Mistaken Identities by Bonnie Le Hamilton

This past week, I came across a social media post asking identical twins about something embarrassing that happened simply because they are identical.

Of course, this interested me greatly since I am, after all, an identical twin, but I found myself reminiscing when it came to one of the stories in that post.

In the story, a guy told of a time his twin brother praised a certain restaurant for having great service and excellent food, so the guy decided to take his wife there.

During the evening, he found the food was indeed excellent, but the service was cold and even hostile, until ruckus laughter broke out near the front door, then his twin and said twin’s wife came around the corner! It seems the staff thought he was cheating on his wife when he wasn’t his twin at all.

Boy, did that bring back memories, though it didn’t involve a restaurant. In our case, it involved a grocery store. This was at least a couple of decades ago, but at one point we lived within a mile of each other in the city of Idaho Falls, Idaho, which is the closest geographically we’d lived to each other since we were attending the same college in 1983.

As a consequence of living so close, we shopped at the same grocery store.

Now let’s set the scene, I have mentioned before how different our husbands are in size, but you add the differences between our children, and I would have thought any sane person would conclude we were two different people. I mean, really, I was married four years before Konnie got married, and my oldest son turned two within weeks of Konnie’s wedding. Not only that, but he also had a much taller daddy, so he wasn’t petite like his oldest cousin. Who, by the way, was born when I was like five months along with my second son.

Then you need to consider that Konnie, at the time, had three daughters while I had two boys and three daughters. And not only was my oldest boy obviously older than her oldest, but well, there was less than nine months between her second oldest daughter and my oldest daughter, and her youngest daughter was still an infant when my twins were born.

Needless to say, the math on the possibility of one woman having all those kids just doesn’t work, so I honestly couldn’t see how anyone could get us confused, after all our father was at that point telling us apart by our husbands and children!

So, anyway, one day I ran to the store alone, just to pick up a gallon of milk. When I got to the register, the salesclerk commented, “Forget something?”

Which, in and of itself, was odd, since they normally ask if the customer found everything they needed. I was confused by the statement, but pointed out that it was the first time I’d been to the store that day.

The salesclerk insisted I’d been through her line less than an hour before my milk run.

It took a couple of minutes to convince her I hadn’t been in the store earlier, and I finally managed it by pointing out I was not dressed the way the woman she’d seen almost an hour earlier had been attired. I knew that was so, despite not having seen Konnie that day, because we haven’t had anything identical in our separate wardrobes since our late teens.

Once I convinced her I wasn’t Konnie, she loudly announced to her coworkers, “It’s not a woman leading a double life! There’s two of them!”

To reinforce that newfound knowledge, Konnie and I coordinated our next shopping trip to go together, which was an experience and a half, because we are talking eight kids and two sets of identical twins.

It would have been more fun if our husbands had been there, but oh well.

I can remember once when my twins were still infants, going to Walmart together and turning heads. In fact, one little kid pointed toward my double stroller and said, “Mom! Look! Twins!”

The mom glanced back at our entourage and replied, "More than one set.”

Yeah, we turn a lot of heads when we go to the store together.

Anytime we go someplace together, we turn heads, such is the lot of identical twins. I think the last time we went shopping together was a few years ago when she came here to attend a writing conference with me.

We went to the store I usually shop at, Konnie faithfully following me around the store, both of us using a mobility cart. It was hilarious watching all those people doing all those double-takes.

Anyway, happy writing, everyone.