So, first Beyoncé announced on Instagram that she is having twins. Then Madonna posted that she has adopted twin girls. Now the Clooneys have let it be known that they’re expecting twins. What on earth is going on?
Hannah, by email
OK, so the most pressing issue to deal with here is to correct a mistake in your question. “First Beyoncé announced she is having twins”? “First”? I don’t think so. Look, I don’t know if I’ve told you this already, but the very first person ever on this planet to have twins is most certainly not Bey. Obviously not! No. It was me.
What? I’ve mentioned that I have twins before? Well, lucky you – everyone knows that readers love nothing more than journalists writing about their kids, because they are literally the only people on this planet to have procreated. Indeed, the whole publishing world is eagerly looking forward to the launch of my new column Twinning Is Winning!!!, which will be full of hilarious anecdotes about amusing things my kids have said/done/thrown up. Yes, I think we can all agree that this will Save Journalism (#savejournalism).
Anyway, as I was saying, first there was me, then, as happens every single day of my life, the celebrities came a-copying. Well, to be strictly accurate, a few celebrities had twins before me (Angelina, Celine, J-Lo, Mariah, etc), but who’s the one who inspired Bey, Madge and Dr Doug Ross to follow suit? I mean, come on.
So, now that we know exactly why all these celebrities are having twins (because they’re copying me – have I mentioned that enough yet?), what amazing twin-based wisdom can I impart? Given that Madonna has adopted her girls, this first tip is more for Amal and Bey: get ready, ladies, for complete strangers to ask you straight out the most astonishing questions about your sex life. Come to think of it, maybe this is normal for a celebrity, but for the rest of us, it really is quite something how total randoms think it is perfectly acceptable to demand you tell them how you got pregnant, just because you have twins. “IVF?” “IVF?” “IVF?” is the ringing cry you will hear from strangers every day, for, as far as I can tell, the rest of your life. Personally, I find shouting back in their face, “NO, JUST REALLY HOT SEX” is a good way to shut them up, but that is possibly not a viable response if you’re a mega celebrity. So maybe just hit them?
Next, the flavour of the twins. Now, you might think that conceiving two actual human beings simultaneously is an achievement in itself. You would be wrong. As soon as you tell people you are pregnant with twins, you learn there is a twin combo hierarchy and having boy/girl twins is considered the alpha of combos, because we now live in a world so astonishingly privileged that it is no longer enough for people to have a healthy baby, or two. No, the babies must tick both gender boxes “for variety’s sake”, people say, as if they were pick’n’mix. And so, as a general rule of thumb, the same people who think it appropriate to ask whether a penis or medical science impregnated you, then follow up by asking the gender of your twins, and their face falls ever so slightly if the answer is anything other than “boy/girl”. Try harder next time, woman pregnant with two babies at the same time!
Obviously, celebrities never knowingly miss a chance to seize alpha-status, and so through, I presume, sheer force of celebrity will, the majority who have twins have boy/girl ones (Mariah, J-Lo, Julia Roberts, etc). Given that they are the alpha-most celebrities on the planet, I fully expect Bey and Jay to follow suit, although they are so alpha that for all I know perhaps they have discovered an entirely new gender to produce.
Finally, here’s the real secret joy of twin parenthood: no one can give you any crap. Incredibly, there are people on this planet who see childbirth and parenthood not as a possible rite of life you muddle through as best you can, but as some kind of masochistic one-upmanship. So all that nonsense about how women are now expected in some wildly overprivileged quarters to prove how good they are by declining pain relief during birth, refusing a recommended C-section, shunning sleeping and feeding routines, breastfeeding for years, etc? Well, ha ha, you are fully opted out of that rigamarole, because you’re having twins, and no one can give you any nonsense about anything. Obviously, in a perfect world, no one would give any pregnant woman any nonsense, but we live in an imperfect world, and anything that saves you from any unnecessary crap should be celebrated.
So there you go, Amal, Bey and Madonna: welcome to twin parenthood. It is entirely possible that none of this advice has any relevance to you whatsoever, but as all fashion journalists know, two’s a coincidence but three’s a trend, and with three celebrity twin parenthoods at once, we got a trend on our hands, folks. Which means, of course, only one thing: bring on the Kardashian-West triplets.
