Ancient History: Part 3: How to cope with being a double room instead of a single

Although it sounds self-explanatory, what many mothers don't know or realise about having twins is that everything is double.  Many float through their days with visions of two cute sets of booties, two beautiful identical cots, two sets of all the adorable baby clothes.


What is not thought about is the two doses of hormones raging through your body.  For some moms, this barely affects them, and they float serenely into motherhood with hardly a twinge.  For others, this means double the morning sickness.  I, for example, acquired a loathing for Parmesan cheese to such an extent that I could not watch it on TV without running to the loo, a hatred that persists even to this day.

Twice the hormones also means twice the usual excitement on the pregnancy roller-coaster of emotions.  Ask the partner of a twin-bearing mom how easy it was to cope with all the usual ups and downs of pregnancy times two - the response might not be pretty.  About half-way through my pregnancy, I developed a craving for pickled onions that could be satisfied by nothing other then a particular brand, easily available from the supermarket 11 300 kilometers away.  No amount of persuasion by my better half that "these onions are just as good" would work - I was having none of them.  In fact, to this day (shamefully, I might add), we have an entire shelf of bottled pickled onions of various persuasions in our fridge, from the episode in our lives where the Sweetpea naively believed he could find a replacement for my pickled onions somewhere closer to home.


One interesting factoid that I had not expected was the fainting.  Around the six month mark, having felt amazing for a few months by then and well over the morning sickness, I blithely leaped out of a chair to answer the phone and promptly keeled over.  Romantically, my hubby had just returned from work and was there to catch me in his arms as I fell.  He remained calm throughout, talking to me quietly and not freaking out at all (something you would expect from a man who deals with heavily pregnant women every day of his life) but to tell the truth, I was a bit miffed that he hadn't freaked out even just a teeny bit.  After all, it was probably the most dramatic thing that had happened to me and here he was remaining calm. I expected some wailing and gnashing of teeth, to tell the truth.  But anyway, he explained to me that the reason I was passing out now was my extremely low blood pressure - a common side-effect of pregnancy and exacerbated with having twins.  This was good to know, but not very helpful when I continued to faint in the local supermarket, while at work, and also while at the theater.

Perhaps the least exciting of being a double room instead of a single was the fact that a double room, simply by its nature, is LARGER.  And when I say larger, I mean the size of a small ocean liner larger.  I think that in my last few weeks of pregnancy (I carried until 38 weeks, which is seen as term for twins) I was both six foot high and six foot wide, a phenomenon not achieved by many in their lifetimes.

What are your stories of surviving being a room for two?