Today I received a new story, written at length, with care and permission to publish anywhere. Such generosity is wonderful, but of course the act of writing one's story is therapeutic in itself. It helps others, hundreds of them, but it also helps the writer.
Do you want to share your story? It can be anonymous. There is a special page for sending me stories here.
Not only that, but by telling the story about your womb twin, its like you make them real and give them a place in this world. This is clear from a blog created specifically for this purpose, called "Enjy's place". On this blog there are some details and reviews about books about single twins. Clearly, it is a subject worth writing about and reading about, even if you are not a single twin.
But there is nothing more profound, moving and real than stories written by womb twin survivors in their own words. A Silent Cry is a book of 70 stories like this, and more and more stories are being sent to me every week via the questionnaire, some of them with permission to publish. But this new story is particularly interesting....
My Beautiful Triplets
I had always been aware of a presence ever since I was really young. It's been there really my entire life. I never gave it much thought because it was completely natural and not frightening at all. I would have long conversations with this presence all the time. Sometimes I would look into the mirror and talk, other times it would be in the privacy of my room, or the back yard, and as I got older, in the car as I drove. There were times that I actaully "got caught" conversing aloud with seemingly nobody there, and I would invariably get embarrassed and make some weird apology to whoever had been listening, aghast and no doubt thinking that I was insane. The presence was female. How did I know that? It was always an unspoken but known aspect. I never told anyone about it, not my parents or my friends. When I was in second grade, I happened to be reading a book about twin sisters who were identical and played a joke on their classmates. THe oddest feeling washed over me as I read this story; a mixture of envy, jealousy and sadness. Deep sadness.
Over the next couple of years, I would see twins on television. In the early 1960's there was a children's show called "Wonderama" and each week they had an audience filled with children and always some sort of theme. One day the theme was "Twins" and there were only twin pairs in the audience. I was so envious I couldn't stand it. I felt cheated and very unhappy. It took a long time for that feeling to subside, but it never went away entirely. I never knew actual twins in elementary school.This made them all the more exotic.
My best friend growing up was a little boy, Georgie, who lived the next street over from me. We were exactly 2 months apart. We did everything together' played at each other's houses, attended each other's birthdays, walked to school together. My father took pictures of Georgie and I on our first day of kindergarten as we rode on the school bus for the first time. Around age 9 we started drifting apart somewhat; that's the age when boys hang out more with boys and girls hang with other girls. Two weeks after my 12th birthday, my family moved to another town far away and I would be attending a different school. Georgie came over to say goodbye. I never thought for one second that I would never see him again; 12 year olds don't think like that.
I entered seventh grade and immediately everything became an intense struggle. I had trouble making friends. My parents fought constantly. My grades dropped for the first time ever. Nobody understood me. I felt alone and adrift in a sea of loneliness. I had started feeling empty inside, like I didn't really exist. In the fall I went to the local library with another girl, and for some reason I found some books on twins. Mainly they were how-to books advising parents of twins on how to care for them. I loved these books and felt a strange affinity for them, like it touched on some silent, hidden aspect of myself.Read the rest of this story on this page:
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