The response took my breath away! Womb twin survivors were so glad to know that at last they would be heard and taken seriously, that within a month I had seventy stories! Every contributor was given a complimentary copy of the book.
The title was taken directly from an email I received from a director of the Twinless Twins Support Group International...
It indeed a silent cry that begins in the womb and can last a lifetime unless given a voice. You are giving a voice to those survivors.Just the decision to send a story was healing for some contributors. Many did not send theirs after all, but even so the decision-making was helpful, as here:
I will pray and meditate on whether I should let you share my story or not. It would help if I knew for sure whether I had a twin or have simply lost my mind. If in fact, I did have a twin, I would love to let you pass my story on so other people in my position wouldn't feel so crazy for wondering if they had twins themselves.Some stories were too long to be edited, or not in a suitable format for publication, or submitted after the deadline. If I had given myself more time to include those too, the book would have been much longer, with almost a hundred stories. The next decision was a cover image. Lindabeth Sanderson, an artist and womb twin survivor herself, living in Toronto. Her work is intuitive and carried the right kind of mystery and depth for a book of this type. (See her gallery here.)
The publisher would of course be Wren Publications, and Lightning Source the printer.
The cover is green, the colour of healing. The type is white, the colour of innocence and hope.
With a week to spare, the book was made available by the time of the first Womb Twin conference, which was held in London in June 2008. With a second title now complete, it began to look as if I may be able to create a Womb Twin library, for the benefit of womb twin survivors everywhere. It was a great feeling!
The book has sold well since then, being the smallest and cheapest of the books and suitable for a gift to a newly-aware womb twin survivor.
In fact, this year I calculated that this book has probably now paid for itself, but I still have to do the sums about that. This will mean that from the end of this year all proceeds from sales of this book will be made over directly to the Womb Twin Fund, which will bring in professional speakers to the annual Womb Twin conference and expand their activities around the world.
Hi Althea, I read A Silent Cry earlier this year and it was spellbinding. I am one of the people who never knewfor sure I had a twin, but I have carried the feelings with me for over fifty years now, so that should signify something. The statement from the person who wrote that they would pray and meditate on whether they should share their story, because they, too, did not know for sure, or if they were simply going crazy, really hit home.To that person, and to ALL people feeling that way, I say,trust your intuition! I was hospitalized in mental hospitals 20 times in my life, and the bulk of those hospitalizations were in my twenties and early thirties when I was hearing voices ( I had been hearing voices since the age of 10) and there were all sorts of other things, like not feeling real, feeling my twin's presence all the time (and still do, to this day) so the psychiatrist declared I was schizophrenic This was in the 1970's and there was no mknowledge of vanishing twins, at least not among the myriad psychiatrists I went to (and there were a lot of them). I had pushed down the feelings of having been a twin for at least a decade when everything hit the proverbial fan in 1977 when I really went off the deep end and told my doctor that my twin sister was still around as a ghost and we were interchangeable. In the hospital they were very interested in my story but they really didn't take me seriously, they just wanted to treat my "delusions". But my point is, they AREN'T derlusions!! My deep feelings of having had a twin are still there, 30 years after shock treatments and every pill in the book, and untold numbers of doctors. It's still there becxause its THE TRUTH. Of course people who don't understand think we're all crazy. We have to operate on the strongest faith there is... faith in ourselves. If the feelings are persisting no matter what, then I believe that you are indeed a womb twin survivor. The stories in A Silent Cry prove it to me, and thank you Althea, for publishing that wonderful book, and for all your research and guidance. You are helping a significant number of people who otherwise might just feel adrift and crazy.
ReplyDeleteIt is so hard to convince people that you are NOT crazy! Womb twin survivors are often misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, narcissism etc, when all the time their feelings and behaviour comprise a perfectly normal response to a rather unusual pre-birth experience.
ReplyDeleteKeep on reading and learning, there are other books. And spread the word wherever you can so we don't have to have people like yourself put into hospital for no reason at all. THis science is all very new and closed-minded professionals won't listen. The open-minded people however are welcoming it and gladly embracing it into their work, simply because it works!