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.