How important is it to know the difference

3 Small Individuals


19. But you’re their mum, surely you can tell them apart?

So the other day the thing I dreaded occurring happened; I yelled at one of my son’s “Rufus, Edwin, oh whichever one you are, stop pulling your sister’s hair”.

Ok, so I wasn’t actually terribly angry with myself, as speed was of the essence due to my poor daughter’s terrified face.  But I was a bit surprised that I hadn’t immediately known which of the boys was pulling her hair.

You see, to me, they look completely different. To the point that the other day whilst looking at photos of my lovely children, I found myself thinking ‘oh Rufus looks just like Edwin in that picture’. And then I was surprised that I had even thought that. Of course he looks like his brother. They are identical twins.

I haven’t, until very recently, read much about the theories of raising twins. I haven’t had time if I’m honest. The pregnancy was a disaster from beginning to end so I didn’t exactly have time to sit down with a book and consider my twin parenting perspective, and then they were born, and I didn’t have time sit down full stop.

So I based my parenting style on instinct, on the model of parenting I had been shown by my own Mam Bach, and through discussion with their other parent, my husband. Together he and I cobbled together a theory that we wanted to very much treat them as individuals. We didn’t want to refer to them as ‘the twins’, we certainly didn’t want to dress them the same, and we didn’t particularly want to treat them the same. Yes, we would of course love them equally, and be as generous with one as with the other, but not presume that if a certain song soothes one then it will soothe the other. We were prepared to separate them at night if one was having a sleepless night and the other in need of some peace and quiet. They had names, and we used them. We respectfully asked (with mixed success) our families to not refer to them as the twins. In our heads they just happened to be born on the same day.

Needless to say we still hear the ‘twin’ label a lot, from passers by who stop to ask the obvious ‘are they twins?’.  To the point that my daughter, following yet another passer by showing an interest in my sons, asked me if her surname was Milling. To which I replied yes, and I was proud that she knew this. However, then she asked “and is *my boys’ surname ‘Twin’ mummy?”  It was then that I realised that we had both succeeded and failed in our approach to having twins in our family. We had succeeded in so far as clearly ‘twin’ wasn’t how she primarily identified them. We had failed in so far as we obviously hadn’t managed to explain enough to our daughter what being a twin meant.

I’ve always felt it important that my sons both know I see them as separate and individual, and one of the things I found most frustrating in the early days was that I couldn’t mother them in the style that I wanted to.  Personally I am very child led to begin with, I feed on demand, allow them to sleep when they want, for as long or as little as they want, and if they need a cuddle they jolly well get one.  As the child grows so does their understanding that they aren’t the centre of the universe and that they will be ok if they have to wait a couple of minutes for their milk.  Try following those guidelines with two newborns and you soon fall foul. So there were many times when one wanted feeding and wanted feeding now, and I was unable to respond as I was still feeding the other child.  There were most certainly times when one just needed a cuddle and I couldn’t give them one as I was dealing with the other baby. I used to call them the double melt downs. But, as most parents do, I just did my best. I made sure that when I was dealing with one he knew that at that moment he was everything to his mummy. For those precious few minutes he was the centre of my universe, an extension of me, or whatever he needed to be in order to feel safe.


Now that our sons are nearly two (next week, they turn two, I can’t ruddy believe it) I am slowly gaining the odd glimpse of time within which I can turn my mind to something productive. One of the things I have been reading is (as I’ve mentioned before) Winnicott on the Child, the Family and the Outside World.  I have found this rather validating, as he also looks at these issues about a mother not being able to meet two infants’ immediate needs at once.  He says ‘as a matter of fact she will find her aim is not to treat each child alike, but to treat each child as if that one were the only one. That is to say, she will be trying to find the differences between each infant from the moment of birth.’

And here comes the bit that makes me feel bad on the odd occasion that I do get them muddled; he says ‘She, of all people, must know each from the other easily, even if she has to tell one at first by a little mark on the skin (Edwin had a tiny birth mark on his lip when he was born) or by some other trick (we left their hospital tags on at first). She will usually come to find that the two temperaments are different (when they were tiny we used to call Edwin ‘thumper’ and Rufus ‘tree hugger’ and those labels remain true even now) and that if she easily acts in relation to each as a total personality, each will develop personal characteristics.’

Winnicott goes on to talk about the huge importance of them being treated as two individuals, and this sentence really stayed with me ‘it is essential in every case that there should be no confusion among the children themselves, and for that there must be some person in their lives who is quite clear about them.’

Thankfully, despite my lack of any real research nor any vast amount of time spent reflecting on it, I seem to have stumbled upon what I consider to be a healthy approach to parenting twins.  It is quite validating to know that you aren’t getting it all wrong, even if you know you’re not getting it all right either.

I guess our job as parents of twins and a ‘singleton’ (gosh I hate that word) is to parent as though we have 3 distinct, quite separate, and rather adorable children.



*Elspeth refers to her brothers as ‘my boys’ which we think is rather lovely, a sense of ownership over them. 
Who says we like each other?


18. “At least they have a friend for life”

Do they though? Do they really automatically become the best of friends? 

Part of why this blog has laid neglected for the last couple of months, unloved and untouched, is because I, or rather ‘we’ have moved into (yet) another new stage of the experience of twins.  The boys are now starting to talk more and more, and with that have become much more able to communicate their emotions, their needs, their likes and dislikes.  They are becoming ‘sociable’. And with that there is a relationship between the two of them, and indeed between them and their sister, that is developing.

I have often wondered about the feeling of being ‘them’ and ‘other’. What is it like to be a part of that unit, the casualness with which they have been forced to adopt a play mate. I often wonder how my daughter feels about knowing that each and every day they do everything together, and yet whilst she spends a lot of time with them she also does quite a lot of her own thing. They share a room together. She doesn’t. They nap together. She doesn’t. They bath together. She didn’t, but recently I have started to bathe them, feed them, read to them, as the three of them. 

So I started reflecting on the friendship between the two boys. Is it right to assume that they have any good reason to even like each other?

And so I took to reading Winnicott’s book, ‘The Child, The Family, and the Outside World’.  Specifically his chapter on twins, of course. Needless to say it is highly likely that I will make reference to this book in future meanderings. He speaks a lot of sense.  And indeed it was him who wrote, in response to the question ‘do twins like each other?’, “Often they accept each other’s company, enjoy playing together, and hate to be separated, and yet fail to convince one that they love each other.  Then one day they discover that they hate each other like poison, and at last the possibility that they may get to love each other has come.” 

At first I thought blimey, that sounds a bit dramatic, hate each other like poison? I jolly hope not. But on reading further and exploring it a bit more the point he is trying to make is this…. (or at least I think and please feel free to correct me)… when you are a twin, you don’t get to chose the person you spend the majority of your time with for the formative years, they are ‘chosen’ for you, so how can you know if you love them when they have always been there and you have never had to question it. Indeed, it also seems silly to assume that they will even like each other, given that whilst they may of course be identical, their personalities will not. One wouldn’t assume that you could throw two random people, who happen to be born on the same day, together, for weeks on end, and just expect them to get on and become best buddies. So why would we assume that to be the case for twins?

Very interestingly, Winnicott ends the chapter on twins by saying “So it is important that you should not take it too much for granted that your twins will want to spend their lives together. They may, but they may not, and they may even be grateful to you, or to some chance thing like measles, for separating them, it being much easier to become a whole person alone than in company with one’s twin.”

Right then.