A healing path (6) Time to say goodbye

The day comes when it is clear that holding on to your twin doesn't help you or your twin. Now we come to the crucial part of the womb twin work.  After you have read this page you may decide you are not yet  ready: that would not be surprising if you have barely begun to consider the possibility that you ever had a womb twin!

This stage has two elements: one is to "find" your womb twin and the other is to "let go" of your womb twin.

Womb Twin stories

On my web site I have a collection of stories.

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....

The womb twin kids project - We Are Womb Twin Survivors

To produce a book for young womb twin survivors aged about 8-11 is difficult. At this age there is  great curiosity about the biology of the whole thing but not the emotional maturity to work though the feelings.

Still in its infancy and not yet completed, this book will be a collection of stories about young womb twin survivors for womb twin survivors. ( see here)

Books for womb twin survivors: Untwinned

UNTWINNED - The first book in the Womb Twin series took two years to create. At that time I had  a whole lot of information about womb twin survivors, but most importantly,  I discovered many other people, better qualified than me, who were discovering the same things. They were qualified in their own fields and worth taking notice of, so I supposed that a housewife sitting at her computer in St Albans could not be the author of any kind of book at that stage, but an anthology of peices written by reputable people from around the world may help to put these ideas on to a sound footing.

On the same day in 2006 I came up with two ideas, both of which came to fruition in 2007: an anthology of articles about womb twin survivors and an organisation to support them, Womb Twin - but more of that later. 

Information for womb twin survivors - womb twin stories

It is very important  for womb twin survivors to feel able to tell their story and not feel strange or weird.  I started collecting stories in 2003 and I have  more than 200 now.  I have permission to use them anonymously and I do put little quotes here and there on various web sites. There are a couple of story pages on the womb twin organisation web site.  People are asked to tell their story ( or just part of it) in 250 words, and Ben, our volunteer web site developer, places the story anonymously on the site.   The stories make wonderful reading.  [Take a look here]

For longer stories, see this page on my womb twin survivors web site.  These stories are a real inspiration, particularly the one below, about an important misdiagnosis...

The death of a twin: the same story, again and again

Some  of the 90% of  the population who have no experience of twin loss claim to know that womb twin survivors "make it all up"; that they are seizing on this idea to "explain all their troubles away." Yet time and again I hear the same story. Here is an example. 

More than half a century has passed since Mary Billingdon’s twin sister was stillborn. Here, Mary talks about the sister she always felt was missing from her life, and the heartache it has caused her.

Mary and her sister Rosemarie were delivered in April 1953 after their mother Elizabeth was rushed into hospital suffering from pre-eclampsia. All three lives were at stake and doctors battled to save mother and both children. They managed to save Elizabeth and deliver Mary safely, at just 3lb 7oz. But Rosemarie was stillborn and weighed a whole pound less than her sister.

Mary recalls: "Mum was 29 and we were to be her first babies. She never really got over losing Rosemarie. In those days, people didn’t like to talk about such things, it was out of sight, out of mind.

"But Mum always introduced me to people as ‘one of the twins’, it was as though she didn’t want to let her go.

"I missed my sister right from the beginning. While other children had imaginary friends, I had Rosemarie. I’d sit on the bus and if someone tried to sit on the seat I’d immediately say: ‘Don’t sit on my twin sister!’ Our nanna, who was with me, would be embarrassed, but I was adamant Rosemarie needed somewhere to sit," she said.

Mary said: "Right from an early age I felt something was missing from my life – it was as though there was a part of me missing that could never be replaced. Mum had never hidden from me that I should have had a twin sister and I grew up knowing about her from the start.

"The bond between twins starts early in the womb. We had shared a placenta and an amniotic sac, and after our birth I still felt there was a bond that would never be broken. I remember playing with twins at school, desperately wishing Rosemarie was still alive so we could all play together.

"I had close friends but I still felt lonely and longed for my twin. I chose twins as friends so I could see what it was really like – what it would have been like if she had been there too. I was envious of those twins, who had each other while I had to pretend," she added.

"As I grew older, guilt crept in – guilt that I had lived and Rosemarie hadn’t. While I was staying with my nanna once I asked why I had survived and not Rosemarie. She joked: ‘you were the greedy one, you were a whole pound heavier’, but I was just seven years old and I took her words literally and blamed myself.

"For years I carried that burden around, feeling guilty that I’d survived and not you. I tried to compensate by being over generous to people, anxious not to be seen as greedy.

"It wasn’t until mum died nine years later that I finally realised it wasn’t my fault. As she lay dying of bowel cancer we talked a lot about you. She reassured me that I wasn’t to blame.

