Who's Who? by Bonnie Le Hamilton

 

The other day I heard some interesting facts, one of the facts mentioned was that identical twins have most likely been mixed up and the parents didn’t realize it.

My response?

Tell me about it.

I know we have mentioned this before, but well, I was born Konnie.

We know this now, but that took decades to figure out, and both of us were already married and mothers before we were definite.

That isn’t to say the clues weren't there all along; it’s just that we didn’t put two and two together until after the summer of ’97. Why I am so specific about that date? That’s because I had given birth to twins that July.

You see, on our mother’s side of the family, the third born daughter had the twins. Our grandmother was third born, our mother was her third born, Konnie was third born. You get the picture.

Of course, in our case, we have a paternal aunt who spent years insisting we’d been mixed up. She insisted that Konnie had a slightly rounder face, was slightly bigger, and not as shy as Bonnie.

Guess what, I’m the one with a slightly rounder face and am just a bit taller than, well, Konnie today.

We also have medical records that show that Konnie is the one who got stitches on the bridge of her nose when we were about two years old. I have the scar; for decades we all assumed our mother told the emergency personnel the wrong name because it was Konnie (the one we know as Konnie today) who was bawling her head off, not me.

No, in reality, Konnie got the stitches; I have been going by Bonnie since I started school.

We know this now because a year or two before our mother died, she told me that when she enrolled us in school for the first time, she asked us which was which. She informed me that I told her I was Bonnie and Konnie (the today Konnie) agreed.

Though that does explain my clear memory from our early school years were I accidently said I was Konnie, for which Konnie was upset with me and reminded me she was Konnie.

In other words, we switched places when we entered school and went with our new positions for so long that when we realized we had been mixed up, neither of us wanted to go through the rigmarole of switching back. Of course, by that point we were both married with children.

We would have switched places in the fall of 1968. Meaning by the time we figured it out, we’d spent twenty-nine years using the wrong name, i.e. most of our lives. Just the idea of changing all those legal documents to the correct name was daunting because it wasn’t just our marriage licenses but the birth certificates of our children, and diplomas, and frankly our school records!

Let alone we’d have to go back and tell people they knew us by the wrong name.

And there was also the fact that we felt the name we were using (are using) is who we are. It just felt weird to have to learn to go by the other name after all those years.

Now that switch occurred well over fifty years ago; making it even harder to switch back.

And it's not the red tape that is the daunting part – it is absolutely having to change the name we each answer to. Way to hard at this stage of the game.

But do all identical twins get mixed up without the parents noticing? I have no idea. Maybe I’ll ask my cousins who are identical what their experience on the subject is.

Though, I know this is something I really should put into a story I write. That might be fun.

On another simi-related note, I keep running across memes about how the one Phelps twin who played George Weasley was living the scene were Fred died while Rupert Grint and the guy who played Percy were just acting in the picture shown.

Each time I see Phelps’s expression in that scene, I think, “Yeah, that’s how I’m going to feel.” And Konnie and I haven’t been together 24/7 for decades, the same can’t be said for the Phelps twins at the time of the scene. I mean, at least back then, they lived and worked together, they were always together.

I actually feel sorry for him going through something that traumatic in his life.

Konnie does have a set of identical twins as main characters in her epic science fiction series, but I don’t have any main character twins. I do have a few stories with twins in them, but they are not main characters.

Anyway, happy writing everyone.