Close Encounters of the Twin & Multiple Kind

We were glad to see the response to our first “Twin Encounters” column in June, 1989. Dealing with living twins⁄multiples is one of the most difficult and painful things faced by all of us…yet in the first months and years after my loss, I had no way to cope with this and often felt embarrassed that I should find these encounters so painful. Since the first column, we’ve received not only some things that readers would like to share but also many letters that mention, “I had a really bad twin⁄multiple encounter last week.” We’re very glad that this concept is now out in the open, after all, it is valid and very important for us to grieve for our twins or our triplets or more just as we grieve for our baby(s) who died. Meanwhile writing the column has helped me a lot too, because now every time I have an encounter (for instance, the time recently that I sat at the twins club table at our local baby fair giving out bereavement support brochures) I can be very busily mentally telling all of you all about it even as it is happening. As we all know, twin⁄multiple encounters have a way of happening when we least expect it. The next column will deal with those which pop up and get us through the TV or movie media when we’re finally safe at home. This one will be about those that happen face to face.

Your basic kind of twin encounter, real-life version, is heading through a store or a shopping mall and suddenly coming face-to-face (or close enough) with a pair of baby twins. It may be months since you’ve seen any – but this is almost a guarantee that you’ll see one or two more sets by the time you go home. Often this comes after instinctively having your twin “antennas” out the whole time, for double strollers and checking out every pair of siblings who are close in size and then, after finding none, they appear just as you’ve let your guard down. Anytime that I’m in a large crowd I automatically check out all the kids and babies; and it seems that going to the ice rink area of Anchorage’s largest malls almost always produces an encounter. Though my reactions vary, I know the sadness and frustration and rage that so many of us feel at these times: Why aren’t they mine?? Why can’t that be me? Why did mine die?

I might mention here that things are not always as they seem, for various reasons. One day several years ago I had my closest-yet encounter near that ice rink and simultaneously ran into one of my oldest friends friends from the local support group (while trying to stay away from but watch the double stroller) and told her about it – only to find that the babies’ mother was a friend of hers…who had adopted the two babies (6 weeks apart in age) after years of infertility and no luck adopting. When I met the mother and mentioned what had happened, she smiled at me still a little puzzled and said, “I saw you look at me” (I thought I’d been discreet about glaring).

On the other hand – there’s also a real chance that those two babies arc not twins but surviving triplets…and that as Terri K.’s poem shows, the mother may understand a great deal more that you might think – and feel much more like you than like a “mother of twins”. Later on we’ll be getting back to the situation faced by bereaved multiple birth parents who have multiple surviving children.

Then there are the look-alikes. My youngest son, born 22 months after my twin sons, is now very close in size, looks, temperament, and relationship to my surviving twin. So now I also have to deal with quite a few people asking me, always when I least expect it, “Oh, are they twins!?!” I say: “They aren’t but he is – his brother died and they’re 22 months apart.” It’s easier for me – and the first time it happened, it turned out that the woman had lost a twin herself 30 years ago, and three other babies (she said the twin loss was the hardest). Once, leaving the ice rink (after two or three pretty bad encounters) with my surviving twin having a tantrum, a nice man came up to tell me: “Just be glad he’s not a twin!” I told him nicely that he was, that his brother had died, and he and his wife helped carry him and the baby to the car. Have others with surviving kids had that happen?

Another kind of real-life encounter is where you’re doing a specific task in a specific place that you need to be doing and it ends up involving twins. One mother, for example, told me about how she had returned to her church exactly a year after her twin daughters had been born and one of them died – a big step for her – only to find that there were one-year-old twin girls in the nursery. Another reader told us about an encounter that took place only six months after the death of one of her daughters:

When Rebecca was just over a year old I took her to an audition for a diaper ad. I knew that it would be painful for me to watch her having her picture taken and to think how much fun it would have been to have two beautiful girls to show off, but I’ve found that if I can anticipate these feelings I can usually handle it. What I didn’t anticipate was the three sets of twins that would be there at the same time!!! I considered just leaving but thought that I couldn’t run forever and this was as good a time as any to face it. The two boys were OK and the boy⁄girl didn’t bother me too much, but of course the girls had to sit down with their grandmother right next to me. After just staring at them for l while I thought I had better say something so I told her how cute they were. And she said, “We just thank God every day for them” and told me that their mother had been very sick during the pregnancy and finally the girls had to be delivered very early to save their mother, with no guarantee that the babies would even survive. So I told her about Rebecca and Erin and there we all were crying… Sometimes I think – why couldn’t I be the one with the miracle? But more often when I see a set of twins now I think about those girls and realize that they ALL are miracles and it helps me to get past my feelings of jealousy and resentment.

