her twin daughters J and M, and her grandchildren, Fuey and Fuzzy, live in El Paso, Texas.

Mothers' Day

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Happy Mothers’ Day (belated) to all mothers, experienced, expecting, both, or otherwise.

Yesterday was Mothers’ Day here in the US, as is the second Sunday of May every year. Mothers, grandmothers, godmothers and mother figures are celebrated in all sorts of ways, from children’s handprints to breakfast in bed, cards to vacations. Like many holidays, this one is highly commercialized, but I have yet to meet the person who considers this celebration of motherhood to be a burden or chore.

My family doesn’t do a whole lot for Mothers’ Day. Our twin daughters, J and M, have their birthdays this second week of May. We’re usually still working our way through their birthday cake leftovers through Mothers’ Day until my birthday rolls around a few days later. As you might imagine, Mothers’ Day gets a little lost in the middle of three birthdays.

My mum lives in the United Kingdom, and British Mothering Day falls two weeks before Easter for her. We do make a point of doing something for my mother-in-law for American Mothers’ Day. This year, however, some fantastic medical news eclipsed Mothers’ Day altogether, and the flowers and pampering headed her way turned out to be more a celebration of her good news than of the annual holiday. I confess that in my giddiness over my mother-in-law’s news, I failed to call my grandmothers-in-law yesterday, which I usually would do. Oops.

Despite my general grinchiness toward Mothers’ Day, my girls always bring some token home from school in recognition of my role in their lives, thanks to their rather less grinchy teachers. J has forgotten to give me hers this year, but I found M’s to be deeply touching.

Dear mom, I hope you like this mother's day. I wish you a lovely mother's day... Love M

“Dear mom,” it read, “I hope you like this mother’s day. I wish you a lovely mother’s day. You are the best mom. I learn lessons from you. Anyways thanks for the cats. I love Sasha. Mom she’s adorabel [sic]! Mom I love you. I miss you so much at school. Love M.”

To clarify, we added two young cats to our family last week. M is usually quite nervous around new animals, but bonded instantly with Sasha, a 13-month-old bundle of purrs and adoration. Fortunately, J and 7-month-old Sookie also hit it off, J giggling helplessly as Sookie attempted to groom her (J’s) toes. I suppose the addition of two new felines for me to mother is a rather decent celebration of motherhood this year.

How are you celebrated on Mothers’ Day? Who do you take this annual opportunity to recognize?

Sadia is currently recovering from her daughters’ sixth birthday party in El Paso, TX. She failed to write this post on Mothers’ Day because she appears to have forgotten to do much eating in the preparation, execution and cleanup phases of the party. Instead, she fell into bed shortly after tucking her daughters in at 8:00 pm, managing only to feed to cats and brush her teeth prior to crashing.

Where My Twins’ IQ Test Results Throw Me Into a Tizzy

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Our identical (we think?) twin boys are in 1st grade now. While their speech issues hinder their spelling, they’re still performing above grade level in language arts. But math is where they really excel. This fall, G’s standardized test scores for math were the highest in the class, well above the 99th percentile threshold. Right now a parent volunteer is running a pull-out group for some of the kids who can do more challenging work, but next year that might not be an option. We wondered if the boys might be able to jump a grade for math. This isn’t something our district does readily, so we knew we’d have to push. We requested that our boys be tested for the district’s gifted program — if they qualified, we’d have the leverage we need to push for differentiation.

We were surprised by our results. G did not qualify for the gifted program, missing the cut-off by 4 IQ points. P did qualify.

Initially, I was upset with myself for even requesting the test. I hadn’t thought about the possibility of one qualifying and the other not.  Now we had this bona fide test result, on paper, saying G was less capable than his brother. And G has always struggled with self-confidence.

We had a conundrum, too. While we agreed it would be devastating to G for us to place P in the gifted program, we didn’t feel good about withholding enrichment opportunities from P just because his brother didn’t qualify. This is similar to the situation HDYDI blogger Sadia faced this year, except she was faced with moving one of her twins to first grade while the other remained in kindergarten. In researching what to do for our boys, I found this study of different twin types and their reactions to having one twin placed in a gifted program, while the co-twin was not. It definitely affirmed our gut feeling that our boys wouldn’t do well in that situation.

The more I’ve thought about it, the less I trust the IQ test results. I consulted with the director of the university speech clinic the boys attend, and she felt his speech issues could have thrown off the results. G is very aware of his articulation errors, and speaks very slowly to strangers so they can understand him. P does not make any effort to slow his speech for the benefit of others. The speech clinic director said G is likely to choose his words based on what will be easy for him to pronounce and for others to understand, rather than choosing the words that best convey his meaning. G is a kid who asks for math work on his days off of school, because he says he feels anxious on days when he doesn’t get to do math. He picked up his sister’s 4th grade math workbook and started completing the pages for fun. My other two kids who do qualify for the gifted program don’t do anything like this.

We will probably have him retested at some point, so we know what all of our options are. Our oldest child attends a charter school for academically gifted students, and our public schools have various levels of differentiation available. For now we won’t retest — G said he didn’t like the test and it was boring, so I hate to put him through the same thing with the same test administrator this school year. In the meantime we’ve decided to home school next year — we can let them work at their own pace, and provide as much enrichment as either of them needs.

What would you do? Have you run into a similar situation? How would your multiples handle one being placed in a gifted program, while the other remained in the regular classroom?


Jen is a work-from-home mom of 7-year-old twin boys, and two girls ages 5 and 9. She also blogs at Minivan MacGyver. Once in a while.

