Maybe the surviving children themselves insist on not being “twins”? (Er, that’s how it is in the Lemony Snicket books, anyway.) Kids don’t necessarily get the difference between casual conversation and the other kind; maybe they were upset by having their sibling “forgotten”. (Particularly if it was the loss of an older child, not a baby.)
My guess would be that the loss of the third child was relatively recent. I would think that if the third child had died at birth or shortly after, at some point the parents would start thinking of the remaining two as “the twins”. But then IANAParent, so I can only speculate.
Well, the problem with idle comments is sometimes they run smack into real life tragedies. So the lady made you a little uncomfortable. It’s nothing to how uncomfortable she is. Sometime life throws us stuff that doesn’t fit into neat little social categories.
My first baby died when she was 4 months old. I have two sons now, 6 and 3. It will be eight years since her birth next month and I still haven’t figured out how to always handle stuff with finesse.
The hardest was when I was visibly pregnant with my older son, whose birthday is eighteen months after my daughter’s. People were always asking me if this was my first. It’s an idle conversational question. That just happened to occasionally make me dissolve into tears.
I try not to smack people over the head with my personal tragedy. I will rarely answer “how many children do you have” or “is he your oldest” with information about my daughter if it is someone I am never going to see again, but it does always bring up emotion for me (much more manageable now).
What is harder is when I’m getting to know somebody new. On the one hand, if we are just going to be casual acquaintances, I really don’t care to tell the whole story, but if we end up being real friends, it can loom large as an untold secret until I find a way to talk about it without being socially inappropriate.
so cut the lady some slack is what I’m sayin.
Well, I think that’s what “surviving triplets” mean, that one of them died, but not necessarily at birth. It’s just that we have to be careful what we say around people we don’t really know because we might accidentally say something that might remind them of a personal tragedy. Something like that happened to me. I went to my friend’s house (well, she was my partner for this science project and she wasn’t really my friend at the time, but now she is) for the first time. I saw a bunch of old pictures on her desk and they were really old, like she had recently found them in the attic. The pictures were of her parents and they were holding a baby. I asked her out of curiosity, “Hey, is this you or your brother?” because she has a brother who’s a year younger than us. She said in a serious voice, “Oh, no. That’s my parents’ first child.” I just said, “Oh” in a polite tone. And then I didn’t say anything else, so we dropped it. Later, she told me that her brother had died when he was six months, but she never told me how and I’ve never asked nor do I want to.
This woman hasn’t learned how to handle whatever loss occurred. Don’t beat yourself up over it. Though you could have yelled after her, " Hey, mind if I run over your puppy while I’m at it?
Your question was honest and sincere and she gave you a gruff answer.
Given the fact that just about ever set of multiple births that are going on now are probably IVF or some kind of Egg Stimulant Pill involved, she’s probably A) still reeling from the hormonal highs (YAY!) b) Still Broke from the treatments and diaper bill C) Exhausted duh and D) At Disney in Sweltering Heat.
It’s better than a Trifecta for you!! Sorry, on Quattrofecto’s bring on buttheads and morans.
w00t!
grin The Quagmires were the first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title.
This is why I never talk to strangers.
having almost lost a naturally conceived twin at birth 6 months ago, i don’t even want to speculate on what the mother was thinking. i would cut her slack.
don’t beat yourself up over her comments either.
The difference is that the Quagmire triplets lost their brother as older children, and remember him clearly and fondly. In their minds, they are triplets, even though there are only two of them, and to insist on it honors the brother’s memory. I’d say the same even if they weren’t fictional.
These kids, though, are very small, and probably have no memory of their third sibling. I’m torn between sympathy for the mother, who is indeed the mother of triplets, and sympathy for the kids, who will grow up with a strong sense that one of them is missing.
I doubt they’ll be as messed up as some people suggest. I had a student who considered himself a twin, even though his brother had died at childbirth, and was fairly well adjusted while still honoring the memory of the twin he’d never met.
Pack your sunblock. I hear hell is hot this time of year.
I laughed way too hard at that.
There will never be one easy answer for this woman or her family, and it will depend on the situation. My youngest sister died when she was four (I was nine), and to this day, the question “How many kids in your family?” will get a different answer depending on who’s asking and exactly how they ask. How many kids did my mom have? Five girls. How many sisters do I have? Three. It gets complicated.
She could have, there are many different ways she could have responded. However, she choose to say what she did, I really don’t see a problem with it.
Well, I usually answer “two” when someone asks how many kids I have, but it’s pretty hard to get a bunch of women together without someone bringing up birth stories, so most of my co-workers etc. know about Johnny.
We keep a picture of him in the livingroom and he’s mentioned around the house fairly often in casual conversation. You know, “the place we lived when Johhny was born”, that sort of thing. Jeez, he’d be twenty-one already.
Since he died at six months, before Dan or Josh was born, they don’t think of themselves as “three”. On the whole, everyone’s pretty comfortable with talking about him.
I think the triplet’s mom was a bit TMI, but not really too out of line. Sometimes it’s hard to know how to handle that stuff, especially early on. I’d have probably made a sympathetic noise and just said something low key like, "Having fun, kids? or commented on the weather or line-up.
