Double trouble

Getting two for the price of one means twice the challenge, and the birth is only the beginning

THEY MAY not be average parents in any other way, but film star couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt must have been very relieved to leave the hospital in Nice 10 days ago with two healthy babies. Getting two for the price of one inevitably increases the risks during pregnancy and delivery; twins are more likely to be premature and have a low birth weight.

But once the medical complications are behind you, the challenge of raising two children in tandem is just beginning. And only those who have gone through the experience of multiple births really know what it is like.

It’s hardly surprising then that Jolie and Pitt have reportedly been looking for advice from other parents in Hollywood circles who have had twins, such as Julia Roberts and Danny Moder, who have a son and a daughter, Phinnaeus and Hazel, now three.

At least celebrity couples are not short of helping hands. The latest additions to the Pitt-Jolie family, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, are likely to have at least one nanny each. With another four children in the household – birth daughter, Shiloh, who was born in Namibia in 2006, and three adopted children: Cambodian-born son Maddox, daughter Zahara from Ethiopia and Pax from Vietnam – there is plenty of work for an entire childcare team.

However, no matter how wealthy you are, early months with twins are tough. The hired help can only do so much. Jolie was reported to have breastfed Shiloh, but feeding twins is exhausting.

Charlotte O’Brien (41), the mother of twin girls Emilie and Lucy, managed it for six weeks and was then relieved to switch to bottles. “It’s too demanding with two of them, they don’t feed at the same time.”

But Corrinna Moore (37), whose twins boys, Cormac and Aran, were born six weeks early and spent 12 days in special care, says the hospital helped her by starting a routine where they were fed at the same time. “I don’t know if, left to my own devices, I would have achieved such a fine-tuned routine.”

When she left Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London, where she was living at the time, she continued to do what she had been advised – when one woke to feed, she woke the other and put one to each breast at the same time.

“Otherwise you wouldn’t have a minute to yourself.”

Their tummies were so small, they were feeding every one-and-a-half hours so even nursing them simultaneously was a pretty constant business.

“One day I was determined to get out of the house,” Moore recalls. “But by the time I had them fed, then the bag packed and was out the door, they started to cry: they needed feeding again. I sat down and cried too.

“You can’t breastfeed twins in public. You need your couch and your feeding pillows.”

As for any parent of a new-born, it’s the feeding and the sleeping which are the biggest issues in the first few months – but with twins it’s undoubtedly at least double the trouble.

“I will never forget those first six months of no sleep at all,” says O’Brien. She and her husband, Ashley, look back and say “how did we do it?”.

“Emilie never slept through until she was a year old. At one stage she was waking every half hour. For the first eight weeks they were together in the same room. Then we put them in separate bedrooms and that was the first night Lucy slept through.”

Out of sheer exhaustion, the couple hired a night nurse three times a week for a while, which was a life-saver for them. The moment she came in the door, the nurse took charge of the babies and sent the O’Briens straight to bed. Those were the months of physical slog but now, with the girls aged two-and-a-half, there’s a whole new set of challenges.

“They are very strong willed, strong personalities,” O’Brien says of the two fair-haired girls as they confidently explore the home of the Moores who live near them in Dalkey, Co Dublin.

“But they are very different and have been since birth. Emilie is quite demanding; Lucy is quieter and will sit and do things on her own.

“They both want to be with me. It’s very hard when there’s two children, one grabbing at each leg, and you can’t explain why you can’t pick them up at the same time. The moment they started to walk, it became difficult.

“They have no sense of danger and I have only one pair of hands. If I go anywhere, they inevitably want to go off in opposite directions. I do use reins but they don’t like them, they like the freedom.

“I went to Imaginosity which is quite big, with open spaces and four floors. Within five minutes I had lost one of them. It is a bit uncomfortable if you lose one,” she says wryly.

Moore laughs and says with her twins now aged six-and-a-half, she had forgotten what that was like. She recalls losing Cormac in Kew Gardens one day but at least she had a friend with her who could mind Aran while she ran “like a headless chicken” looking for the missing boy, thoughts of abductors and ponds racing through her mind before she found him happily playing hide-and-seek with her.

Like O’Brien, Moore’s twins were her first children, but she has gone on to have two more, two-year-old Lorcan and baby Aoife who was born last month. “In terms of practicalities, having one child at a time is easier,” she says. “But once you get twins to about two or three, it is easier than having a second child 18 months behind.

“I am glad I had the twins first. With subsequent children, the twins are so focused on each other they don’t care who comes after them. The sibling rivalry is for each other.”

Although both mothers emphasise that their twin children are very different individuals, in each case their rate of development has been remarkably similar.

“At 16 months, they started walking the same day, within 20 minutes of each other,” says O’Brien. “Emilie stood up, she was the first born; the other one watched her and then stood up too. I couldn’t believe it!”

“Aran and Cormac both crawled, stood and walked on the same days,” says Moore.

Before the girls started to speak recognisable words, they developed their own language for communicating with each other.

“They were quite definitely conversing and I would not understand a word. I found it amazing. They still do it in the mornings and the evenings; you can hear them chatting away in their room.”

The next milestone is toilet training. “I have bought two potties and from next week I am going to see where it takes me,” says O’Brien.

Moore did it with one potty with Cormac and Aran, encouraging them to pee into it at the same time, but that’s boys for you.

From age three onwards, the emotional issues can become more apparent as they start to socialise. Moore says it was only when the boys started playschool, and found people getting confused about who was who, that they started to be aware of being twins.

She and her husband Richard have been careful not to lump them together, by not dressing them the same or by calling them “the twins”. Although not identical, it is hard to tell them apart. Luckily they support different football teams, so spot a Liverpool shirt and you can be sure it’s Cormac, while for Aran it’s all Man Utd.

Emilie and Lucy wear the same clothes out of choice. “Initially everybody gave me matching outfits but now they won’t wear different clothes,” explains O’Brien. “If one has a spillage and I have to change her, I have to change the other one too.”

While the girls will be starting playschool in September, the boys are already two years into their primary education in separate classes. All the received wisdom is to separate single-sex twins at school if possible, says Moore, especially boys as they are so competitive.

“They had started bickering and we felt they needed individual attention. It has been brilliant. Separating them has diluted the competition.”

For all their talk about the practical problems in raising twins, and their shared guilt about the lack of one-on-one attention they can give, both mothers stress the joy as well.

“It is special, no doubt about it,” says O’Brien. “For me it’s an instant family; they’re company for each other which I am pretty sure will continue.”

Moore agrees: “You get double the pain but more than double the love back.”

swayman@irish-times.ie