The secret life of twins…
Alison Dunford’s twin girls, Summer and Eden, look so alike, even she can’t tell them apart. Now they’re causing havoc on a new TV show....
‘Eden, the school has been on the phone,’ I said sternly to my teenage daughter. ‘Your teacher said you hadn’t done your homework.’
But, rather than looking dismayed at being found out, Eden shook her head. ‘It wasn’t me,’ she protested. ‘I did mine early.’
While most other parents might ask, ‘ Who was it, then?’, I knew instantly what had happened. Glancing over, I saw her twin sister, Summer’s cheeky smile and knew I had found the culprit.
Although they aren’t biologically identical, my two girls couldn’t have looked more alike if they had been. Ever since they were born, back in May 1995, they’ve been confusing people – myself included – both accidentally and on purpose.
I’d been left reeling with shock when an early pregnancy scan showed I was carrying two babies. There were no twins in my family and, as I already had one seven-year-old little girl, Lilli, I hadn’t planned on expanding my family to three.
‘I’ve no idea how we’ll manage,’ I fretted to my partner at the time.
Thankfully, my pregnancy sailed by smoothly and I gave birth at full term to Summer, weighing 7lb, and Eden, 7lb 3oz, 17 minutes later.
As I cradled them for the first time, I couldn’t get over just how similar they looked. ‘They must be identical,’ I gasped to the doctors.
But they assured me that the girls had grown in separate amniotic sacs.
However, that wasn’t going to help me tell them apart – by the time I brought them home, I couldn’t even be sure that the one I’d named Summer at birth was the one I was calling that now!
So I bought them different coloured hairbands – pink for Summer, blue for Eden – to tell them at a glance.
But, when I took them up to bed and one would wake crying in the middle of the night, I wasn’t always convinced I wasn’t feeding the one I’d just fed an hour before!
Yet, however tricky their matching faces made life, I adored seeing how inseparable my girls were. They adored snuggling up in the same cot so much that I had to wait until they were six months old before I could put them down to sleep separately.
‘Goodness, they look alike,’ people would stop me and say when I took them out for a walk.
As toddlers, Summer and Eden developed their own language and shared the same best friend – and, right from the start, they both had a cheeky sense of humour.
When they were five, they found a pair of scissors and Summer gave Eden a drastic ‘fringe’. Although I couldn’t be too mad with them – for the next few months, I didn’t need their hairbands!
Despite their closeness, the girls were eager to show they were separate people with different personalities. Even when people bought them the same outfits, they’d often refuse to wear them on the same day. However, when they started secondary school, they soon realised an added bonus of looking so similar.
Neither was particularly
academic, preferring to focus on the social side of school – so, if one of them hadn’t done their homework or was told off in class, they’d pretend to be the other twin.
I was constantly getting phone calls from school, only to find the ‘wrong’ child was in trouble.
Even when the girls left school and got jobs on the high street of our home town of Whitstable, the confusion didn’t stop there. ‘Didn’t I just see you down the road?’ baffled shoppers would ask.
After more than two decades of being two halves of a whole, it was no wonder that, when Summer announced she was pregnant and was moving out with her boyfriend, Eden was inconsolable.
Luckily, Summer only moved a five-minute walk away, so we still saw her and her son, Sol, all the time. In fact, she’s probably here more than she’s at her own home.
Funnily, Sol is about the only person who can tell the difference between his identical relatives – although that might be because Auntie Eden stays clear of him when it’s time to change his nappies!
It’s certainly not because of their looks. At 24, they look as alike as the day they were born. I recently encouraged them to enter an audition for a TV show called Undercover
Twins, where a pair of suitably similar siblings try to pass themselves off as one person.
By this time, Summer’s relationship with her boyfriend was rocky, and I thought the show would take her mind off it – a good distraction, and a chance to have fun with Eden.
The pair had a brilliant time, apart from deciding on what to wear. Summer is a bit more girly when it comes to her clothes than Eden, and so they can never agree.
But, no matter what mischief they cause, I’d never change my girls. They may be double the trouble, but they’re also twice as much fun!
Undercover Twins is available to watch on my5 catch-up