SEEING DOUBLE
Searching for information on her adopted daughter, Wausau mom discovers the girl’s twin
“We found something we weren’t looking for. And it’s been pretty cool stuff.” JENNIFER DOERING
Wausau — Laughter rings through the house as Audrey Doering talks to Gracie Rainsberry by video chat.
Audrey tells Gracie about a recent fifth-grade trip to the school forest she went on with her school, Wausau’s Riverview Elementary.
The two 10-year-olds are playing a game online as they chat, Audrey in her Packers gear and Gracie, who lives in Washington, in her Seahawks jersey. Just two long-distance friends keeping in contact this holiday season.
But these two friends share more in common than most. The girls are identical twins — and this month, they spoke to one another for the first time.
The twins discovered each other after Jennifer Doering, Audrey’s adoptive mother, searched for Audrey’s “found ad,” an advertisement that would have been posted in a Chinese newspaper when the girl was aban-
doned as a baby.
Doering and her husband adopted Audrey from China in 2007, at 15 months. The found ad was to be a part of Audrey’s Christmas present this year. So Doering turned to the website research-china.org,
where she knew the ad would have been posted when Audrey was found abandoned.
“(I feared) that there wouldn’t be as much information in the future,” and so doing the search early while Audrey was still young was important, said Jennifer Doering. “Before it was lost for her.”
The man who runs the website sent her the ad but also told Doering he had found Audrey’s foster mother and had a few pictures to send along as well.
Jennifer Doering
stared at the photo when she received it. There, on the foster mother’s lap, were two Audreys.
“I asked him right away, ‘Why are there two of them? Are they twins?’ ” she said.
The man went into the other girl’s file — Gracie’s file — and gave Doering her Chinese name and her birth date.
Gracie’s given name, Tong Min Mei, was the first clue. Tong Min Gui was Audrey’s. The first part denotes the region of China where they were born, but Mei and Gui, if put together, mean “rose.” It’s common in Chinese culture for twins to be given names that mean one word, Doering was told.
From there, Doering, a physician’s assistant, started searching more. She turned to Facebook groups of other families who had adopted children from China and began asking questions. Someone dug through an old Yahoo account and found contact information for Nicole Rainsberry, Gracie’s mom.
Doering reached out to Gracie’s family and sent a picture of herself and Audrey to Gracie’s dad.
When Nicole Rainsberry first saw the photo, she told her husband, “I know that’s Gracie, but I don’t know who that lady is.”
Rainsberry said even Gracie, when she later saw the photo, thought it was a picture of her.
Once the Rainsberrys realized the truth, the parents decided they needed to talk.
Nicole Rainsberry, a paraeducator who lives in Richland, Wash., said her first reaction was fear — they didn’t know the Doering family, and they didn’t know why the girls had been separated in the first place.
But the narrative started to fall into place as the families talked more. Jennifer Doering suspects the girls were separated because they were both sick — both families applied to adopt a child with special needs — with a rare condition that will require numerous surgeries to fix their hearts. The girls also had different birthdays — Gracie’s is April 23 and Audrey’s is April 28 — which meant not even their foster mother knew they were twins before they were adopted.
The two were adopted separately, Gracie first to the Rainsberrys, and then Audrey to the Doering family.
Once the Doerings and Rainsberrys talked a couple of times in early December, they decided to tell Audrey and Gracie.
Doering and Nicole Rainsberry exchanged photos of the girls, identical at every age. They exchanged videos of their daughters, too, that often showed the two had similar mannerisms.
The Rainsberrys told Gracie about her twin as soon as they could. Audrey heard about five minutes before the pair talked for the first time on Dec. 9.
Audrey said she was “overwhelmed and I started to cry,” when she saw Gracie for the first time in a video chat.
“Yeah, that was the same as me,” said Gracie.
“Then I started to talk to her, and ask questions,” Audrey said. “It’s like talking to me. She likes mac and cheese like me. She has the same type of glasses as me, except mine are actually broken and hers are teal and mine are pink.”
The similarities don’t stop there. The girls, in fifth grade, both participate in sports, Gracie in soccer and basketball and Audrey in gymnastics. Both like to wear their hair in side ponytails and both consider math to be their favorite subject in school.
The girls talk almost every day now, but they’ll have to wait to meet until spring break. The two families will meet in San Diego, where the girls will finally see each other face to face for the first time in 91⁄2 years. It will surely be an emotional trip for both families, but they’re both eagerly awaiting the date.
In the meantime, Jennifer Doering said her search for information on Audrey’s biological family will stop here for a while. Nicole Rainsberry is looking for more. The Rainsberry family will hold on to anything they find until the Doering family is ready. They’re awaiting the results of DNA testing to prove that Gracie and Audrey are indeed identical twins, but for now, they have all the proof they need.
“We found something we weren’t looking for,” Jennifer Doering said. “And it’s been pretty cool stuff.”