How I Finally Weened my 3.5 yo Twin Toddlers off Pacifiers in One Night:

A Horror-ish Comedy, Kind Of

“Beings are self-correcting,” my Internal Family Systems therapist said. Another’s presence is all that’s needed for this self-correction to happen. The day I smelt rubber burning in my home and frantically ran to the pot where my 3.5 year old twins’ last remaining pacifiers had melted into gooey lumps, her words were my refrain.

Last week, I’d made a big to-do about driving them 30 minutes to Build-a-Bear, where we spent $200 (obviously Big Sis had to get a doll too) dramatically announcing the end of baby-hood by kissing a pacifier goodbye and placing it inside the doll of their choice. My Twin A, obsessed with panda bears and everything remotely resembling Halloween, chose a black bear with a Dia de los Muertos design.

The Night of the Melted Pacifiers, she’d hold this beloved bear by its legs and slam its body into the wooden floor. “Me want mi num-num!” She wanted her pacifier back.

Sacrifices would be made.

Slam. Tearfully crawl to retrieve it. Slam. Tearfully crawl. Slam. I’d sat on the girls’ bed in the darkened room and watched in silence. Slam.

Finally, she picked up the doll and cradled it in her arms, burying her face into its blackness. “Me sorry,” she cried, speaking directly to her doll. She buried her teary eyes into its fur. “Me sorry.”

I sat frozen on their floor-mattress, terrified.

Instead of throwing out the rest of the pacifiers upon returning from Build-a-Bear, I had snipped each one and boiled them clean. “Mi num-num broken!” they both screamed in turn.

“You’re Big now,” I’d said. “You don’t need a num-num.”

“Why me num-num broken?”

“Because they know you’re Big now and you don’t need them anymore; they’re ready to die.”

But it turned out that a puncture-wound in their pacifiers was not motivation to do away with the comfort object they had enjoyed the entirety of their young lives.

A week passed. “You still haven’t gotten rid of those pacifiers?!” one of my best friends chided. “Girl! Throw those away today!”

“You’re right! Buckle-up, Buttercup,” I said into the phone while cutting bigger holes in each pacifier.

I placed the snipped pacifiers into a little blue pot to boil them clean for the twins to use later. I went about my morning without giving the pacifier situation a second thought.

An hour later, I was opening all the windows to let out the smoke and smell of burning silicone.

“It’s okay for them to tantrum. We all have to go through big emotions,” my therapist had said.

“It’s okay for them to tantrum,” I muttered to myself after the initial shock of seeing their pacifiers melted into pink and green gooey piles at the bottom of the pot wore off.

I looked over to my twins, playing gaily with their imitation kitchen set. They didn’t suspect a thing. “We all have to go through big emotions,” I muttered.

I walked to my trusty therapy-notes. They would tell me what to do next. I kept one cautious eye on the girls while I searched the pages. They had no idea what was coming. “It’s okay to tantrum,” I muttered, flipping through the journal.

And then: “Beings are self-correcting. All that’s needed for this self-correcting to happen is an outside presence.” I’m big on mantras. This would do. All morning, I was muttered under my breath. If the twins noticed, they didn’t let on.

Still, with each tick of the clock, my fear grew. The nearing of naptime suggested impending doom.

To get her through her first binkie-less nap, the best friend I had lied to on the phone that morning had literally lied beside her and held her two-year-old down.

Mine were way bigger. And stronger. Also, there were two.

F—- it.

“Who wants to skip nap and go the park?”

We stayed at the park for hours. At home, every incident of hurt (feelings or otherwise) led to them running to their beds to cuddle under their blankies with a num-num. I was putting this off for as long as I could. No one would discover the pacifiers were missing until I was ready.

We were home with two hours to go before bedtime. I went to my room to meditate while the three girls played together. My husband made dinner while I read through my notes from the therapy session. I did an exercise from the interactive IFS therapy book No Bad Parts while they ate. I gathered noise-canceling earbuds/headphones for myself and two of the three kids while they brushed.

It was go-time.

“Me no find Green Num-Num, Mommy,” Twin A said.

“Me either,” I said. “It must be lost.”

“No,” she said, without hesitation or doubt, “You take it.”

Her calmness here stands out to me. I’d never taken their pacifiers before. What in God’s Name made her suspect it this time? It was like the time my brother went turkey hunting and couldn’t shoot a single turkey, despite their proliferation on the property every single other day of every year. The turkeys knew. Somehow, they knew. Exactly four minutes after this moment, Twin A would be yelling, “Me want me num-num!” whilst her twin simply screamed at the top of her lungs in a fit of rage. She’d been so calm because she could wait for the punishment she knew was coming to me. “When Twin B finds out about this, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Where mi num-num?” Twin B demanded.

I made a game-time decision to return to the original story. “Your num-nums finally died.”

Even before the punctured pacifiers, death had been a big topic of conversation in our home. Still, I’m not sure this was the best route.

The departure was like an actual death, or at least that’s how Twin B’s pained, wild screams made it sound.

“Mi num-num DIE?!”

The noise of their fury was high-pitched and incessant. At all times my ear-drums were being assaulted by one little turkey or the other. I was grateful for the earplugs. They were in and out of their bedroom, running across the house with arms flailing in dramatic despair and then back into the room where the rest of the family awaited the continuation of our regularly scheduled bedtime routine. Their sounds pierced. They punished.

