The Twindaoes | picklebums.com

April 5, 2010 | Filed in: Muski,Pickle-me-kate,The Twindaoes

I have only one child at the moment.

One getting-closer-to-three-than two-year old boy and that is it.

So this is what it’s like to only have one child?

Dinner and bed time are over and done with so quickly. And it’s quiet… really quiet.

Tonight I think I finally, really really, understand when people say it is harder to go from one child to two, than from two to three… or more.

Sitting eating dinner with a little chatting in between bouts of silence was odd to say the least. It is never silent at our dinner table… it hasn’t been since the moment the girls were old enough to be awake at that time of day. That’s almost six years of dinner table noise, which is, for the most part, lovely, but very very noticeable when it’s gone.

With one there has been more choices and options. Two adults to read bed time stories, two available to brush teeth and tuck into bed. There is no one else to take turns choosing the car music, no one to knock down your block construction or tell you ‘you can’t play’.

There is also less laughter, and less cuddles and no big sisters to tell you they love you ‘more than any other boy they know’. There is no older child to fill up drinks for me, and no excuse to begin the next chapter of the Fairy Realm book.

I can’t imagine how odd it would be to suddenly go from one child to two. I just can’t fathom it…. It must be almost as odd as going from three to one has been for me.

The girl’s have been at their grandparent’s for two nights now. This is possibly the last time I will experience the only child thing for a long… long… long time. We are enjoying it, Muski and me, but I think we’ll also be glad when the girls come home on Wednesday.

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Being crammed into a small room, with people you don’t know, with just a thin curtain separating us all (sometimes one that doesn’t even reach the whole way around), listening to them sleep, or snore, or toss and turn, it’s a new kind of hell. The worry is palpable, and then there are machines and night nurses and strange noises. Sleep is not easy to come by for anyone.

Add to that the fold out beds are not exactly comfortable. They are usually old and battered. The bottom sheet never seems to stay on. The springs squeak. They are tiny, with torn vinyl and strange smells.

Don’t get me wrong… I know most of us would sleep standing up if we had to, just to be near our children when they need us. I also know that the hospitals that we’ve stayed in do a fabulous job of not only looking after our kids, but caring for us too. But funding falls short and beds for parents are at the bottom of a long long list of much more important hospital equipment.

So why am I rambling on about this?

Well I know someone, a hero, though I know she’ll hate me calling her that… Someone who has slept on many a fold out hospital bed. Someone who has seen first hand how much hospital staff care about our sick kids. Sometime who knows much more about this than any parent would ever want to…. and someone who is making a difference.

Please pop over to Tiffs blog – Three Ring Circus and read more about her efforts to raise money to buy parent beds and a fridge for the ward nurses at John Hunter Children’s Hospital.

Sure, the likelihood me ever sleeping on a fold out bed in NSW is slim to none (since we live in another state!), but I know what it’s like. I’ve been there. I can imagine how horrible it must be for those parents with longer or recurrent hospital stays. So if I can donate a few dollars to make just one parent’s hospital stay a little easier… I’m up for it!

When all of us bloggers and blog readers get together we can do amazing things.. so donate a dollar or two and make someone’s hard night a little bit easier!

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But I am not my children and my childhood is not their childhood, and most importantly, I am not a twin. I have no idea what it is like to be a twin. To have someone who is so much like you, who has always been there, who you know so well and who knows you back. I only have one sibling and I can’t say my brother and I have ever been close….

Maybe not being alone is normal for my girls?
Maybe being alone is not something they feel they need to do?
Maybe being alone is a completely alien concept to my girls?
When I broach the subject of them no longer sharing a room they burst into tears.

Of course this is just another version of the ‘together/apart’ debate which seems to constantly haunt me. There are ‘professionals’, not to mention a heap of books, that all push the line that they need to spend time apart. That we have to really encourage them to be individuals and to separate, that they have to be able to cope ‘on their own’.

While I think that learning to cope in the world on their own is important, I am not convinced that it is the be all and end all. I don’t feel that we have the right to choose when, where or how they separate, or to push them into doing it if they don’t want to. Sure, there are times when they have no choice but to be apart, and we are working on helping them deal with that, but I am not sure they need to be apart to be ‘normal’ or to be ‘happy’.

But is having some ‘alone’ time the same thing?
Do they need time alone to unwind? de-stress?

I find all of this so tricky. I have no idea what it’s like to be a twin and most books and professionals who spout advice about this don’t either. Child development and parenting books and theories are based on your average singleton child. Being a twin, an identical twin, is different. It stands to reasons that twins would be different in some ways, especially socially and emotionally, but are those differences bad? Or is it reasonable and healthy to expect children who are genetically the same (98.9 % the same in our case) and have had pretty much the same life experiences to be pretty much the same and to not need the same ‘apart/alone time’ that others do?

As usual I come up with way more questions than answers.
Why oh why isn’t there some magical book that will tell me how to figure out this tricky stuff, because really I have no darn idea!

(Image above is of the girls their first week at home – they were 11 weeks)

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