Being an identical twin shaped my identity in childhood. From the very beginning, it was what I was known for. I can’t recall one picture of me without Rebekah.
The story I heard most often was of our birth. I grew up in a tiny town in Iowa with dismal healthcare, which meant that even in 1980, my mom didn’t have an ultrasound. After delivering me, the doctor shouted, “There’s another one in there!” and my dad almost fainted.
We got confused all the time
They say one of the perks of living in a small town is that everyone knows your name. Well, I guess that only applies to non-twins. Which one was I again? Rebekah or Rachel, they’d ask.
My parents encouraged this by dressing us identically and giving us the same hairstyle. They thought it was best for us to be together, and we were supposed to ensure the other twin was safe. I thought we would grow up to live next door to each other.
This constant togetherness was all I ever knew and was such a large part of my identity that when I talk about my childhood, I accidentally start using the plural “we” to tell a story about myself. The only time we were apart was during the short school day. The elementary school wouldn’t let us be in the same class together, but we made sure to play together at recess and sit together at lunch. I hated being away from Rebekah. It felt like half of me was missing. She was my best friend and the person I was the most myself with.
Being a twin was the most interesting thing about me. It was something that people were always curious about. Do we have telepathic powers? If Rebekah gets hurt, do I feel it? Don’t get me wrong, I liked the attention, but no one ever asked about me specifically or wondered who I was without Rebekah. People wondered if we played tricks, like we were some characters in a Disney film. No, we didn’t, and by high school, it was no longer funny finding out a boy meant to ask you to homecoming but got it wrong. In return, I often wondered what it was like not to be a twin. Was it terribly lonely?
I compared myself to my sister
Regardless of whether other people knew the difference between Rebekah and me, we did. Having an identical twin was an easy yardstick against which to measure myself. Her successes felt like my failures. By high school, our twinness was a competition of who did it better while also knowing each other so well that a sideways glance could cut like a knife.
While we had similar interests (and still do), we started to find our own paths. I baked cookies and made a scrapbook while Rebekah wrote in her journal and joined the soccer team. But the most profound difference was that she knew what she wanted to do after high school, and I did not.
She was going to a four-year college and was going to get an English degree. I could’ve gone and done the same, but by that point, I was starting to see that I needed to be a whole person and not just the other half of a whole. It was the first time in my life that Rebekah wasn’t right by my side. We stayed in touch, but we were both finding out what it was like to be seen as our own person and not the other sister’s doppelgänger. I wasn’t used to going places by myself or having to make all my own decisions without my twin’s input.
After a year, I ended up across the country at a small college. I met my husband and found out that his best friend was a triplet, which is decidedly cooler than a twin. He knew firsthand how incredibly different identicals can be. For the first time, being a twin didn’t seem all that interesting. I didn’t have to try to explain what it was like or answer silly questions. He truly wanted to know me as me. I was finally known and loved for who I was and not seen as part of a box set.
Sometimes I think about how sad 10-year-old me would be that Rebekah and I don’t live next door to each other. But once she got over the shock of it, she’d be proud of the life I created all on my own.
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