She who pushes the pram wins (mostly)

Strolling along on a summer’s day, my partner pushing the pram and the boys faintly cooing, didn’t seem like the moment for an awesome magic trick. But it was. For that was the first time when I became invisible.

We fight, my partner and I, over who gets to push the pram. Yes, my arms hurt after propelling several stone of baby and buggy up or down a hill, but that negative is outweighed by two significant positives. The first is the general feeling of satisfaction I get from helping my children towards their destination. The second is that most people assume the person pushing the pram is the mother, while invisibility descends over ‘the other’.

Grandmothers, cooing over the twins, only notice the person whose hands are on the handle. Strangers at bus stops only comment to the one in charge of the buggy. At best ‘the other’ will get a supportive smile, like she is such a good friend to help out a mother with twins. But if ‘the other’ deigns to speak in reply to a question about first words or furthest crawl, she will receive only a puzzled, slightly offended look. Who are you, person who merely stands beside the pram-pushing mother, to answer a question about her children?

I get it, I do. Most people assume that if two women are present then the father is elsewhere. Only one mother can be present, for the majority of people only have one mother. So I get it. But I don’t like it. Nor does my partner, and thus we fight over who gets to push the pram.

There is the odd occasion, though, when I am glad to be ‘the other’. One day as my partner wheeled the boys home from fun at the swimming pool, a passing mother, also wielding a pram, stopped to ask whether the boys were breastfed. This is, apparently, an acceptable topic of conversation amongst strangers, so long as they both have babies. Now, I was the one who carried the twins and so all questions about breastfeeding are properly for me. I answered. The result? My partner received a look of pure evil, for she was daring to push the babies of another woman. ‘The other’ in charge of the pram? Unthinkable.

Just say ‘burble goo goo’ to strangers

All mothers knows with a clear sense of inevitability that once you are pushing a baby around, every journey involves inane chat with strangers about how cute/old/mobile your baby is. With twins, the situation is… well, doubled. Twins attract awe and sympathy from strangers in equal measure, especially when they are as gorgeous and smiley as mine (proud mother moment).

Don’t get me wrong – for the most part I enjoy the conversations. I’ll never object to telling anyone how perfectly behaved my boys are (proud, and slightly delusional, mother moment), how they coo at each other and play (ahem… fight over toys) together. But I always have at the back of my mind a hint of caution. You see, my twins have two mummies.

My partner and I followed the utterly conventional relationship trajectory of falling in love, getting ‘married’ (civil partnership) and then, with the aid of frankly amazing medical science, having kids. The boys are growing up in a stable and loving home, and I am so used to my friends and family treating us like any other family that I forget that we are, objectively, unusual. But when I talk to strangers on the train there is always a small part of me that is assessing whether they are likely to have an issue with my personal circumstances.

And then something happens that makes me remember how wonderful people can be. I was on a London suburban train with my partner and the twins, who instantly befriended a young man by grinning madly at him. The young man told us that he was a twin too and warned us about the trouble we could expect when the boys get old enough to hit each other properly. Then, as he left the train, he leaned over the pram and whispered, “Be good for your mummies, boys.”

That was it. No double take, no raised eyebrow, just an instant appraisal of the situation and an utter lack of giving a damn. It was a lovely moment. I am not complacent about the sad fact that there are people in the world who object strongly to our family set up. But I love the way that, just like any other mother, I am approached by strangers wanting to comment on the adorable cuteness of my babies, and not on the person whose hand I am holding.

The day the penises took over

A few weeks ago the day came when I had been a mother of twins for a whole year. And with that important milestone came the realisation that I had been outnumbered by penises for just as long. Within my own house, that is. I don’t count the ones I may pass on the street and that, thankfully, I rarely see.

 

Let me explain. When my partner and I moved in together there was only one penis. It belonged to the cat. My partner and I, both being female, felt in the ascendance. After a few years, I decided that we needed to be more of a lesbian stereotype, so I got a another cat. A male cat. That made two of us (women) and two of them (penises). Things felt balanced.

 

Then, after a house purchase and a civil partnership, my partner and I somehow decided that we were sufficiently grown up and responsible to become parents. I can’t quite remember how the conversation went, but I think I was drunk. Jump forwards 18 months and we became the ridiculously proud parents of two baby boys, who for the purposes of this blog I shall call A and R.

 

After a fraught and premature end to my pregnancy the tiny little mites spent nearly three weeks in intensive care. This made the day we got to take them home even more momentous, and for many reasons. The way we fell in love with them all over again. The pride I felt at seeing my partner rocking our son to sleep. The never-again reached level of cleanliness in our flat.

 

And the fact that while from then on there were two of us (women) and four of them (penises), things still felt balanced.