Better Make It A Double

Oedipal

My boys can’t seem to get enough of me lately. They fight over me, act tragically jealous when I hold a baby in the church nursery, and act like hellions if we are together around anyone who ever babysat them (needing much reassurance that I don’t plan on leaving right then). Comments about my appearance and/or anatomy are frequent, and no opportunity to peek into the shower when I am in it is ever missed. "You have two of those, Mama! You have a big bottom!” Ahem. When I’m dressed, the comments are sweeter: “This is so fancy, Mama!”, while playing with a necklace. “You are a bootiful Mama”. They demand to be carried, flail on the floor if they are denied, demand to be heard right the first time and act mortally wounded if I didn’t. They demand to be the only boy in my lap, and ask for a thousand hugs a day, pushing brother aside. At bedtime, little arms squeeze around my neck so hard it hurts, and when I close the door to their rooms, my face is wet from all the insistent kisses I must be given before deigning to leave. Every kiss will have needed to be returned, every "I love you" matched with an "I love you, too". When I leave the house, I am left with long faces, boys that say, “When you go, I will be so sad”.

Mama, mama, mama.

Mamaaaaa!

What vast reservoir of need must I fill before it is enough? Is there ever enough, at this age? Is this a boy thing, a three year old thing, both? When does it pass? It was nothing like this at our house a few months ago, and I admit, I was unprepared for this outpouring of love and adoration.

So very sweet, and so very much.

readiness

Over the last couple of weeks, the boys had their early childhood screenings with our local public school system. Our district screens every child before kindergarten, and prefers to do the screenings as soon after the 3^rd birthday as possible. It was one of those things that are kind of interesting to watch with twins, as they each made their way separately through an identical process. O was very excited about the whole thing, and thought it was great fun. He hardly looked back as the teacher took him down the hall without me to be weighed, measured, and tested, though he was a little clingy afterward. His developmental assessment score was excellent, and his hearing and vision both very good. He’s slightly nearsighted, but many kids are at this age. He’s near the top of the charts for height. The evaluator clearly hit it off with him, and told me a bit about how the evaluation went. He answered most questions quickly and easily, but he sometimes had his own ideas about what he’d like to be doing. One test he refused outright within the allowed time, as he proceeded to tell the evaluator all about something related to the zoo, and then he asked for a book. He was, however, very polite and calm other than that, and sat in his chair the whole time (not a strength of his in general). He did very well in patterns and analogies, and knew his colors well. He does have a minor articulation issue with his speech, but doesn’t quite qualify for speech therapy at this point – we were given some information to help him work on that. He speaks freely and has good grammar and a huge vocabulary, but he isn’t always very easy to understand if you don’t know him.

A week later, I took N in for the same evaluation. N has typically had a much more difficult time separating from his parents, so predictably, he was a bit nervous. In the waiting area, he kept telling me, “I will be sad when I go, Mama”. He had his bunny with him, and was doing that fretful thing that he does where he rubs his bunny with one finger and chews on his lower lip. But then – the teacher came out, and off he went with no trouble at all. Forty minutes later, he came back smiling. As we were walking back with the teacher, she said, “I had such a nice time with N – it was a really great ending to my day. He is so sweet and interesting, he just charmed the pants off me today!” His developmental assessment score was also excellent, and his hearing and vision both very good (his vision is actually 20/20 in both eyes – how, with his genes, that’s happening is beyond me, because literally every family member on both sides of the family needs glasses or contacts). He’s near the very top of the charts for height, an inch-and-a-half taller than O and four pounds lighter. When we went over his assessment, he actually got the exact same score as his brother. What was interesting is that they arrived at that same score through completely different strengths. N did very well at counting, answering “why” questions accurately, naming things, giving her the correct amount of blocks when asked, etc. She related something kind of funny to me: when she asked him where his eyes are, he blinked dramatically with a huge grin on his face, but she had to give him “zero”, because he didn’t point to them. His blinky faces have been cracking us up for a while now, actually. Then, in the second part of the test, she asked him why he has eyes. Again, he scored zero points because he didn’t answer in the way the test requires. His answer? Because God gave them to me.

