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They're twins not weirdos
'Double trouble!' bellows a man collecting litter in the park.
'You've got your hands full,' remarks an elderly lady.
'Ooh, I saw this documentary about twins,' says a mum with toddler. 'They were separated at birth and reunited at 70 and – you never guess what…'
'They were wearing identical cardigans,' I say, flatly.
'Not only that! They were dressed identically. Right down to their hair slides.'
Well, blow me down. I have heard dozens of versions of this hair slide story, and am well practised at gasping, 'No! Anyway, must dash. I'm late for a meeting of the Spooky Twin Society.'
Yes, I have twins. Nothing particularly unusual in that: twins are on the increase and, no, they don’t communicate telepathically. Mine are three-year-old boys who get up to three-year-old boy shenanigans: swinging from curtains, smearing jam on the telly, your usual endearing kid stuff.
Yet twins are perceived as something odd – even scary. I'm often asked if they speak a private language. I am tempted to fib that they huddle in corners, whispering, 'Mayagoo-dwaddle,' which I interpret as, 'Orange juice please, Mummy.' But they don't. They yell, 'Ah wanna chocolate biscuit,' approximately 28 times a day, like any other human being under five years old.
To the outside world, however, they are undeniably 'different'. When they started part-time nursery at 18 months, one of the carers asked, 'Do they have separate personalities?'
I blinked at her. Did she expect that they might share one giant-sized personality with no room for individual quirks? 'No, they are different people,' I told her, patiently. She paused, as if waiting for a run-down of each child's nature. People often assume they can be summed up neatly: 'I see that Dexter is the affectionate one and Sam is more, er, complex,' said a fellow mother at a toddler group. OK, at that moment Dex was sitting patiently on my knee while Sam was attempting to shut another child's head in an oven. But it's never as simple as easy one/tricky one. They can both be little monsters, frankly.
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