Day 264 - If You Can't Say Something Nice...

A few weekends ago, Lisa and I were visiting our friends, Heidi and Brian, at their furniture store in Culver City. While there a guy was wandering around with a baby in a stroller. Of course since I had the twins with me, he came up to me and we struck a conversation. All the standard questions: "How old are they?" "One boy, one girl?" "Why are they so cute when you're such a geek?"

Once all of his questions were answered about the twins, the uncomfortable silence of not knowing where else to go with this conversation entered the fray. Usually I end the talks with an abrupt "Well I better go breast feed the kids now." But this time the guy broke the silence and said, "I have twins too. They're over there." He pointed to two girls probably four or five years old resembling the creepy twins in The Shining standing next to a large apothecary table (Not to be confused with the Mel Gibson line of Apocalypto patio furniture).

My generic question to parents of older twins is "When does it get easier?" The answer varies from two to four to never. I always find it peculiar when people say never because how do they know it will never get easier? Were their twins assholes, then they suddenly died in a fatal see-saw accident and that's why they can say it never got easier?

My new found furniture store buddy started to answer my standard question by saying that when they found out they were going to have twins, they braced for the worst. All of their friends were telling them how difficult it would be, but when their twins were born they thought it was relatively easy. They scoffed at their friends for telling them how hard it would be.

I told him that's exactly the way we felt! That it doesn't seem that bad. Deep inside, I felt like I found my new BFF. Would it be too metrosexual to ask him for his phone number?

He then continued to tell me that after they had their new baby (just one this time), he realized what his friends were talking about: having one kid is SO...MUCH...EASIER. I'm not exaggerating the all-caps and the ellipses. That's the way he said it. The guy continued to tell me the differences of one versus two kids emphasizing how much worse it is with twins. After a few minutes more of his diatribe, he was called off by his wife and left me stranded with my twin devil spawn.

Although almost two weeks have past since the incident, the more I thought about what he told me the more I got angry about it. Why tell me how difficult it is with twins? Why tell me all the virtues of having one baby and trash the twins? It's a slap in the face by someone who shouldn't because we shared a common bond. My BFF became a SOB!

It is true that Lisa and I are comfortable raising twins because we don't know any better. We have nothing to compare it to. But who really cares if it might be more difficult? There will always be things that are easier and more difficult to do, but what really matters is how you deal with your present situation. All I can say is that we are perfectly happy raising Emma and Andrew, and we'll keep all other opinions to ourselves.

Except for triplets. Who the hell would want triplets? Crazy, medicated Nazis...that's who!