The teacher then told me that I have remarkably calm and focused three-year olds – things which, while very nice for a parent to hear, were admittedly a little surprising too. It’s not that I thought they were holy terrors or anything, but our boys are pretty wiggly little guys. They’ve not exactly been the calmest, most compliant kids in their Early Childhood class, and they get pretty darn keyed up sometimes at home. Sitting still in their seats has not always been particularly easy for them compared to what I see of their peers (though I have lots of friends with girls, for some reason), and judging by last night’s dinner, still isn’t.

But even though I believe that the test they use is at best an imperfect tool, the screening did give me some insight into some things. First, the screeners have the right idea by getting the parents to wait behind. Clearly, they can get more cooperation out of a lot of kids without any power struggles nearby. Parents are usually their kids best teachers, especially at three, but kids will likely also cooperate and behave better for a stranger than a parent, especially during the limit-testing years. Second, I’ve been noticing for at least a year and a half (since the boys were about 18 months old) that they usually behave much better apart than together. The screening was a good example of that. They may grow out of that tendency, but if it still holds a year or two from now, we’ll definitely separate them for kindergarten for that reason alone. They also clearly have very different strengths, and I don’t want them to be compared all the time in such a fishbowl either.

I used to be more concerned about how school would go for N and O. I was a little worried that our boys would be up against the disadvantage that boys often have in the early grades (the disadvantages for girls often coming in the middle-and-high-school years) – being energetic and having more trouble sitting still and with fine motor skills than girls in general at the same age. N also doesn’t transition easily when he’s really focused on something. I’m not really concerned anymore, though –I think that even though they’re high-energy with strong wills, they do, and will do just fine. Even two months ago, sitting in church for the first part of the service and then going up for the children’s sermon was challenging for them both, and now they do just great as long as I take them one at a time (I alternate weeks). By age five, when they can’t go into the nursery anymore, they’ll probably do OK just looking at books or drawing. I think this will be an interesting year at home with O, because he’s much more interested in out-and-out limit-testing and drama than N is (I suspect that age three will be easier with N than age two was, but who knows), but I think preschool, if we ever get in, will be fine. I’m still not ready to describe them as “remarkably calm”, but I’m learning to have more faith that they’ll eventually grow out of their less desirable, age-appropriate tendencies while showing us more and more of the wonderful things that make them who they are.

For O, we see some of that in his “favorite book”.

 

He likes to look at the diagrams of how houses or toilets are put together, and where all the pipes go. He’s much less destructive than he was a few months ago, and now that he can ask complex questions, he can better meet his insatiable appetite for classifying everything and figuring out how things work in new ways.

His brain is indeed full of analogies – this is like that, but not quite like that. I think we should have named him Linnaeus. He's sweet and affectionate in between dramatic outburst and shows of will.

N is becoming more confident and secure, and he’s full of smiles and life. He counts everything, is starting to sound out letters and show interest in which words on the page correspond with the spoken word, and loves to rhyme, sing, and tap out rhythms. He is obsessed with books and language, and one of the best ways we have hit upon to get him to be a little more flexible in general is to let him (within reason) read his books at his leisure at bedtime. Sometimes he spends an hour sitting in his bed in a crack of daylight from the window, poring over a book about boats, or insects, or anything by Richard Scarry. He seems to get through the day a little better for having had that uninterrupted time to make sense of things for himself – a quality to which I can highly relate!

things that go

This post got me thinking.

When our family of four first moved to the United States from the Netherlands, I was seven years old. My 3-year-old brother and I each got to bring a small child’s suitcase full of toys. My pink, plasticized cardboard suitcase with yellow and orange flowers on it was mostly filled with books, a doll, my Memory cards, and a stuffed seal. It wasn’t hard for me to choose what to bring, but I was concerned about my brother’s choices. He too brought mostly books, books I had long outgrown, and his stuffed monkey took up so much room in his blue-and-red suitcase that he was forced to leave most of his little wooden trucks at home.

I wanted those trucks. I wanted to run them up and down ramps made from boxes and cookie trays, line them up in orderly rows, and run them over mud-pie obstacle courses as we had together, next to the compost heap in the shade of our Dutch backyard.

When we had settled into our new home, a large Colonial on a cul-de-sac in a blue-collar Jersey suburb, my mother held a family birthday party for my brother’s 3rd birthday. After the candles were all blown out and the dishes were cleared, my brother opened his gifts. Among them were a wooden rifle, a set of Matchbox cars, and two big, bright yellow Tonka trucks.

