When my twin boys were born, four years ago, I took enormous pains to stock their bedroom with a wide range of books, and when I say “took enormous pains”, I mean “ordered them online from my phone while lying in bed”. (Do you think I left the house to go shopping? Did you miss the part when I said I had twins?)
We are in the jumpy, high water days of identity politics, constantly told how important representation is in the stories we tell ourselves. I agree with all that. Hell, I wrote a book about it, in which I ranted about modern Hollywood movies, the ones where the white male heterosexual is still seen as the baseline norm. No way would my boys grow up thinking like that, I told myself, smugly, as I ordered brilliant books like Nadia Shireen’s Billy And The Beast and Andrea Beaty’s Ada Twist, Scientist. My children would never see any minority group as weird. But there was one thing I had overlooked, and that is what I shall call “the twin problem”.
The release of Dr Sleep, the sequel to The Shining, has sparked a renewed interest in the most infamous twins in cinematic history, the Grady twins, played in the original film by Louise and Lisa Burns. When it comes to the creepiness of twins, the Grady twins are, if not the original version (the Ancient Greeks and the Bible, followed by Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe, were also no slouches on the subject), then certainly the ultimate. And the Burns sisters have happily played up to that, as Cosmopolitan emphasised in a recent interview. “We’re naturally spooky!” they said. “But we did practise our timing, saying things in unison.”
Twins in literature are generally depicted as interchangeable (Erich Kästner’s Lisa and Lottie, which inspired The Parent Trap; the Weasley twins in Harry Potter; Thompson and Thomson in Tintin), and/or creepy (Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Through The Looking Glass; Carrie and Cory in Flowers In The Attic). In film, there are the psychosexual gynaecologists in Dead Ringers, the evil censors who talk as one in Good Morning, Vietnam, and the goofy Kaufman brothers in Adaptation, none of whom I would exactly call role models. My boys are too young to read or watch any of this, but they do have Little Miss Twins from the Mr Men series. Like all Mr Men books, it is an intensely weird story, but this one especially so. The seemingly adult Little Miss Twins live together in total co-dependency, say everything twice, and – in a decidedly Pinter-esque plot twist – welcome in a strange man (Mr Nosey, for the record) who forces them to entertain him for the rest of the day. These are not messages I wish my boys to take on board.
And yet, I can already see the messages starting to stick, as adults ask me if they’re psychic (hard side eye) and their friends tell them how weird it is that they have the same birthday. My boys aren’t identical yet still people tell me they can’t tell them apart; as with Cosmo assuming twins always talk in unison, people hear the word “twins” and think: “Do my eyes deceive me? Double vision!” Incidentally, while we’re on this subject, here is a handy cut-out-and-keep guide of things not to say to a parent of twins: “Wow, how can you tell them apart?” (I flip a coin.) “My kids are 14 months apart so they’re basically twins, too!” (Look, I’m not saying there’s a competition for parental endurance – there is: I win it – but unless you were pregnant with two babies at the same time and then had to learn the extremely sexy art of double-breastfeeding, then you do not have twins.) “Do they have a secret language?” (Yes, and they’re saying that I should delete your number from my phone.)
If the idea of two babies gestating inside a woman at the same time blows your mind, then rest assured, that’s nothing to how the woman herself feels. But when my daughter was born over the summer, one of the first things my boys asked me was whether she was lonely, and I worry about that, too: only one baby in the cot, the pram, my arms? How unnatural! I’ve met a lot of twins by now (twin parents gravitate towards one another, like people who have been through an earthquake or another extreme event). And yes, twins tend to be close, as siblings who have never known life without one another would be. But they are as individualised as any brother or sister, as sweet as you’d expect from children for whom sharing has, since conception, been instinctive.
One of the best pieces of advice I got was to never call them “the twins” but always to use their names. Because twins are not what they are, but who, and in the absence of a book that tells them this, I tell them myself. And then I tell my boys about their real twin superpower, which is that every time I leave the house with them, I get to have both my hands held. While my boys might not be psychic, they know that makes me feel like the luckiest person in the world.
