Happy Birthday to Our Other Favorite Twins

I post with some regularity on a small general-interest internet forum. One section is devoted to pregnancy and parenting, and, as on many sites, those boards are broken down by trimester/child age range. To give you a sense of the small size of the forum, in any three-month age range there are maybe 25-30 people posting. So, small. Nothing like thebump.com or babycenter.com or any of those other hugely trafficked sites.

So it was a rather unlikely coincidence that there would be another poster on the site who was due with twins on the exact same day that I was. Unlikely and incredibly fortuitous, because once Julia and I started emailing each other off the board, we discovered that not only did we have many other things in common (including that we both graduated from Brown, a year apart), we also just plain really liked each other (I’ve used the phrase kindred spirits before and I’m not afraid to do it again), well beyond the shared experience of twin pregnancy (and, later, twin parenthood). We certainly had a lot to say about that topic above all else, though, and found ourselves emailing and Google chatting with great frequency about heartburn, hugeness, our fears about preterm labor and life with twins, and every other topic we could cram into our lengthy exchanges.

Well, a year ago today Julia and her husband Jeff took the plunge into twin parenthood and gave birth to their beautiful Ben and Elly Bea. I remember so clearly sitting on the couch, enormous, reading her announcement email, and feeling a little left behind — my friend was in the thick of it, loving and caring for two babies, and I was 36 miserable weeks pregnant and giving Matt instructions about what to do if my stomach were to rip away from my body when I rolled over that night (he was to root through my internal organs and save the babies).

Of course, a week later Matt and I jumped off that cliff ourselves, and Julia proved to be even more of a lifeline for me as I attempted to survive those harrowing early months. We both devoted our scant free time to furiously cranking out long emails in which we gave and sought advice, expressed and accepted encouragement, and marveled about how hard and amazing the whole thing was. (Mostly the former for a while. Lately a lot more of the latter.) At one point Julia aptly described it as writing to a diary that writes back (but not in the creepy Tom Riddle way). Through those emails (and some phone calls and, eventually, whole-family Skyping), Matt and I got to know Ben and Elly pretty well: we always had a pretty good sense of how they were sleeping, what they were eating, and even their, erm, digestive habits. We know their personality quirks and their most endearing habits. We’re pretty attached to them.

Unfortunately, they live 3,000 miles away from us, in Portland, Oregon, so in spite of the fact that we know Ben and Elly probably better than any other kids in the world aside from our own, we have never met them in person. And so today we had to celebrate their birthday from afar, with Julian trying to eat the party hat and Eloise for some reason wearing her crankiest pants. But Julia and I have big plans, beginning this summer when we all meet when they come to this coast to visit her family and continuing with our biannual trips to visit them Portland, then taking the kids to Prince Edward Island after they read Anne of Green Gables, and ultimately renting a series of houses in marvelous locations around the world. The adults will sip the local beverage of choice and the kids will play quietly and delightfully (all best friends, of course).

But for now, we have to be content with wishing Ben and Elly happy birthday via blog post, and congratulating Julia and Jeff on surviving the first year. It looks as though Matt and I are going to, too, and it’s in no small part thanks to their fabulous support and sanity-saving humor. I am sure we will all manage to stay in touch even after everything becomes easy-peasy in Year Two.

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