The rifle made me a little nervous, but I really wanted those cars and trucks. I remember observing grimly that all my toys were for inside the house, and that my brother’s toys went places. My dolls got put to bed, but my brother’s trucks dug big holes and built things. My frustration was intensified by the girly fad of the day – Strawberry Shortcake. Neighborhood girls would spread out blankets and tend their dolls. The smelly dolls made me sneeze, and I thought they looked kind of creepy besides. One of the girls, the freckled one who was always dressed in neatly pressed Laura Ashley dresses, told me that bruises and scrapes weren’t ladylike. I figured were that the case,  I’d switch camps.

I was saved from my fate as a seven-year-old recluse by a neighborhood boy my own age.  Trevor, who had no male friends in the neighborhood to play with, had enough trucks for a small army of tomboys, and they were usually strewn all over his backyard, two houses down from ours. We made elaborate Tonka truck obstacle courses under his parents’ deck, complete with sand pits, mud, sound effects and water hazards. Trevor shared his trucks with me when he felt like it, but he also had a habit of torturing ants and climbing up the electric pole scaffolding until his boozy, beer-bellied dad came yelling.

I can’t quite remember the source of the conflict, but one fall day, Trevor pushed all my often indignant seven-year old buttons. We had passionate arguments about our respective property lines. This day, despite my threats to call the police, the little bastard  stepped right onto our driveway, strewing  two fists full of white landscaping rocks over the asphalt. In a fit of white-hot rage, I ripped off his glasses, ran down the driveway to the street, and dropped them into the sewer grate. I remember the moment of sheer terror that followed the realization that no, I couldn’t just undo what I had done. Trevor, nearly blind without his thick specs, stood in our driveway, groping and howling.

Arrangements for compensation were made. I was soundly spanked and grounded. Worst of all, I was never to play with Trevor or his trucks again.

I never really played with trucks after that, and anyway, we moved away to another tri-state suburb by midwinter. I found other diversions besides dolls, tea sets, and make-up kits, though. Mostly, I read books like they were burning up behind me and put on plays with any neighborhood kids or classmates willing to go along with my carefully penned scripts.

I couldn't’t have known then, in the sunset of my childhood, that I would someday have all the time in the world to play with trucks. Both my boys adore trucks and trains beyond any other toys. They own trucks large and small, plus a wooden rail train set nicer than anything Trevor ever had. My boys know words for trucks that were not part of my own vocabulary until recently. At twenty-two months, N can identify a backhoe, a digger, a tanker and a combine by sight and name. O can tell you which part of a train is the engine, caboose, or boxcar, and yells “all aboard!” every time we drive by the light rail station. They spend hours running big trucks and little trucks about our little house, over the couch, down their plastic slide, under and around chairs. They pick truck or train books over others, and notice many trucks out the car window before I do. When I eavesdrop their chatter through the monitor as I finish dinner for J and I, I hear lists of trucks, fire engine sounds, and the "beep, beep, beep!" of a garbage truck in reverse.

We have dutifully purchased dolls and other gentle, nurturing toys, as well as books about all types of things with both male and female protagonists. Most of their toys would be considered “gender-neutral”, in fact. They play with all of them, stacking their blocks, rocking their dolls, and rolling their balls. They love animals, and babies, and flowers, and someday they will learn to cook, and do laundry, and putter in the garden. But right now, they prefer trucks and trains over anything else. It doesn’t really bother me, since I am, of course, naturally sympathetic. I can see why these metal giants fascinate them, careening down the street like shiny armored monsters. They do things. They go places. They are magnificent.

For me, there is something lovely and complete about enjoying their games. I can both follow their passions and appreciate the part of myself that likes things that go. I can also know that their play will not be restricted in the way that my own was. I can set up tracks, and ramps, and obstacle courses and make vroom sounds with my boys and see inside their little world, the world we adults lose our passport to, where imagination and reality are at peace with one another.

The part where Emmie goes all Red Letter Chistian on you

Yesterday, on the way home from a playgroup, I drove by a heart wrenching scene. A dog had just been hit, and was lying in the middle of the street, probably dead from the looks of it. A minivan had been parked sideways to protect the dog, as well as it's likely owner, a sobbing boy of about 10. A woman - perhaps the driver - had her arms around the boy, they were crouched down together, and I could tell she was crying too. In fact, there were stricken looking kids and adults everywhere, unable to do much but stare.

