Twins, with a twist
Conceived at the same time but born in different years? It’s extremely rare, but Gabriela and Sophia and John and Pieter are living proof that it happens
The Rodriguez twins of Mississauga will share a lot of things as they grow up, but, strangely, never a birth date. Gabriela and Sophia came into the world eight minutes and 38 seconds apart in 2013 and 2014 at Credit Valley Hospital.
Gabriela, the eldest, was born at 11:52 p.m. Her sister Sophia followed 38 seconds after midnight in a “Superman” pose with an arm outstretched and a clenched fist.
“Nobody realized we were going to be having babies born in two different years until the babies came out,” says their mother, Lindsay Salgueiro. “Everyone at the hospital wanted them to be New Year’s babies, but I just couldn’t hold them in any longer.”
Few eyes were glued to the clock, she says, because doctors were deciding whether Sophia, who was breech, could be turned in the womb to avoid complications or would have to be delivered by emergency caesarean section.
Unlike the fraternal Rodriguez twins, whose mother can’t wait to share their birth story with them when they are old enough to understand, twins John and Pieter Oly never heard much about their delivery because their mother had to be sedated.
“The only thing we know is that we ruined our doctor’s New Year’s Eve party because he had to be called in to deliver us,” Pieter says.
John was born before midnight on New Year’s Eve in 1959. His brother followed about four hours later in the opening moments of 1960, meaning the twins were born in separate years and decades.
“We got our 15 minutes of fame right from the start, but it’s just a novelty,” John says of their birth, which made the Star and a handful of foreign newspapers that day.
His brother calls a “quirk of nature,” and it is in fact a “fairly rare” occurrence that’s so uncommon it goes untracked, experts say.
Like most twins, the Olys endured “natural sibling rivalry” growing up, but Pieter doesn’t remember John boasting about being the older twin.
“Maybe I was jealous because he was dating more girls than I was, but we were both easy-going and laidback kind of guys,” says Pieter, who thought of John as an older brother more than a twin and was always pleased to have someone else around to share experiences with. “I am feeling guilty now because I probably should have milked him for what it was worth.”
John says that part of the reason there has never been animosity between them is because they’re different. “The only thing the same is our voice and our blue eyes,” he says.
John, a project management consultant, is bald, left-handed and needs glasses to see distances, while Pieter, an accountant and pottery studio owner, has a full head of salt- and-pepper hair, is right-handed and uses glasses to see close objects.
Some don’t even know they’re twins, John says, because they celebrate birthdays separately. As kids, they had their own cakes and were awakened on their own birthdays by their older sister and parents sere- nading them with well-wishes.
Lindsay likes the Olys’ approach. She says her girls are different too, and she hopes to raise Gabriela, “the calm, relaxed one,” and Sophia, “the one who is always giggling and attracting attention,” so they won’t feel jilted.
This year, she, her husband and the twins’ two older brothers will do their best to keep the girls up, marking their birthdays as the clock strikes their exact birth minutes.
Still, she says, celebrating with everyone on their exact birthdays may never be possible because people are “so busy getting ready for New Year’s Eve and having their own dinners and parties.”
That’s why the girls will wait until Jan. 3 this year to dress up in matching Minnie Mouse costumes and blow out the candles on separate cakes.
As for the Olys, they will undertake their decades-old tradition of rifling through newspapers and browsing websites looking for other twins born in different years.
They regularly come up emptyhanded — and they missed the births of the Rodriguez twins — but they always hold out hope for other twins who share their “quirk.”
For those wondering if history will repeat itself in 2015, the odds are stacked against the phenomena happening.
Freakonomics, a blog determined to dissect the hidden side of everything, noted that Canada and the U.S. do not track the frequency of twin births in different years. They say the media reported on only three sets of twins born in separate years in the two countries last year, making the occurrence “a rarity.”
John recalls that “it did happen once in another country in the ’70s, but I remember reading it and saying, ‘they still didn’t hit the decade barrier like us.’ ”