"Every time I look in a mirror I think of her. We were identical twins and I think we would have led identical lives. I think she would have been a nurse, like me.

"I wonder if she’d have looked exactly like me, dressed alike. I remember when I was eighteen, mum and I were shopping when a man stopped us and admired my legs. Mum was horrified but I wondered what he would have thought if Rosemarie had been there too, in an identical skirt. We could have hit the catwalk as twin models," she laughed.

Shortly after her 18th birthday, Mary’s best friend Heather died in a car crash.

"I was devastated at losing Heather. Over the years I’d always tried to compensate for not having Rosemarie by having very close relationships with my friends. In a way they were substitutes for her, and I felt doubly devastated by Heather's death.

"My one regret is that I can only talk to Rosemarie in my head because I have no grave to sit beside. When she was buried in a tiny white coffin. The church decided to put her into a grave that was being dug for another body so that they didn’t need to dig a tiny hole.

"We never knew which one she was in. I have recently trained as a bereavement counsellor and it has finally helped me come to terms with her death. I am helping other people who have lost babies and twins and I feel I am putting my grief to good use.

"I am now at peace with my past and hope one day I will be reunited with my twin after a lifetime apart."

This is her story

Womb twin survivors are not making it up. The twin bond was formed in the womb but broken by death and needs to be grieved normally, freely and publicly.  But first we need to overcome this block that exists in some peoples minds,  that this is nothing but a fantasy.

90% of the population have no experience and do not understand - how dare they claim to know anything about this!  It makes me really angry.

WombTwin survivor, anyone? Share your story with others...

On the Experience Project they have hundreds of stories and we have started a Womb Twin stories page here.

Maybe you could put your story there, it doesnt have to be very long.  You could start a discussion topic on the related forum - have a go, its easy!!

We have to seize every chance of getting the  idea out there.   There are far too many people who do NOT believe this for a moment and we have to put that right, so do your bit today and lets see 100 stories on that page as  soon as we can - got a moment?  Tell your story now!

Wonderful stories!

In May of this year, when I began writing the book of the Womb Twin project, (Womb Twin survivors: the lost twin in the Dream of the Womb)  I advertised for some stories that I could use to illustrate the points being made.

I have just sorted them out  today, and I have more than 100 stories given to me with an agreement that I can use them and the writer will remain anonymous.

Thank you,  thank you!  You know who you are.

I get such wonderful support for this project in some ways. This is wonderful.

All I have to do is go on writing. I have just finished Chapter three, which details all the various ways that a twin may die close to birth or in the last trimester. Many womb twin survivors are born prematurely and have health problems as a result.  It has been a difficult and very sad chapter to write.

Carl- Abortion survivor

I have made a movie about Carl, who is a womb twin survivor and whose twin was lost because of an abortion attempt.

View it here

Comments welcomed!

Saying goodbye to your lost twin

In his new book A clear blue sky, the Hon. Timothy Knatchbull, whose identical twin and other members of his family were blown up, he says that the book is designed to say goodbye to his identical twin, Nick.

Read a moving account of his journey here.

He has moved on. Like all surviving twins he can heal, and this entails a journey through the pain into a recognition of being the fortunate survivor.

Healing fables

Today I posted onto my wombtwin survivors project site yet another story sent to me by a wombtwin survivor. I knew when I read it then this story would speak to many others, and so its so great to have these stores on the site. 

See the whole collection here.

Then I thought: years ago, I wrote some fables that documented my own healing journey and since then I have added more. I know that these fables will speak to many people, and I  am waiting for time and money to publish them. But why? Wombtwin survivors need them now!!

So today, inspired by this talented wombtwin survivor who sent me his story so willingly and who said that it helped him to write it, I have put my fables on the site for anyone to read. They once helped me and now they may help others. They are here. 

Do please enjoy them and tell me what you think.

Combat ignorance! Tell your story to the world!

It is quite clear to me that if 10% of the worlds population is made up of wombtwin survivors, then 90% of the words population doesn't understand what we are talking about.

One way to counteract this lack of understanding is story telling.

The book "A Silent Cry" has 70 stories, but there are many millions of other stories out there. After all, there are at least 600 million wombtwin survivors in the world, each with their own story to tell. Here is one for today:

The story of my life

If you want your story to be out there, email me and I'll put in on the Wombtwin Survivors Project website, with all the others. Lets see how many stories we can collect!

If you already sent me a story on the questionnaire form, you can just email me with permission to upload it to the site (anonymously, of course, unless you want to be named. )

Its a great story, so let's tell the world!