Choosing Twin-ness

You can choose your friends, your outfit for school and what you're going to have for lunch -- but you can't choose "twin life," as this witty (and collaborative) yearbook quote points out.

Posted by Reddit user Some_Random_Guy_, the following senior quote printed in a yearbook was so good that it was meant to be shared -- by twins, that is.

And here is a twin quoting it!

You don’t choose being a twin, that decision was made at some point inside your mother’s womb when her body released two ova or for some reason the zygote slit in two. Either way, it wasn’t your choice to share the womb with another human being.

It is, however, your choice about how you choose to live that life — whether you ignore that or celebrate it.

Of course, I have no idea how fraternal twins feel, because I am not fraternal, quite the contrary.

To illustrate just how alike Konnie and I are, let me tell you about something that happened to us way back in high school.

One day, after school, we attended a drama club meeting, and the advisor (a fellow we called Mr. T at his request because his last name was hard to pronounce) instructed us on how to preform what he termed the mirror exercise, in which two people faced each other and one lead while the other followed. The object was to become so in tune with your partner that it appeared as though you were moving at the same time.

Then Mr. T had us pick partners. It wouldn’t be hard to guess whom I picked, considering we were new at the school. Anyway, we set to work doing as he instructed along with everyone else present, however, after a few minutes someone in the crowd noticed how well Konnie and I were doing, and everyone stopped to watch us.

Seconds later someone noted that if an empty frame were hanging between us, it would look like there was only one person there, just looking in a mirror, which got the whole group talking about just how identical we were — our attire, hairstyles, and glasses being the only differences.

That’s when Mr. T chose to ask which one of us was leading. Each of us pointed to whom we thought was the leader and our fingers touched!

The differences they saw in us then are the only differences you’ll see in us today, though you have to add in now our different family situations.

I’m clearly not Konnie, because I don’t have a home in Vegas with a husband and five kids (four of which still live at home), and she’s clearly not me — a childless widow residing back in our hometown.

Living so far apart now, the last time anyone got us confused was at my husband’s funeral and some of my husband’s friends, who hadn’t seen me in a couple years and didn’t know I was at the time dragging around an oxygen tank everywhere I went, let alone that I’m a twin. That is until Konnie told them she wasn’t me.

Our various family members were the only people there not surprised about how much we looked alike; all my husband’s friends were doing a lot of double takes.

But we didn’t choose to be mirror twins; that’s just part of our genetic makeup. We do choose to be writers, we do choose to help each other with that, but everything that happens to us because of our twin-ness, we don’t choose, it’s just something we have to deal with just as we deal with our nearsightedness and our shortness. It’s just life.