Holding Twins!

I got to hold month old TWINS last Thursday! Such a high! It’s JOY doubled. 

Having other arms nearby to help out is essential for a mama who is doing wall to wall nursing. This Mama in question is blessed with a wonderful and very present mother of her own. Grandma’s arms are rarely empty now either, while the daddy is at the office. One twin wakes; the other dozes. Whoever is awake wants to feed. There’s no escaping the fact that as these hungry mouths need to be filled. Nursing mom must provide the food. Fortunately, in the case of this family I got to visit, dad helps out a lot with night time bottle feedings using frozen breast milk, which mom has expressed earlier, so she can get some well-deserved sleep.

If a couple can survive the first year with twins, their marriage can survive just about anything. Sleep deprivation is like a gigantic magnifying glass over all the little disagreements that normally happen between folks. It’s good to hone and clarify communication so that when the chips are down and sleep is not happening one or both don’t come to a conversation loaded for bear.

Owning our own ingredients in the emotional-stew of family life is crucial to the mental health of all concerned. This is especially true for the youngest members of the family. When parents can differentiate their own stuff and reassure the babies, children or teens that the parental grumpiness of the moment is their very own “potato,” and is not about the child but about something all together different, it goes a long way toward freeing those aforementioned family members to breathe a sigh of relief that all they need to take care of is their own “carrots.” This is true even in the absence of perceivable language skills.

In Parenting from the Inside Out, author Daniel Siegel, MD examines the importance of the reparative sequence. After an episode where a well-meaning parent has “lost it” and yelled or done something the child perceives as scary or out of congruence with the moment, if the parent acknowledges the gaffe, names it and apologizes and differentiates for the child what really happened, (no matter how young the child), it builds emotional resilience. Even if the apology and differentiation happen later – even up to forty eight hours later for children older than two years – it makes a difference to the child, helping to build trust, esteem and resilience. 

Example: Mom and babe are lovingly gazing into one anothers eyes and playing “Peek-a-boo.” The phone rings. Mom says: “Oh, telephone! I’ll be right back.” Baby is still in play mode and eagerly awaiting mom’s return to continue the game. Mom comes back distraught by news on the other end of the phone. She is distracted, frowning, no longer focused on the game and gets upset when the baby upchucks some milk onto the clean crib sheet. Baby begins to cry – wondering where the loving mom went.

It would help the child immensely if mom could “come to her senses” and say, “I’m sorry. I heard some troubling news on the telephone and I’ll take care of it later. My upset is not about you. It’s not your fault that I’m upset. I’m sorry I was so grumpy. Let’s just change the sheet and continue our game.”

In our culture, the tricky part is trying to convince parents and adults in general who surround children that even newborns are completely sentient and are taking in the tone of vocal communication, facial expressions and actual words – everything is going into their marvelous brains for processing and storing.

Infants and under-two year olds do not yet have a temporal sense. Interestingly, neither have the temporal bones yet finished growing. They lack the mastoid process – that bony ridge behind the earlobe - until sometime after the second birthday. I’ve always wondered if there’s a correlation between the development of the mastoid bone and the development of awareness that time passes. What we do know is that for very little ones the present moment feels like forever.  

If you thought a bad moment was going to last forever do you think you’d be upset? I sure would feel a sense of overwhelm and despair! Overwhelm is not conducive to learning about the world. The less time we spend in overwhelm the easier it is to function and to navigate the world with ease and confidence.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.

                                                                                                                                   --Ernest Hemingway

Here’s an interesting point Dr. Siegel brings out in his book: When the reparative sequence is completed a child shows more resilience than if there’s never been a gaffe and subsequent repair. This doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to yell at our children repeatedly and then tell them we’re sorry, but it does mean we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves for those times we act out our frustration in front of our kids. We can use the skills of repairing the discord.

Parenting is the toughest job on the planet. Seemingly, babies come in to push every button we have so we can clean up our stuff. Could we cut ourselves a little slack and minimize the difficulties of the job by treating our children the way we would have loved to have been treated?