Thursday, June 22, 2006

Seeing Double


Everywhere I look I see twin strollers. Hardly anybody is having children one-at-a-time anymore. So energy efficient! Two birds with one stone. It's the Industrial Revolution all over again.

I gave birth to my first child the same day my Persian cat, Kiisaa, produced her first litter of five. When I came home from the hospital, she visited me in bed, glanced disdainfully at my daughter as if to say, "What? Only ONE?" and proceeded to drag her kittens by the neck up two flights of stairs, one kitten at a time, leaped heavily onto my bed and plunked it on the coverlet for my approval. She was clearly showing me how it should be done.

Twins used to be rare. I knew only two sets, both identical, when I was in grade school: The Bader boys, cruelly nicknamed the Monkey Twins for obvious reasons, and the Manck girls, who looked so much alike that their own mother couldn't tell them apart. Everyone called them both "Twinny." Both families enjoyed a certain celebrity for having flaunted convention so spectacularly.

Julia Roberts, with the help of fertility drugs, although she denied it, brought the phenomenon to Hollywood, thereby making it official: We are a nation of reproductive overkill.

One small step for woman, one giant baby step for womankind. Kiisaa would be pleased.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Haven't we become a nation of EVERYTHING overkill? Really enjoying your blog so far...discovered by way of Rude in Public (also a fab blog).

heartinsanfrancisco said...

Thanks for the kind words, Bella. Glad you could stop by.

Rude in Public is indeed a great blog -- ProudMary is super smart and funny.

And yes, we definitely have become the Lords of Overkill. (Sounds like a rock band.)

Anonymous said...

thanks, both of you, for the kind words! I'm very flattered.

Have to point out on the topic of human twins, though-- women have careers now, get married later, and have babies sometimes way after that. Hence, a big boom in fetility aid... also hence, far more twins. :)

heartinsanfrancisco said...

You're right of course. In the early days of fertility treatments, there was an epidemic of quadruplets and quintuplets, even an occasional sextuplet birth, and a very high rate of infant mortality among them. The prevalence of twins now represents a great deal of fine tuning the drugs.

I think it's lovely, by the way, that so many people willl grow up with a twin.