I took calming breaths.

I muttered mantras.

I sent them chill vibes.

Finally, Twin B entered the room in silence.

My hard-work is paying off! I thought.

Then I saw it.

In her hands was my cherished childhood stuffed bunny, Ted.

“You no give me Barbie Num-Num: me do this.” Twin B looked me dead in the eyes while her tiny hands furiously tore at the floppy, threadbare doll. She was determined, she was strong, she was

threatening me.

My mind immediately began thinking of ways I could repair good ol’ Teddy Bunny. Would he look okay with red thread? Patches? Could he survive patches?

Before I had to figure it out out, Twin B wrapped the beloved stuffy in her arms. Attempting to pull him to pieces had been an exercise in futility, she saw that now. “Me sorry, Baby!” she said through heartbroken tears as she caressed Ted’s ears back to rest their foreheads together. “Me love you.”

I stared wide-eyed. My six-year-old pawed at my elbow frantically.

“It’s okay, Baby,” I said to my kindergartener. “It’s going to be okay.”

But when Twin A ran at me with a toy ice-cream scooper, clearly intending to clobber me into submission, my oldest broke.

“It’s not!” she shouted, limbs flailing in fear. “It’s not going to be okay!” I suddenly felt I’d been transported to the twins’ infancy, when, at any given moment, you might walk in to find four females crying at the same time. (The fourth being me.)

I’d been avoiding it— who was going to clean the kitchen?— but clearly, I needed back-up. “Love,” I shouted out their open bedroom door loud enough for him to hear me over the dishes. “I need you to take Penelope and put her to bed in our room.”

I was on my own.

The twins sat behind curtains with books in their hands. “Mi mama die,” Twin A pretended to read.

Could it have been a lament?

“[Jibber Jabber Twin Babble Blah Blah] mi mama die,” she repeated, calmly.

I broke down then. I started to cry.

They poked their heads out, satisfied.

“You bad mommy,” Twin B added, for good measure.

But they were were tired. It was an hour and a half past their bedtime and they’d exhausted themselves wailing. Twin A was ready to talk. “Me no see Green Num-Num. Me no say ‘Goodbye!’”

They needed to say Goodbye! Of course!

When they weren’t looking, I scraped the pacifiers off the bottom of the blue pot. I held the green one in my open palm so that Juniper could see it from where she sat balled up in her panda blanket.

“Thank you for being so good to Junie,” I said by way of a eulogy. “You were a great chupon. Thank you for loving her and making her feel better when she was sad. Goodbye, Green Num-Num.”

“Why him look like that?”

I looked down at my palm to really examine my work. I’d snipped the entire tip off, leaving a large gaping hole that made it look less like a pacifier and more like a Dr. Seuss character. It was completely flat on one side, the brown sucky-part and the green handle melted into one frozen puddle.

“Why him sticky!?” And it was sticky.

“He died.”

“Why him like that?”

“That’s what happens when num-nums die.”

“Wilder!” she called to her twin. “Look you num-num!”

I saw then that this sight was reenergizing their rage.

Another wrong path.

It was too late to take it back.

Still, I had to do something.

“Hey, guess what I just read,” I projected over their screams, waving my phone about as though I were going to cite the imaginary page. "Apparently if you bury a num-num, a regalio will grow from it!”

Twin A stopped wailing to listen.

“Yeah, a gift will grow if we plant them. Do you want to put your num-num in this [makeshift casket] box so we can bury it?”

She did, actually.

Juniper processes out loud, so she picked up a receipt that had fallen in her path and “read” it. “Everybody grow up. You grow up, you num-num die. You num-num die, you put him in the dirt and him grow flower. Mama, what this say?” I repeated her chosen story, carefully.

And then, just like that, Twin A was fine.

Twin B, on the other hand, would not be so easily pacified.

“You num-num grow flower!” Juniper explained to her twin.

“Nooo!” Twin B screamed. “No flower!” She took her melted pacifier and ran to hide, needing to say goodbye privately.

“You can’t put that in your mouth!” I yelled after her.

“Me no put it in mi mouth,” she called back disgustedly, as though I were an idiot.

Eventually, when no one was looking, Twin B slipped Barbie Num-Num into the box casket. Twin A and I were in their bedroom when Twin B slumped in. “Mi want Barbie Num-Num!”

The thing with twins is, if one is distraught, the other is too. On her sister’s behalf. The screaming was to continue.

They are going to keep this up until they pass out, I thought, and closed their bedroom door, enveloping us in darkness.

“Get me out of here!” Twin B yelled.

I began to read Gertude McFuzz, a favorite of ours. “Lala Le Luuu,” I tried, using the exaggerated, silly voice that always made them laugh.

They gaped at me with the disdain of someone a decade older.

As though it were the most obvious solution to her pain, Twin B said, “Me want see Baby Penny.”

“You want to see baby photos of your big sister?” It was a strange (though touching) thing to request for comfort. I was ready to give them anything. I pulled up videos and photos from three years before their time, when their Penelope was an infant.

We watched way too many old home videos.

Nearly an hour later, when I finally got the courage to shut it off, they fell asleep crying on either side of me.

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I hope this brought you some comfort, joy or comradery.

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