On raising twins
I WAS KILLING TIME and sheltering from the rain in Monaghan bus station recently when I saw a diverting poster for the second annual Carrickmacross Twins Parade. With a two-year-old set at home, I was intrigued if mildly queasy about the idea of them going on parade under the twin banner, even for a charity fund-raiser. Still, I took the number and saved it on my phone under Paddy Twins. Then I promptly forgot all about it.
Small country this. The following week I came face to face with that very man in the RTÉ radio centre when I took part in a Jedward-inspired discussion about twins on the John Murray show. It turns out Paddy Twins is Paddy Gollogly, the depot inspector at Monaghan bus station. He doesn’t look much like his twin brother Jimmy but they complement each other beautifully, like finely crushed crisps mixed together with peanuts (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it).
Jimmy, a teacher, is quieter and a bit of a twinorak who gathers twin-related trivia from Shakespeare quotes to J-Lo notes for Paddy, who describes himself as the “mouth” of the operation. Paddy is president of the Lions Club in Carrickmacross and the twins parade was his idea. As I understand it, the rest of the club thought the idea of the parade was a joke, but Jimmy wouldn’t let it lie.
He finally convinced them to hold the first one last year when 231 sets of twins paraded around Carrickmacross raising thousands for a local Alzheimer’s charity and creating a new Irish record for the most twins gathered in one location.
This year they’ve expanded the event to include triplets and quads, calling it the Twins+ Parade. That means that local Co Monaghan woman Bernadette Boyle can bring her two sets of twins and her triplets along if she feels like it. Although, with two other children on top of that lot, she probably doesn’t have the energy to even tie her shoelaces. She probably doesn’t do laces; it’s Velcro all the way in her house, I’d say.
Carrickmacross should be twinned with a town called Twinsburg in the US which attracts several thousand sets of twins each year for their annual Twins Day. The name of the Ohio town comes from identical twins Moses and Aaron Wilcox who in the early 19th century persuaded residents of what was then Millsville to change the name of the settlement to Twinsburg by promising six acres of public land and $20 towards the town’s first school. The brothers were in business together all their lives, married two sisters, each fathered nine children and died of the same illness within hours of each other. It’s the kind of story that propagates twin mystique.
Personally, I cried when I found out I was having twins. Tears of shock. Tears of hysteria. Yes, there were tears of joy but despite the state-of-the-art scanning equipment used to facilitate this verdict, I still demanded a recount.
The twin thing hasn’t been so important to us as the fact that we are lucky to have had two lovely children in one go. We don’t call them “the twins”. We don’t dress them the same or expect that they will have some mystical psychic bond on account of them having been born one minute apart. Our parenting approach so far has been about reinforcing their individuality, from putting them in different outfits to highlighting their individual likes and dislikes. One of them is mad for sweet stuff like her father, for example, and the other enjoys savoury food more, like her crushed crisps’n’nuts-loving mother.
As much as I love Jedward, I think I am wary of my two daughters growing up and being viewed as one bifurcated being. It could happen anyway, though. Apparently the parents of John and Edward wanted them to have different bedrooms but they insisted on not being separated. It seems their closeness was natural and inevitable rather than anything manufactured.
As much as I like to point out the characteristics that distinguish our girls from each other, so far personality wise they are remarkably alike. Recently, I noticed that they have the same rough patch of dry skin in exactly the same spot on the same arm, which spooks me out a bit and reminds me that they are monozygotic or identical twins. As much as I try to deny the mystique, there is a kind of magic in that kind of physical symmetry.
I told Paddy Twins that I wasn’t sure about the parade. That I didn’t dress them the same. That I don’t celebrate their “twinness”.
The award-winning PR maestro bus depot inspector replied: “Sure isn’t it a bit of craic and there are some people who don’t dress the twins alike. You won’t be the only ones and it’s a great family fun day apart from anything else,” which of course was the perfect answer.
At this point in their lives our girls can reel off their address and their surnames but they still don’t know that they are, drum roll, twins. There is a very strong possibility we’ll break the news to them next Saturday in Carrickmacross.
To register twins or multiples for the parade on June 4th in Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan see carrickmacross.ie.
In other news . . . The monthly Dublin Flea Market takes place at the Co-op in Newmarket Square, Dublin 8, tomorrow, for all your second-hand bike, retro furniture and white elephant stall-style needs. Great grub on offer, too. See Dublinflea.ie