Lost Tooth

I remember losing teeth. It was an exciting, fun thing that meant I was growing up just a little bit more.

With twins, however, or at least with my twins, it can be a little more complicated than that.

Dulce lost her tooth, finally, and miracle of miracles, Natalina was excited for her. Celebrated with her.

For a few moments.

Natalina was happy because she truly wanted Dulce to lose her tooth first. That way, her sister would prove it was safe. These are the things my children worry about.

Soon enough, though, the jubilant shrieks died down, and Natalina began with the quiet ribbing. She didn't like the way the big tooth looked, she said. She thought Dulce looked better with her little teeth.

We're going back and forth right now between teasing and support, and honestly, that's more than I'd hoped for. Particularly coming from a little girl who just an hour ago threw a tantrum at a party because she'd eaten her entire slice of pizza and Dulce had eaten just half. This is the life we live.

For now, we'll take what we get, and the little girl who doesn't believe in the tooth fairy will get some money under her pillow tonight.





 

The Pulley of Twins

Let me weave for you the story of my morning:


The twins wake up. Dulce wakes Natalina up, which means Dulce starts out in the good mood, Natalina the bad.

Knowing that a calm, helpful mood earns happy parents, Dulce capitalizes on this. She eats her breakfast without complaint, gives me hugs, and is generally chipper and easy going. Natalina cries about wanting to go back to bed (which is an option she could have taken), cries about eating breakfast, calls us all mean, and is generally ornery.

This goes on for an hour.

Then, Dulce finds a little plastic puppy she'd painted yesterday. The paint had somehow gotten messed up. She freaks out, throws herself on the ground (by the way, these instances are a lot rarer these days. Most of the time, my kids are actually human beings at this point. It's glorious.) Anyway, I send her to her room to calm down, where she continues to be inconsolable. I turn to Lilly.

Who has miraculously transformed from cranky, pissed-off child to happy-go-lucky, compliant girl. She even offers to take the mistake dog instead of Dulce and attempt to repaint it. (Unheard of). She cheerily got dressed and made her bed. Because Dulce was crying.

And when something happens and Natalina starts tantruming, the pulley will shift again.

In this way, I perpetually have one "good" kid, and one "bad" kid.

Which is better on the face of it than two tantruming kids, but underneath, not so much. It speaks to a larger issue with my twins. Their perpetual, frustrating, maddening competition with each other.

Every single thing they do is only to outshine the other. Every single thing that happens is an accolade for one and a slight for the other. They spend nearly all their mental energy thinking about their twin and whether she is in a better position than the first.

And there are no positions in our house. My husband and I make it clear we don't care about the she-said/she-said crap. We don't favor anyone or anything. We have no idea why it is like this. We work to fix it by repeating that they are different girls and that it is not a competition. To limited success.

Twins. I just don't know about them.

The Twin Continuum

I don't know if this happens to anyone else or if it's just our family, but my twins operate on a continuum. Or maybe a more accurate description is a scale. I don't know. All I do know is that they are convinced that the other twin's behavior is a reflection of themselves in the opposite way.

So that, the worse one twin behaves, the better the other one feels. They're caught in this weird reality where behaving is good, but the other one misbehaving is better. It makes them more good than regular behaving would have.

And they follow strict rules in regard to this.

For instance, yesterday, Dulce coughed on the graham cracker I gave her, and started to tantrum about wanting a new one, even though I told her that her own cough on her own cracker didn't matter. Natalina came by to get her cracker and promptly dropped it on the floor, breaking it into a few pieces. She automatically went beserk, ratcheting up the emotion in the room to 60 from 0, far outstripping Dulce in her attempt at discontent over her own cracker. On Facebook, I said "feeling the quota met, Dulce took her cracker back and ate it quietly."

But that's not quite correct.

In fact, Dulce broke her cracker into pieces and then ate it, just to show everyone (quietly) how cool she was with broken-cracker-eating. Because Natalina was acting out, Dulce felt good, like "the good child."

Now, before we go further, I swear I do not promote this in any way!!!! I'm never like, "why can't you just be like your sister" or "Dulce is behaving right now and you are not." I do everything in my power to treat them separately, and don't think it's purely for them. It's for me. I need them to act like individual people. It's exhausting living this way.

On the opposite end, I cannot give one of them a compliment without the other one feeling like I've insulted them. I've mentioned this before. If I tell one she's done a good job, the other hears, "you did a bad job." If I tell one she's funny, the other one hears "you're not funny at all, why can't you be more like your sister."

They are constantly telling me they feel I love the other one better than them, when I give even the slightest individual attention to either of them. It's infuriating and frustrating and so hard to deal with.

My twins feel like they are sharing the goodness, in a sense. Like there is a limited quality of good and only when one gives up some of her 50 percent can the other grab up that excess. It's fully ridiculous in every way. And it leaves them bitter competitors in everything.

I can't give them different identities. They won't take them. Any difference at all is analyzed. The activity for each kid is taken apart and weighed in every aspect for "goodness" and "badness", "favored stature" and "unfavored stature". And mind you, these are all made up. They make up definitions of good and bad in their own minds, which makes it extra confusing to me, because I never know which twin is going to feel like she got the good deal and which is going to feel short-shifted for completely equal alternatives.

Twins are hard, guys.

Here are some shitty pictures to illustrate what I'm trying to say:

I haven't figured out how to fix this yet (obviously). Suggestions are certainly welcome.