DOUBLE TROUBLE
Sisters open up on life as a twin
BI was bouncing on the toes of my gym shoes. This was my first time playing on a volleyball team and I was the only Grade 7 on the team of older Grade 8 students.
AI was leisurely browsing a body care store for a friend’s birthday present, sampling perfumes.
BThe ball got bumped out of the court. “Mine!” I shouted, racing to get it back in bounds. Looking over my shoulder as I ran, I didn’t see the wooden bench in my path until my shins slammed into it. My elbow buckled and cracked as the full weight of my body came crashing down on my right arm.
AAt the cash register, my right elbow suddenly started throbbing in pain. • That was the first time that we, Amanda and Brittany, a pair of identical twins, had ever felt each other’s pain.
In our 21 years, we’ve encountered our share of myths, truths and downright twin silliness: We’ve spoken in our own language, saved each other’s lives, felt each other’s pain, shared a bedroom and never been apart for more than 50 hours.
Growing up, all of our personal items, from sippy cups to toys, clothes and keepsakes were labelled “A” and “B.”
It’s practice that started with our first ultrasound picture when the technician indicated “Baby A,” later named Amanda at birth, and “Baby B,” named Brittany. Our parents didn’t realize how much the labelling had affected us until one night when three-year-old Amanda said “Amen” after her nightly prayers and Brittany followed, “Bmen.”
We love that story because it explains what it was like for us growing up. We can’t imagine living without our other half because being a twin is an important part of our individual identities, too. However, even though we learned to be expert sharers, we are our own people and some things are distinctly “A” and “B”.
Despite this, sometimes people and even computer systems have a hard time recognizing that we are two people.
We’ve never felt slighted because we have to share a birthday but it has caused computer confusion when we need the same medication prescriptions. To this day, the computer system can’t handle that we have the same last name and birthday. The solution? Instead of simply looking at our first initials, it is incorrectly indicated that one of us is born a day later to avoid a system breakdown.
A digital change of birthdate couldn’t interrupt our connection, however.
On birthdays and Christmases growing up, our parents brought us to the dollar store to pick out presents for each other. For years, we gifted the exact same items, including plastic dress-up shoes and a butterfly necklace.
Unfortunately all of our home videos live in the cassettes of our parent’s Panasonic Camcorder, the slightly bulkier 1990s version of a smartphone camera app. We haven’t seen all the videos but our parents attest that we conversed in cryptophasia (a secret language between twins) as infants. They managed to decipher three words: diddy (what we called each other), deeto (stairs) and boppy (grandpa).
Having a secret language might creep some people out, but as twins when it comes to tricking people, the possibilities are endless.
Becoming a criminal duo is not one of those possibilities. Contrary to popular belief, identical twins have different fingerprints. So, although we share a genetic blueprint, being an identical twin doesn’t give us any advantages when it comes to the conclusivity of fingerprint evidence. We could trick eye-witnesses, though...
Throughout elementary and high school we played our own pranks on April Fool’s Day: trading places, wearing the same outfit, sitting in each other’s seats in class and answering to our sister’s name. We never switched places for tests except for a Grade 1 spelling exam, after which we told the teacher to reassign the marks ... it didn’t matter because we both got 9/10. From there, our averages in high school were always within less than one per cent of each other.
Our parents have been able to tell us apart. On one April Fool’s Day, they turned the tables — in the middle of the night they switched us in our beds. Amanda woke up in Brittany’s bed and Brittany in Amanda’s, thinking we had swapped bodies overnight.
We haven’t actually stepped into each other’s lives but on occasion we’ve shared a connection in our minds, “twintuition,” that has saved each other. At two years old, Brittany threw a ball at a philodendron plant our mother had out of reach on a mantle. Amanda tattled when she intuitively knew her younger sister shouldn’t be nibbling on a poisonous leaf she knocked loose. At three years of age, the same twintuition kicked in when Amanda was choking on a small candy and Brittany yelled for help while pounding Amanda’s back until the candy dislodged.
Contrary to popular depictions of twins, one of us is not inherently more evil than the other. In film and television people often blame mischievous acts on their “evil twin,” and pairs of twins are represented like Lisa Kudrow’s “good” Phoebe and “bad” Ursula in Friends. However, based on the 11 pairs of identical twins we know, we’re all fairly decent people.
Overall, being a twin is hard to describe. Currently, we work the same two jobs and are both in our fourth year of Carleton’s journalism program, with the same double minor. We enjoy that we’ve always had very similar interests and can share these experiences with each other. Our relationship is kind of an amalgamation of spousal, sibling and best friend-type relationships. Except even better.