Hellobee

My girls were born five weeks apart. While not technically twins, they are pretty darn close and I consider myself a twin mom. I remember at our first pediatrician appointment with both girls, I had my list of questions for the doctor and nearly all of the questions revolved around why one baby was doing something that the other was not doing, and vice versa. The doctor stopped me politely and smiled. She then told me that one of the biggest challenges with twins is the parental tendency to do too much comparing. She told me that I would drive myself crazy if I kept this up, and here we were only in the first month!

As time has gone on, I’ve tried to stop myself from doing these comparisons. But I find it to be one of my biggest daily fights with myself. Mr. Starfish likewise struggles with it. As I’ve talked to mom friends, I’ve come to the conclusion that while this tendency might be more heightened from the start for parents of twins, it is a natural habit of all parents no matter how far apart their children are spaced.

In the beginning, my concerns were around physical development. Lilly was born very small, and Audrey was born very big. Maybe the initial size differences played into some of the physical differences that I focused on. For instance, Audrey was larger and she had weaker muscle tone and control of her body in the beginning. I honestly think that if Lilly had not been right next to her sister with far better control over her neck and her limbs, I would have never considered Audrey’s “floppiness” to be an issue. But the fact was that every time I picked up Audrey, she felt very different than Lilly. Most notably, Audrey needed far more help supporting her neck and head than Lilly.

Audrey on the left; Lilly on the right.

As we rounded 2-3 months, I started to worry about Lilly developing a flat head. Perhaps this is an instance where I was happy to have the comparison because it forced us to act very quickly in getting Lilly special physical therapy to address the issue. Thinking back on it, if we hadn’t had Audrey’s perfectly round (and large!) head to compare to Lilly’s flatter head, I’m not sure I would have moved as fast. I also felt so much mom guilt and shame about Lilly’s flat head initially – I blamed myself for not pushing tummy time hard enough, and for leaving her in her bouncy seat too long. But when we met with the physical therapist and she told me that she sees this all the time with twins (one baby has the flat head, one baby does not), I came to the quick conclusion that I had no reason to feel guilty. Some babies are simply more prone to developing a flat head than others.

Even today, at around nine months, I continue to compare the girls’ physical milestones and worry about the differences. Lilly remains smaller than her sister and she’s developing fine motor skills quicker. For instance, Lilly will delicately pick up a puff using the pincer grasp; meanwhile, Audrey will smash her whole hand onto a pile of puffs and shove them all in her mouth. On the other hand, Audrey demonstrates more body strength than Lilly and moves faster along the gross motor curve than her sister. She was the first to sit up from her stomach, and she was the first to practice pulling up to standing independently (and she’s five weeks younger than Lilly!).

And then there are the personality differences. It is really hard for me sometimes to differentiate between a real developmental issue and a simple personality difference. An example of this was my concern that there was something wrong with Audrey when she didn’t demonstrate as much stranger anxiety as her sister.

The word that I use most often to describe Audrey is “chill.” She just does not experience dramatic spikes in emotion. Don’t get me wrong, she cries when she’s upset and she doesn’t hold back from giving us a wide grin and an adorable chuckle when she finds something funny. But her sister gets emotional and generally seems to experience emotions more deeply. This definitely includes anxiety around strangers. When Lilly meets a stranger, she screams and shouts; she gets bright red and very clingy. In contrast, Audrey usually takes stranger meetings in stride. Again, in this situation, I’ve alternated between thinking that something was “wrong” with both babies because they act so dramatically different in the same situation. And when I’ve brought this issue up to my pediatrician, I’ve been told that both responses, while different, are normal.

Similarly, Lilly has always been a more vocal baby. I am personally a very quiet person and I remember thinking before Lilly’s one-month birthday that she seemed to be taking on her father’s more extroverted and chatty personality traits. Lilly frequently squawks and squeaks and shouts and babbles. She always has. Our nanny has even commented that she is a loud child compared to the other babies they frequently interact with. In contrast, Audrey is quieter in nearly every sense. Her laughs are softer, her cries are more muted and predictable, and I can’t recall many instances of her screaming for attention.

The girls chat with one another. Lilly on the left is tickled by something her sister has done.

Audrey was slower to babble than Lilly and I was so, so worried about this. For weeks, while Lilly was imitating “Dada” and “Hi” and constantly vocalizing, Audrey stayed quiet. She spent her time silently investigating toys independently and softly chuckling to herself when something tickled her. And then one day, it happened. Like a switch being flipped on, Audrey started chatting with us! Suddenly she was saying all of the sounds that Lilly had been saying for weeks, and even started loudly babbling with her sister. I truly believe it was a complete waste of my time and energy to worry about Audrey’s lack of babbling. I now think that it was only such a big concern for me because her sister was so loud that the comparison was very stark.

Even the ways that the girls respond to physical pain is different. Despite being over a month younger than her sister, Audrey was the first to show a tooth. We were absolutely shocked when we looked in her mouth one day and she had two teeth. She had demonstrated absolutely no teething symptoms at all! In contrast, we were on the lookout for Lilly’s teeth for days before they finally emerged because she was such a cranky baby as those teeth pushed through. Right now, the girls are fighting a cold and I’ll let you have one guess which one is taking it in stride and which one is very loudly protesting against her runny nose and cough.

As Lilly and Audrey continue to grow, I know that I will have to continue working on controlling my tendency to compare them. I’m glad that my own sister and I are so different so that I can rely on my own upbringing and memories to appreciate that differences between siblings is what makes the relationship so interesting and so much fun.

My sister is my best friend in the whole world, probably at least partly because she is so different from me and teaches me so much.