A Recollection: Life as Mom of One Year Old Twins

Now that my twins are seven, I found myself recollecting what it was like when they were one year old. I got a clear image of walking them in the stroller to a Twilight Concert in Palo Alto and it reminded me of how far we've come: how needy the twins used to be, and how comparatively easy they are now. So, stroll along with me in a trip down memory lane:

A sunny day, Spring, 2003. I leaned into my red SUV, the only jogging stroller big enough to carry my litter, my twins, “my great big buckets of moona-fish,” as my mom said when she saw them for the first time. My mom always said, with an unapologetic broad smile, that her eccentric nicknames “just sounded right.”

Pushing down the stroller bar, I set my cherubs into fits of glee as we did wheelies over the spiky death stars that dropped from the scalloped canopy onto the sidewalk. I hammed it up, swerving the stroller around real and imagined obstacles to make them laugh. A poke from the gargantuan woody burrs or a sharp rock could flat-tire us and we’d never roll to the outdoor concert. To the west, the last-to-rise foothills between Palo Alto and the Pacific tossed off their fuzzy fog blanket for the day, and prairie-dogged over the trees.

My wide load and I passed the HP garage, the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley.” The feel of the stroller’s foam grip always irritated me. Guy-Guy yammered the entire walk. He was bi-modal. He was either sleeping or talking, usually about a “frozen” (fire engine) or a “make-up truck” (pick up truck.) His sister Kitty Cat was slung next to him, naming neighborhood animals. For each one, she needed me to say some variation of “I saw it, too!"

After twenty minutes of pushing, we pierced through the hubbub of University Avenue. I was sweating. As the street noise died down and commercial buildings turned shingled California bungalows, we were in the brackish space between suburban traffic sounds and music billowing from the park. I couldn’t make out the melody yet, or decipher whether or not I knew the song, but I started to bounce my sandaled feet in time to the beat.

We crossed Everett Street, entering Johnson Park, where hundreds of people were already assembled in the dip in the grass bowl. Older people who didn’t have to haul a stroller and kids to the park sat in lawn chairs. Moms sat on blankets chatting, gesticulating over the loud music, and handing food to their kids. Clusters of kids ran, weaving through the chairs and crowd. Hippie women, those who pre-dated me and my high-tech boom brethren in Palo Alto, danced alone, as though at a Grateful Dead reunion tour.

This was the same park where a few months ago, I overheard some Spanish-speaking nannies talking about me and my kids. If they wanted to identify us, they could have whispered to each other, but they were loud. I thought they would have said something about the six-foot tall mom and her twins.

“Mira! La muy Blanca Blanca y el gordito,” they said.

I smiled to myself and shot them a look. I looked too white to understand Spanish. I was, indeed, pale at the time. And, yes, one-year-old Guy-Guy was snuggly fat – his perfectly fitted full-length pants were actually shorts made for five year olds. Kitty Cat escaped their commentary, but most said, with her brown hair and big smile, that she looked like my mom. I loved that, especially since my mom had passed away less than a year before.

We were a giant drill-bit boring into the crowd. I smiled apologetically and made warm eye contact to augment my thanks for yielding to my “pardon mes” and “excuse mes.” I parked near the sandy playground and unclipped the kids’ shoulder restraints, which I used more for child-control than for safety. Like a maitre d’ I swung open the playground gate, hoping my twins would be lured in by the circa 1970 cement slide or the wobbly wooden bridge on the play structure. No go. I suggested, in my enthusiastic sell-job mom tone, careful to emphasize the noun they would understand, that they “go play in the sand!” They knew I was trying to dismiss them. My twins saw me as their overgrown triplet playmate who would dig with them, yet I wanted to hear the music while they played at a slight distance from me.

They got frustrated.

“Mamamamama!” they implored.

“Just a minute,” I said, lilting, or maybe I mooshed up the phrase from saying it too much, like my mom used to. “’Saminute,” she’d say, exhaling heavily through her nose while writing letters in her proper blue fountain pen.

With my twins, I’d already abused the promised “one minute” too many times, not that they knew what a minute was. I always took too long to bring my attention back to them, as far as their one-year old brains were concerned. Soft little hands grabbed mine and pulled some more.

And, as much as I wanted to listen to the music, maybe move to it a bit, too, I was drawn back to mommydom - the role that demanded 100% of my attention, 100% of the time. I had to make sure they didn't eat sand, that they didn't climb up the play structure and fall off, and that they didn't fight with themselves or other kids. That was the reality that the music tempted me to ignore. I let the music fade into the background as I turned my attention where it belonged: back to my one year old twins, their diapers, their frustrations, their funny phrases, their love.

Alix is working on a book about wind energy. This is an original Silicon Valley Moms Blog post.