I have sixteen-year-old twin sons who have been driving for six months, which means, of course, that I now have two experts who complain whenever I’m at the wheel.

“You forgot to signal again.”

“I swear whenever you’re driving I get carsick.”

 So I let them drive whenever I can (which is what they want anyway). When we got to a stop sign in our neighborhood last night, the boy at the wheel braked too hard—hard enough that my head rocked back and hit the headrest.

I looked up at Neil, eyebrow raised, smartmouth retort on my lips: “Say, aren’t you the one who was bitching that my driving makes you carsick?” But I didn’t say it. I’m the mature one, right? The one who’s supposed to be the parent? I looked back down at my magazine and turned the page.

“You’re such a hater, Mom,” Neil sighed, shaking his head, flawlessly executing the rest of the turn.

“I didn’t say a thing!” I protested. “You’re the one who was just complaining that my driving makes you carsick just the other day…”

“He’s right, Mom. You really are pretty much a hater,” Frank said from the backseat.

I sat there, mouth working, furious.

Fact is, they’re right. I hate what they’ve done to me. Sixteen years, and they still have the upper hand. They’ve always outnumbered me. Now they’re starting to outsmart me.

When they were three years old, Neil managed to squeeze through the bars at a McDonald’s Playland and run straight for four lanes of traffic. Somehow I managed to fling myself over the 6-foot wrought- iron fence in pursuit (impressing the hell out of everyone at the restaurant that day) but the kid still had too much of a head start. He was going to get away from me and wind up splattered all over Stratford Road in Moses Lake.

The only thing that saved Neil’s life that day was another mom in the drive-through. Displaying the finely-tuned reflexes of our kind, she braked (probably spilling all the Cokes and fries she’d just bought), and flung open the door of her minivan. “Hey little boy, come here!” she yelled at him.

And damned if the kid didn’t change direction, hightailing it for her van like she was his accomplice in his prison break. I heard Frankie behind me at the fence, screeching: “Go, Neil, go!”

I glanced back to see if Frank was going to squeeze through, too. He had a couple of pounds on Neil, and so was lodged in the fence, pinned, wriggling like a stuck bug.

I snatched the Neil up by the seat of his pants, waved my thanks at minivan-mom, and walked back around to the playground gate with Neil under one arm, an arm that was shaking with the aftereffects of adrenaline and the fear that Frank was going to get through the fence before I could get back over there. I’d also managed to pee my pants because I’d landed so hard getting over the fence (which I am only mentioning here due to the fact the rearrangement of my internal organs was courtesy the star eejit from this particular tale and the critter who looks just like him). And that meant I had to drive forty miles back home and forget my trip to the grocery store, or just go to the store and hope nobody noticed.

When I got the boys strapped into their car seats and safely contained in the car, I sat behind the wheel and bawled. My oldest son was, as usual, the only one who noticed I was upset. The twins were throwing toys at each other.

Go, Neil Go! Go fucking where?

I’d been ridiculously careful during the pregnancy with the boys; so worried that my body wasn’t going to be able to handle the strain. I was terrified they’d be born too early. And now, after managing to get them here, and fed, burped, healthy, and changed until they were fully ambulatory—all they did was find novel ways to try to kill themselves.  

Ever since they could climb out of their cribs (at nine months—yes nine months) my boys have been trying to escape the real world for a magical logic-free zone I eventually started calling “Twinworld.”

Twinworld is a planet where other people (besides the twin sibling) fade out like ghosts, a place where everyone else sounds like the invisible grownups in the old Peanuts cartoons: Waaa waa, waa waa, waa waaaa.

Things started to make a little more sense after I saw Debbie and Lisa Ganz speak at a mothers-of-twins convention when the boys were six years old. I watched with my mouth open as these two successful, professional, adult women grabbed the microphone away from each other at the podium, interrupted each other, and talked over each other. As Debbie pointed out in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated (about the famous doubles tennis players the Bryan brothers) you don’t stop being a twin when you become an adult…and the twin relationship is one that singletons (meaning most of us hapless parents) just can’t understand.

A mother in the audience tentatively asked the Ganz sisters a question about her identical sons. They just wouldn’t behave, she said, no matter what she did. She locked them in their room every day for a half hour so they could “nap,” (but really, she admitted, “naptime” was just so the rest of the family could get a break from the boys). They had to move the dressers out of the twins’ room because the boys would remove all the drawers and throw all their clothes on the floor. When the dressers were gone, the twins managed to break the ceiling light fixture in their bedroom by throwing their picture books at it. So they had to take the light bulbs and ceiling fixture and most of the books out of the room, too.

The Ganz twins didn’t really have an answer for her, other than laughing over a little anecdote they told about how their mother had blamed her Valium addiction on them.

At the end of the talk, I was one of seven women who made a point of seeking out the mom who’d asked the quavering question about her out-of-control boys.

Six of us standing there had identical boys; the seventh woman had identical girls. And all of us were hollow-eyed, hopeless prisoners of Twinworld—desperate to talk to another mom who was going through the same thing.