Deciding not to contribute to the gawking, I drove on and cried all the way home, but for the boy, not the dog. That's what's different in my life these days, I suppose. I see life through the eyes of children and their parents, and sometimes that's painful. It pains me to to think that my boys might suffer something like this or worse that I cannot protect them from.

On Wednesday, the boys were standing in line with me at their early childhood class to wash their hands at the little sink before snack time . I thought to myself that for them, this was the beginning of a lifetime of waiting in line. At school, at the library, maybe waiting to come up to bat at Little League. At the DMV.

At the Selective Service.

God help me, I don't know if I'm cut out for this. At the boys' dedication at church, on a gorgeous early summer day when they were eight weeks old, I promised to let them go wherever God needs them, to the farthest reaches of the earth if necessary. I swallowed hard when I said those words, and I meant them, but I did not promise to send my sons to war. I did not promise to help them use their God-given talents and abilities to the service of a government that doesn't give a shit about them as people or about anything but greed and profit, and I did not promise to help them use their bodies to the service of killing.

I pray every day for our soldiers and their families. I pray that they will live, and that the scars of what they witness and are asked to do will heal someday. I pray that once they come home, they will find a way back to their educations, and a meaningful transition to a civilian life and a family life. I pray that minority kids, and immigrant kids, and poor kids who do well in school will have someone other than a military recruiter to lay out their "career options". I pray for all the casualties of war, dead or alive, foreign or American. I pray that the resources being spent on this awful, useless war might instead be used for decent schools and universities, for a safety net, and to protect the ailing planet that is their inheritance.

As tempting as it is, motherhood is an impossible reason to hide, "my family against the world". Hiding is an illusion, but if I don't take the time to pray, it is just too easy for me to forget that. A dead dog and a grieving boy 5 feet from my car are real, but all those boys in Iraq, and all the Iraqi boys, and Israeli boys, and Palestinian boys, and Afghani boys, and their sisters, and fathers, friends, and mothers, are easy to put out of my mind, until I realize that I don't know what the future holds for my own sons either, and that my own myopia won't protect them. It isn't that I didn't care about any of this before I became a mother. In fact, I believe that people who choose or are not able to become parents are sometimes more fully able to dedicate themselves to creating a better world. I just realize more completely than I used to that I can't kick the world out of the safe harbor of our home, that there is no safe harbor. I so wish I could have laid the path for a better world for our children to inherit.

As much as prayer helps to me to see the world more clearly, to see beyond my own small part of it, it is not enough. I do not pray in order to tell God how to run this place. I pray in order to ask God to help me find the ways in my own busy life to do what his Son asks us to do. It is the part of my life that feels most out of balance right now.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. (Matthew 5:9)

Barnicle Boys

Sometimes, at play dates, I am still a bit envious of kicky, singleton moms with blow-dried hair, pressed tops with no food trails on them, one sweet cherub balanced casually on the hip. Baby is set before her as she sets the diaper bag on top of her unmarked shoes. If baby protests, she distracts him smoothly with a new toy, and if that fails, she pulls a clean snack cup filled with Goldfish out of the bag. Baby is content with this. She accepts coffee from her host, and sits back in a chair to discuss sleep times, and school systems, and maybe careers. Oh, I know it’s not like that for everyone, that this is probably just a fantasy in my mind, but it’s really not like that for me.

Right now, we are a ragtag ensemble, a clumsy, messy group that descends awkwardly upon unsuspecting households at play dates and playgroups. If I don’t use the stroller to go the fifteen, or even five feet from the car to the door, I have a diaper bag on my back, a baby on each hip, and I’m powerless to stop a boy from, say, pulling up my shirt or undoing my hair on the way there. I get remarkable things done with my teeth in these circumstances.

We get through the door with a little help, and I do my shimmy down to the ground and onto my knees with both boys, the three of us a mutant octopus of legs, arms, and bodies. And there we stay for a little while. O assumes his customary position of sitting inside the curve of my extended leg, his hand on my knee while he reaches tentatively for a toy or other entertainment with other hand. His curiosity and love of all things new quickly win out over his shyness, and as long as he can see me, he’s happy to play. N is less ambivalent. His little monkey legs wrap tightly around my hip, his face presses into my shoulder, and his hands slowly move from gripping my shirt to playing with the fabric. If I give him this, rub his back and murmur to him, forehead to forehead, he slowly relaxes, sinks down, and lets gravity ease him onto the floor with the other children.