Some of “us” who are nurses face the unimaginable situation of having to take care of baby twins and their mothers, and pregnant moms. One mother who lost both of her twins, when they were born prematurely wrote, “There’s also someone on my floor 22 weeks pregnant with twins. Every time I go in there to monitor the fetal heart rate my eyes well up with tears (of course I don’t tell her why)… I wish I could help her. I know she’s scared. She’s been in the hospital since her 22nd week with premature labor. Every time they think she can go home she dilates another cm– now she’s 5-6 cm dilated. I think her twins have a good chance, but then I was 2 weeks further along than her. I don’t know what’s going to be harder for me (I know that’s wrong) but either way I’m going to be upset. Of course, I don’t want anything bad to happen. I just wish my twins didn’t die. You know what I mean.”

The same mom⁄nurse found herself, on the first anniversary of her girls’ death, being called in to help a beaming mother of new baby girls.

Another form of close encounter is one that all of us especially dread – a friend or relative (especially a close one) announcing a twin (or more) pregnancy. One mother who lost a twin wrote:

I’ve been having some very difficult, angry feelings for several months now. My husband’s cousin is due to have twins any day now. Everyone in the family has been so excited, except for me. I guess I’m jealous. I really don’t want to even know how things are going for her. One of the things that really ticks me off is that she never had a stable marriage, and didn’t even know if she wanted another baby. At times I even catch myself wishing that something would go wrong. I know more healing will come with time. When my baby died I always said that if I ever get pregnant again I wanted to have twins again…

In a future issue, she’ll be letting us know how she coped. Another mother whose twin died suddenly after birth said,

A sorority sister of mine who is a fraternal twin herself had a set of twins a year and a half after mine were born. All I could think of was how unfair it was that both of hers survived. Now whenever a friend becomes pregnant, I hope they don’t have twins because it would be so hard to be happy for them. I feel like such a terrible person for thinking that way.

Someone who recently lost one of her twins to SIDS says:

My friend just found out she is pregnant with twin girls. I told her congratulations and I hate her! I guess I am a little envious. As I hit the fifth month I feel anger and a feeling of it not being fair…

Another version of this is having twins already in the family or in the neighborhood. One mother has two sets of young twins in her immediate family – but at family gatherings her son (whose twin sister died when they were 19 mos. old) is never included in the special pictures taken of “the twins”.

Since the newsletter⁄network has expanded, we’ve also heard from more and more parents who have multiple surviving babies … and you all have encounters too. If twins are considered special, triplets and quads and more are very special and so when they are around in some way they will always be noticed and you all will not be able to help hearing about or seeing them… This seems to come up more now that fertility advances are making larger sets of multiples somewhat more frequent. We know this is very difficult for those of you who have lost all of your precious triplet babies. Some of you with multiple surviving babies are involved in twin⁄multiple clubs and are confronted with intact sets of the original number as yours. Also, because twins and triplets always get attention, those of you with two or more survivors often find them being fussed over as “twins” or “triplets”. One mother took her premature surviving triplet babies to a hearing clinic and suddenly had an older couple came up to them and exclaim, “Oh, these twins are almost as good as the triplets we saw last week!” Another mother whose triplet daughter died very unexpectedly after they were born, could barely face going to the hospital nursery and seeing only two isolettes – yet found that all the staff were calling her survivors “the twins” right away. Almost all of you we’ve heard from with multiple survivors have great difficulty with your survivors being called twins (or triplets if they were quads or quints) and many of you have asked us to ask the others of you, “How do you cope?”

Hearing as much as I do about the complications of twin⁄multiple pregnancies and all the tragic losses, it sometimes seems unbelievable that any twins or other sets of multiples do indeed get born healthy and make it through infancy. Yet many do, and when we are confronted with living multiples it is the most vivid possible reminder of what we are missing every day.

Coming soon: Multiples in the Media (or…Did someone at American Express have twins?)

Jean Kollantai
(in Our Newsletter, September 1993)