I disagree, the fact is that they are twins; that there were originally three, but one is not present doesn’t change this - even if the third one had survived, but was somewhere else, the two - considered together in the absence of context - are twins.
Mangetrout, not trying to bust chops. But I bet the parent would strongly disagree and it would open up some nasty wounds to say that.
I’m amazed I didn’t lose it when someone well meaningly mentioned to me that at least one child was healthy when it wasn’t certain if her twin would survive or have significant brain damage.
No, twins are two chilren born at the same time of the same mother; triplets are three children born at the same time of the same mother. If one of a set of triplets is in another room, the present two do not become twins.
I’m also of the “she could have handled it better, but let’s cut her some slack” camp. Some people can “get over” the death of an infant or child easily. Others are haunted by it for a lifetime. I’ve heard it’s sometimes harder for parents of surviving multiples, because at every milestone, there’s a thought of “would he have been doing this by now too?”
Don’t underestimate the multiple bond, even if one of them dies very young. There’s all sorts of reasons why the survivor may feel guilt, even given the best of parenting, or simply feel a missing piece of their life - forever, sometimes.
I can understand where she was coming from. She “miscarried” later than WhyBaby was born (She was born at 5 months.) You say miscarried, she may say “gave birth to a dead baby”, or “lost her baby at birth.”
I had the hardest time deciding whether or not to send out birth announcements when WhyBaby was born. She was alive (still is) but so very, very fragile. It really wasn’t good news that she was born. But the other part of me said, Dammit! Even if she dies tomorrow, that doesn’t mean she wasn’t born! I really wanted to share my pride and joy in my daughter, even if she wasn’t going to make it. As it turns out, I made announcements, had them addresed, and then it felt “too jinxy” to send them. C’est la vie.
I didn’t pass around pictures of my premie, but I didcarry one, and I didshow it to anyone who asked. And I’d secretly be hoping you asked. 'Cause scary or not, she’s my baby. It helped a lot when I posted here and people asked for pics. I could then put up a link, knowing that only those who wanted to see scary tiny baby pictures would click on it.
This is one of the reasons that even innocous questions are loaded. As the mom of two kids a year apart, one Asian, one white, we get all sorts of weird questions. A lot of adoption advocates recommend answering with “why do you ask?” In this case phungi’s answer would have been “idle curiousity.” Idle curiousity is not a good reason to ask questions of complete strangers.
I’m almost never offended by the questions, but a lot of people are.
My wife’s a ‘surviving triplet’. Her mom had a really difficult time conceiving, losing several attempts to spontaneous abortion. While the ‘they are two surviving triplets’ is a phrase we’ve heard mentioned, it’s not one mentioned with dewey eyes and ragged breath.
So Mom-in-law was an identical twin, my wife was a surviving triplet, and my fraternal twin boys are a little over two and a half.
There are SO many emotions involved in the birth of children. It really is somthing that affects you on a base level (if you’re so predisposed). I cannot today say which of my two kids I like more, or which one I could ‘do without’. When they were in the NICU (2 weeks and 5 weeks) I battled shock at having kids, dismay that one wasn’t responding, and befuddlement at having to sign papers as the ‘legal guardian’ of someone I’d known less than a week. Nothing like a bit of trauma to create a lasting impression.
So, surviving triplets most likely means a death near delivery date.
Is it macabre? Nah, we get so much ‘Oh, raising a single kid is hard, I can’t imagine raising two!’ that the ‘they’re surviving triplets’ is a subconscious ‘you think we’ve got it bad? It was actually much worse…we had to deal with the death of a child too.’
Only it’s handled in a ‘Whaddaya think if the weather?’ ‘Oh, this kinda weather killed my brother’. offhand conversational sorta way.
(And welcome to the group, it’s an interesting topic!)
You asked a question, you got a factually correct answer that the mother felt happiest to give you. If that’s how she wants to answer that question, that’s her business.
I had a sister who died the day before my 4th birthday, when she was 12 hours old. Damn right I’m old enought to remember all of THAT, and to have felt the loss.
If asked, my mother will say she has been pregnant 4 times, but that she has 3 children. I may say I have 2 sisters, or I may say I have 3 sisters, but one died when she was 12 hours old, depending on who is asking, and whether I want them to know or not.
One of the obstetricians did tell us about a woman who had had a twin pregnancy diagnosed at a very early (6 week) ultrasound, only for it to develop as a singleton pregnancy (discovered at the 9week scan). This is not uncommon, and many people will not tell mothers they are expecting twins until after 12weeks, for that reason.
Even though it was such an early loss, this woman named the dead twin, and when she delivered, she brought her older children in to see the placenta so they could “say goodbye” to their dead sibling. On top of that, she had a funeral (yes, a full funeral) for the placenta. At her 6 week check, she said that she was upset that her older children had enjoyed it (because they got to ride in a limousine) and didn’t feel the loss of a sibling the way she expected. Now, THAT is a surviving twin who might have some psychological trauma in the future.
I’m glad to hear your little one made it. In your case, I would have shown pictures to everyone, too! However, I draw a distinction between photos of a dead child (one that was not born alive) and photos of a living little one. I realize the emotions are all raw immediately following a stillbirth. But we hardly had the option of “not” viewing the pictures (this was pre-internet days). She stood there with the photo and asked if you wanted to see it. Who would say no?