Not Their Friend

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We’ve been having some discipline issues around here recently. The girls have been talking back to me in a way that is not appropriate for 5-year-olds. Both M and J have had emotional outbursts that can be described only as tantrums. Age 4 and the first half of age 5 were nearly tantrum-free, so this flashback to age 3 was unexpected and unpleasant. I’d say something innocuous, and see one child or the other go rigid, rise on her toes, and clench her jaw before letting out a shriek. Despite my efforts not to, I would feel my own muscles tense and my blood pressure rise in response.

During the Reign of Tantrum Terror, also known as the Terrible Threes, I prided myself for being unflappable in the face of the girls’ outbursts, trying to show them how calm thought can work in one’s favour. I used to count slowly to 3, using both my speaking voice and my fingers, refusing the temptation to try to raise my voice over theirs. At 3, off the culprit went to time out, sitting on the floor facing a wall for a minute per year of their age. It didn’t matter if we were home or out in the world. If there wasn’t a wall available, a tree would serve just as well for a time out location.

I’ll confess that I had allowed the thick skin I developed during the Terrible Threes to melt away. At the same time, my children had learned to say, “No.” The first time that one of my daughters said “No,” when ordered to time out, I lost it. I yelled at her to go to time out, and this time she followed my instructions. I immediately knew that throwing a tantrum of my own wasn’t going to help things. All I was doing was validating the effectiveness of their unacceptable behaviour.

My relationships with both M and J became increasingly charged over a couple of months. My husband finally had to step in with some very constructive, but painful, criticism. He pointed out that the girls had learned that they could argue with me, and I was failing to rise above. I needed to remind them that “because Mom said so” carried weight.

He was right, of course.  I had been so enjoying the recent explosion of both girls’ critical thinking that I had been inviting them to offer their own opinions, and trying to show them, whenever I could, how I reached the conclusions and decisions that I did. In my attempts to encourage them to question the status quo, I had put myself in the position of their friend, not their mother.

I shed a few tears, and slept on it. Once I’d marshalled my thoughts, I sat M and J down at the dining table for a conversation. I told them that I appreciated their ideas, and loved our discussions, but I was the mother. When I asked them to do something, I meant that they should do it immediately. If they had questions about the why of things, they could ask them later, and I would decide whether or not they were open to discussion. I would also be the one to decide when they could be discussed. The girls would go to time out when I told them to, and they would listen to me. Period.

After a week of maintaining my icy calm, and an average of 3 time outs per child per day, we’ve settled back into solid mother-daughter relationships. Much as I hope to be a friend to M and J when they are grown, I am exclusively their mother in the here and now.

Do you find yourself becoming complacent and compromising your parental authority? How do you fix it?

Sadia is a Bangladeshi and British working mother of twins and American army wife living on the Texas-Mexico border. Her thoughts on matters of parenting, twins, and parenting twins can be found at Double the Fun.

Sister's Protector

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J is grieving, an emotion too big for one so small. The dog next door succumbed to breast cancer today, and J is heartbroken.

“I’m mad because I’m sad,” she told me. “I’m mad at you and I’m mad at M and I’m mad at the neighbour and I’m mad at God. It’s not fair. Our cat is alive and she is old and Chloe is dead and she is old and it’s not fair.”

According to the pop psychology I know, J’s expression of her pain, while hard to watch, is healthy. We talked about how much pain Chloe was in toward the end, and how her pain was now over. We talked about how the combination of sadness and anger that fills J right now is called grief. J asked if I would sleep in her bed tonight so she could feel snuggled. I agreed. She wanted me to go to bed when she did, she clarified. I agreed. Dishes can wait, and I can make up my workout.

J’s grief extends beyond Chloe’s death to another dog’s cancer. A close friend’s dog, Pumpkin, is also suffering from cancer. This friend, however, lives some distance away, and it’s unlikely that we’ll have a chance to see Pumpkin again. Wrapped up in J’s feelings about Chloe’s death are also the grief of Pumpkin’s illness and pain of the vast distances between us and the friends we left behind when we moved last year.

I’ve been holding J, listening to her, and acknowledging her feelings as best I know how. In the intensity of J’s grief, I’ll admit that I was glad that M was holding her own. As J moved from anger towards a quieter sadness, however, I began to worry at M’s complete lack of emotional response to the news of Chloe’s death. Instead of prodding her about it, I decided to let her deal with it in her own way, in her own time.

Over dinner I began to see what was going on. M was too busy caring for J to deal with her own emotions. She made fart joke after fart joke in an effort to get J to laugh. She got up, unprompted, to throw herself over the back of J’s chair. Her silly action turned into a long and heartfelt hug.

They’re only 5, but they shared a womb and every step since. They have a far deeper understanding of how to give one another comfort than I have at 32 years old, with 9 years of talk therapy under my belt.

Addendum

I had the opportunity to speak briefly with M at bedtime. She told me that she, too, was sad and worried.

“Who are you worried about?” I asked her. “Chloe or J or Emily or …?” (Let’s call Chloe’s elderly owner Emily.)

“I’m worried about Emily’s sister. I didn’t think life would let this happen.”

Emily inherited both Chloe the dog and the house next door when her sister died of cancer this summer. She had promised to care for Chloe. It had been clear to me, and apparently also to M, that her fresh grief was as much from the loss of her sister as of the dog.

“I have a picture in my mind of Emily’s sister. She looks like Emily, but younger. In my picture she is beautiful.”

In the flood of emotion surrounding her, M empathizes, in her own way, with the story of the sisters next door, one still here and one gone but in her sister’s heart and the picture in my daughter’s mind.

Sadia is the mother of identical twins M and J, aged 5. She comes, in part, from Bangladesh, where death is discussed with children as a matter of course. She has shared her past neuroses at Double the Fun, although she has since taken her personal blog private.