As soon as I started thinking about becoming a stay-at-home mom, I worried about becoming socially isolated. Sure, I’d have a baby to take care of, but that’s nowhere near the same as adult interaction. I had a really rough summer after finishing graduate school a few years ago, and I know that loneliness and boredom do not agree with me in the least. Though I’m sure it will be different as a parent, those concerns are still there.
Add to that the fact that we really don’t have a lot of friends and family nearby. My family is in the midwest, my in-laws are in Florida. Several of our very good friends left Massachusetts for Washington, DC, a few years ago. The closest friends with kids are still an hour away. And while all of them will come visit and do the best they can, we do not have the built-in social support that we would if we were living near family.
I realized I would need to be really proactive. I looked up mom-and-baby groups, tried to think of activities, and was glad to find out my local YMCA offers free childcare to members.
And then I found out it was twins.
Oh, sure, you can do many of the same things, but it gets a little more complicated. For instance, can one mom bring two babies to a swim class at the Y? I’m also starting to realize that being a twin mom makes you something of a spectacle, wherever you go. If new moms are a magnet for strange people offering strange advice, twin moms are doubly so. I decided I needed to make sure I connected with people in the same position as me.
Last week, I joined my local Mothers of Twins club. In addition to monthly meetings and other benefits, they have a “big/little sister” program. This was exactly what I was looking for. Someone to talk to specifically about the strange and (hopefully) wonderful experience of being a twin mom. Someone who wouldn’t have to “get over” the fact that, yes, there will be two of them.
I met my “big sister” on Sunday at a nearby Starbucks. She brought her 9-week-old daughter, and left her boy twin to run errands with dad. She said it was sometimes nice to split them up like that, especially since going out with both of them can be such a circus of people coming up to you. We had a great time chatting. It’s nice that she’s about four months “ahead” of me. Enough that she’s got some experience under her belt, but not so much that she’s forgotten what the early days were like. We seem to have a lot in common (our boy/girl twins aside), and agreed on a lot of philosophical points. She’s breastfeeding, which I hope to do, but she’s not militant about it. She’s full of advice on tricks and tools she’s finding really helpful with newborn twins.
In some ways, it’s no substitute for having family and friends close by. But, at the same time, I also don’t have family and friends with twins who would be the most knowledgeable, anyways. Sure, I’ll still call my mom several times a week, and I’ll call my other friends with babies for all kinds of advice. But there really is something unique about having more than one baby at a time, and I’m really glad this resource is out there.
And hey, new friends have to come from somewhere, right?
That is awesome that you are being so proactive! Way to go! I do think that being in contact with other twin parents is a really good game plan. Our twin girls turned 1 years old in May. I have a friend who had a single baby just a few weeks after me last year, even though her baby was conceived two weeks before ours. But due to them being twins our girls arrived early at 36 weeks and hers arrived about a week late. It originally seemed like it was going to be so cool to be pregnant at the same time and at times it was but at times our experiences were soooo different and I sometimes felt like I was getting the raw end of the deal. I was so nauseated and sick for months and months and I had all the worst side effects, bleeding gums, bloody noses, swollen limbs and so forth. I remember when I spoke of my gums and nose bleeding she looked at me like that was really weird. She sailed through pretty easily up until the very end. Ever since the arrivals I feel like we exist in different worlds. It is so much harder to find babysitters for two babies. Taking care of two is so different from taking care of one. All the time I hear how they are doing this, that or the other thing, going to concerts, going out to eat and with one baby being cared for by two parents it is so much more manageable to do these things. For the longest time we relied on the two of us being there every night for the bedtime routine because trying to get two fed and into bed alone was challenging. My first night away from home I mentioned how my husband had arranged for a friend to be there to help him out at bedtime. My friend asked me if that was really necessary. I thought about being a smart aleck and saying something like “Well how many people does it take to put your one baby to sleep?” but I refrained. Definitely surround yourself with people who “get it.” I also just posted a few excerpts from a book called Meditations for Mothers on my blog. You might want to check them out.