I am the base, the center, the sun of their lives right now, and I would be lying if I did not admit to enjoying this status. I imagine long, transparent threads connecting us. I am not the puppet, because I have the strength, the control and the power. But I am choosing to share it with them, each boy enjoying the ability to control the length, the tightness, or the slackness, and me, happy to let them for now.

What mother of a toddler son hasn’t felt pressure not to let him cling to her? Had the awkward experience of having a stranger try to coax her child out of her lap, and out of himself? Had the feeling that perhaps she is expected to convey a toddler version of “suck it up” to her child? I will not do this. I will not tell my boys that their natural wariness in new situations is anything other than normal and understandable. I will be their sun for now, and happily. If we have to, we will sit in our messy octopus jumble and rock together, all three of us, until we find our equilibrium, and can move out from one another and feel at peace. And the coffee will just have to wait.

8 months old today

My boys are 8 months old today. Over the last few days I’ve been almost weepy about how big they’re getting. They now sit up without assistance, though they occasionally still fall backward. Both are close to crawling. O can go backwards and is just starting to get his big ol’ pelvis off the floor. He keeps getting stuck under the couch. Yesterday he was positively clingy for the first time ever. Neither boy has a hard time going to other people, though me, J, and Grandma (J’s mom) are definitely their favorite people and get their biggest most excited greetings. Sometimes I’m a little envious of moms whose kids seem to prefer them so much, but I do think that’s probably not ideal for twins. It seems to me like they are better off being able to get their needs met by a few trusted people, because there’s 2 of them and only one of me. I guess our relationship is still “primary” in the sense that I’m still breastfeeding them, and I take care of them most, but it’s not by much. N is saying “dada”, though I’m not sure he knows what it means. He says it when he looks at us now, though, so I think he knows it communicates something.

Observing their milestones is so much fun. I’m now one of those parents who is impressed by every development – it’s kind of embarrassing. I mean, all (or almost all) kids learn to sit up, crawl, walk and talk right? Why are we so impressed? Does it mean our standards are low? I don’t know, I’m just so damned proud every time they do something new – I can’t seem to help myself. Must knock it off by the time they get a little older, or they’ll think I don’t expect much. I’m just so happy to finally be a mom, and of such great babies. Ok, must stop gushing now. Forgive me.

Life is good

Best "twin tip" I've gotten recently:

 

Both boys slept from 7 PM until 6:30 AM. Angels.

Drumroll please......

Boys playing:

N in his new winter hat:

O in his new winter hat:

Oh, my darling babes. I am so glad to be your mama.

Boys

When we found out we were having twinkies, I could most easily imagine having 2 girls. It wasn’t a preference, exactly, just easiest to imagine. I’ve since come to realize that this is largely because I have a rather negatively defined idea of what it takes to raise boys. It’s very sad, really, but my feminism leaves me unprepared for a positive idea of what it means to raise good men, outside of being more like woman, or an idea of what I don’t what them to become. I don’t want to raise chauvinists, abusers, or even soldiers. I don’t want to raise men who will take their privileges for granted. I want them to feel like they can accomplish whatever they set out to do, but to also believe that women can do those same things, and to be supportive partners and good fathers. If I had girls, I could imagine that I would want to encourage their interests in sports, science, and math, because our culture might not. I’d encourage them to speak up, and be direct, because our culture might not. I’d encourage them to take chances, challenge stereotypes, and feel good about their bodies, because our culture might not.

It’s not that I don’t want these things for my boys – I just don’t feel like I’ll be countering the more negative aspects of our culture to do it. So what, specifically, DO they need from me that they won’t get elsewhere?  An obvious biggie is talking about feelings, and having the room to identify and express them. I already hear people talking to my boys in a manner that would suggest that they ought to suck it up. Comments such as “oh, you’re fine” “what’s all the fuss here?”, etc. I think those things are pretty normal and innocent, but I bet if I did a study, boys probably hear more of that from birth, and it does bug me. I try really hard not to do that.

So what else do boys need from their parents to counterbalance our culture and grow up happy and to be good people? I would love to hear any thoughts on this. Of course, if you think I’m a bleeding-heart flying spaghetti monster-worshipping feminazi, please just move along to some other blog more to your taste.