I didn’t come into this world alone. And I didn’t come into this world on time, either. In fact, I was due sometime in May, which would’ve been fitting since early May people are categorized as “Geminis”… if you believe in that sort of thing anyway. What I am trying to say is I am one half of a whole. Literally. My mother lost an ovary when she was younger, so I think fertility was a concern of her’s when she decided to start a family. Imagine her and my father’s surprise when the doctor noticed her HCG test was double what was considered “normal” at 5 weeks pregnant. It wasn’t long before two heartbeats were detected when an ultrasound was performed.
My sister and I were once one – a bundle of cells growing from the collision of my father’s sperm and my mother’s egg – but that zygote decided to split in two. We shared one amniotic sac and one placenta – mono mono. According to babycenter.com, “Mono-mono twins are very rare. A 13-year study of mo-mo twins estimated that they make up just 0.008% of total births. Even among twins, only about 0.8% are mono-mono twins. About 65% to 75% of mo-mo twins are girls.”
My mother was labeled as “high risk” and ended up in the hospital at roughly 4 months pregnant due to contractions that started during a lamaze class. Once admitted, she was on bed rest and received high doses of magnesium sulfate to keep us in just long enough for our lungs to develop. She always tells me how McDonald’s hot fudge sundaes kept her going, but she gained a tremendous amount of weight and preeclampsia. It was not an easy time for her, but I know she thinks it was worth it.
When March (Pisces Season) rolled around, one of us ended up getting the umbilical cord wrapped around the other’s neck (supposedly it was mine around my sisters, but who actually can say that with 100% certainty?) and whenever there was movement, my mother’s blood pressure would jump up and the fetal heart rate of the victim would drop dangerously low… so an emergency c-section put an end to all of that and very close to midnight on the 19th, I was pulled out of my mom’s stomach 5 seconds before my sister. My mother didn’t know if we were going to be boys or girls. Up until that moment, we were Baby A and Baby B. My mom said my name would’ve been Michael. I can’t remember what my sister’s would’ve been. She and I were no more than 4 pounds a piece. My father said our heads were like little oranges that fit perfectly in the palms of his hand. We spent the first first month or two of our lives in the NICU until we were deemed big enough to go home, and even then, we were hooked up to monitors to make sure we wouldn’t stop breathing. My parents were (and still are) far from rich. They lived in a little trailer in a tiny town. But being new parents to identical twins made them celebrities amongst co-workers, friends, and family.
So there is my “origin story”, more or less. I’m not sure what my intentions are with this blog… I know that for the majority of my life, I have been a pretty open book. I love to draw. I love to write. I love to sing and dance. I love to share my thoughts and feelings. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to find a way to balance that with the internet and the line of work I’ve chosen. It is a constant juggling act – to want to share the most intimate parts of myself while preserving the parts of me and my life I want and need to keep private. My twin sister, my other half, is entirely different from me. So I have not ever, nor will I ever divulge too much about her online. But it would be odd for me not to mention her here as she was with me from the start.
Perhaps I will continue telling my life’s story in future posts. Maybe I will jump into an entirely different topic altogether. This journey as no map – I am following intuition alone. I have lots of thoughts and feelings, most of the time, that I want to share. And I don’t always know how to get them out, or who to deliver them to, but I think this might be a good place to start.
Thanks for being here!