Once when my boys were in grade school they climbed out a second-story window onto a metal shed roof to get to their older brother’s window. The twins were mad he’d forted up in his bedroom and decided to peck on his (closed) window to further irritate him. When I caught them climbing back into my bedroom window and expressed my extreme displeasure over the lack of common sense involved in this little venture, Neil said disdainfully: “We took our shoes off and spit on our feet so we’d stick to the roof.”

Like: what the hell do YOU know, anyway?

Once not too long after that, I found the boys sitting on the second story of our house, their bare feet dangling over the gutter. They were getting their jollies spitting on our unsuspecting cats below.

The resulting conniption on my part was legendary. It’s a good thing the cats forgave them. I didn’t.

We had to put hook-and-eye locks at the top of every exterior door in the house when they figured out how to unlock doors as two-year-olds, because once they got out of bed at four in the morning and just left. An early-rising neighbor spotted them wandering down the middle of our street, and correctly deduced the aliens from Twinworld had escaped. She went after them. When they heard her coming up behind them, the boys both wheeled around as if following instructions from some hidden drum major, and marched back to our house (with our neighbor in pursuit). It was a quiet walk, she told me later …nobody said a word. She rang our doorbell to wake us up, and let the boys back in (of course they couldn’t open the screen door from the outside of the house).

When they were three, they got away from me at the doctor’s office and locked themselves in an elevator that I had promised them we could take a ride on if they behaved (riiiiight) during the exam. I was steps behind them, but I was too late.

It took nearly fifteen minutes for the maintenance guys to show up, while the boys screamed behind the shiny locked doors. They hollered that it was dark in there and they wanted out. My jaw was clenched so tightly with panic and anger and embarrassment that could barely speak. I had been joined by our doctor and nurse as well as the receptionist—the people I’d just had to holler at for help, who patted me on the back every so often.

“I don’t know how the hell they managed to turn the power off,” one of the maintenance guys said, shaking his head as he pried open the doors with a giant crowbar. “They’d have to figure out how to access the service panel for that.”

Why, I thought, am I not surprised.

And, not for the first time, there was a part of me that was glad that they were scared to death. They weren’t afraid of me or their father, or of the laws of physics. The only hope I had of keeping them alive was that they’d learn from the school of hard knocks without killing themselves.

The embarrassment was a daily thing. Once when I was working as a reporter, I had to take them with me to city hall to get copies from a records request. While I was standing there chatting to the police chief, Frank and Neil were fighting, biting each other like weasels (as was a daily habit when they were preschoolers) while we staunchly tried to ignore them. When Frank started losing the fight with his three-year-old brother, he tried to grab the chief’s service pistol right out of his holster.

Now that they’re nearly 6’5, now after years of football, basketball, and weight training, they no longer carry perfect imprints of each other’s teeth on their arms. Now, when they fight, we worry about things like our drywall and doorframes and broken bones.  

I realized after meeting the other identical twin moms and after watching the Ganz sisters that there was a piece of the puzzle I wasn’t getting. Then I read that court cases have been won by twins who’ve successfully sued for wrongful death after the death of a sibling—after the surviving twin was able to prove that the relationship between twins is even stronger than the connection between a child and parent.

The lights started to go on.

The problem is that when you have identicals, sometimes they’re so strongly bonded to each other that normal modern parenting doesn’t work…the kind where you model good behavior and expect it will “rub off” on the offspring. It’s not necessarily that they have a partner in crime—it’s that they don’t really care about their parents. Why should they? They’ve got each other.

As long they were together, the boys would just take off—nary a backward glance to see where we were. When little kids don’t have the basic concept that evolution is supposed to stamp on their little brains that says staying with Mama=good, leaving Mama=bad, you have a major problem. I was their mama, sure, but as far as the boys were concerned, I was mainly the person who yanked them back to reality all the time.

Of course these numbskulls grew up to be well-liked and good students. But I’m being honest when I say that nobody’s more surprised than we are.   

I remember a meeting with their second-grade reading teacher eight years ago who told me with a little sniff that although they were at the top of their class, she didn’t think they were very happy.

I remember laugh-snorting while the fresh-out-of-college teacher looked at me with her lips pressed together. She didn't know her butt from a hot rock. She didn’t know a thing about parenting, much less twin parenting, didn’t know that my husband, oldest son, and I had all been at war the last eight years.

“Sorry, but I don’t really care if they’re happy,” I said, smiling, which earned me her shocked silence. She had no idea how tightly they had to control themselves just to make it through a normal school day, or what we had to deal with at home. And I knew I couldn't even begin to explain it to her, so I left it at that. I know that my attitude seems unspeakably cruel, but just like the boys say, I’m pretty much a hater by now.

They’ll be running away from me again in a couple of years when they go off to college. We don’t get to see too many scenes from Twinworld these days, although they will immediately regress back to toddlerdom whenever they’re mad at each other or if I’m trying to take a picture of them. Even after watching them for sixteen years, I still can’t begin to understand the extreme mixture of love and hate that characterizes the relationship between identicals. 

All I know is I’ll miss having it around.