Who is Susan?
This has been bothering me for almost a week. And it started
when I was in the checkout lane at Walmart last week. At one point I heard
someone call out, “Susan,” somewhere behind me, but I didn’t turn around, since
I didn’t think it had anything to do with me.
That is until someone stepped up to me and asked me if my
name was Susan!
Now I know a lot of women by that name, but no one in their
right mind would ever confuse me for any of them, so I have no idea who this
person is.
I mean I can see someone mistaking me for Konnie. People
have often mistaken me for Konnie, but this is only the third time anyone has
confused me for someone who wasn’t Konnie and the other two times happened back
in while I was attending college in Rexburg, ID, and Konnie was in Tacoma, WA.
It started with me falling down a flight of stairs and
spraining my ankle so bad I ended up in a cast for several weeks.
One day while in that cast, I went to a meeting of a group I
was in only to have one of the girls accuse me of nearly running her over in
the crosswalk earlier that day.
Folks, I didn’t have a car at the time. So, while I and my
friend who was with me tried to assure her, I wasn’t even in a car at any point
that day, another girl came in and wondered what on earth had happened to me
because I hadn’t been in a cast when she saw me earlier that day. I’d been in a
cast for over a week at that point, and my friend wasn’t the only one there who
could vouch for me.
Okay, they actually mistook someone other than Konnie for me,
because it couldn’t have been Konnie. A fact which had the friend I was with
going nuts since we’d gone to school together in eighth grade.
That’s not to say I can’t name women who fit mine, and
Konnie’s, general description in build, hair color, and glasses, but none of
the ones I can name are Susans. I mean short, round, with streaks of gray in
your brown hair, and glasses could describe a lot of women. But that doesn’t
mean they look just like me, and Konnie.
And then, while wondering about who Susan was a friend of
mine posted a pic about a mom worrying about whether or not she got her twins
mixed up and they’d have to go by the wrong name for the rest of their lives.
My friend was saying this was her fear for her twin
daughters.
My brother Ben, who also knows her, posted that he thought
this had happened to his sisters. So, I informed him that yes it did happen.
At some point, between the stitches incident and entering
school, Momma switched us, probably several times, without realizing it.
We went all the way through school and my marriage before we managed to put two and two together between the hospital saying
Konnie got the stitches and our one aunt who always insisted the twin with the
rounder face and more outgoing personality was Konnie.
Said aunt hadn’t seen us a whole lot during those
years because we didn’t live with her brother, our father, most of that time,
which is why it took so long to get the facts straight. Too long. It would have
taken going to court for a name change to fix the issue. Too much money and too
much hassle.
Besides, it also meant getting used to a name we had denied
being ours for as long as we could remember.
Though we should have realized something was up when we
learned our mother had changed the K to a B on my baby book and the B to a K on
Konnie’s baby book. But I can’t remember when we first noticed that. I do know
we thought she’d just mixed us up once when we were babies.
She even once mentioned trying to compare our fingerprints
with our prints from when we were newborns to get us straight, but our prints
were too alike to tell.
And she was constantly saying she’d been so confused the day
of the accident, which ended with me getting stitches, that wasn’t even sure
which daughter was hurt and which was bawling.
Here’s a hint, Konnie got the stitches, so Bonnie was bawling.
I have the scar.
I guess our life would make for a good story though.
Anyway, happy writing everyone.
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