Twin-Life before Birth

Lately I have felt the effects of being an early twin-loss survivor more keenly again. I will try to restart this blog and see who picks up or to whom it resonates anew.



When people realise they very probably were conceived a twin there are some things nearly all of us do. We give our twins names and we invent a life together. We imagine what it was like in the womb, how we played together, what we felt and thought and what our life together might have been, and we treat ourselves and our twins as PERSONS. There is no other way. As conscious individuals we cannot speak of other individuals than as persons.
If we, born and grown to think ands feel als persons, want to remember our twins we have to invent their personalities.
I did and I do the same.
Yet, all the time I am very conscious of a flaw in this scenario seemingly healing my twinloss if only in imagination. My twin was not a person when s/he died and neither was I.

That's not a bad thing. I still was I. There is a continuity from the fertilised egg in my mother's womb to the 54-year-old typing these words. But to be a person includes the ability to distinguish between me and another person. We did not do that in the womb.

My twin and I just were. We were there. We had our own blood circuit, our own hearts. We grew differently ( I have reason to believe my twin was much smaller than me), we moved differently. We were not one, we were separate entities, but us being together was the only reality we knew. To be was to be together. I moved, my twin moved. We reached out, we kicked, our movements sent ripples through the amniotic fluid. Impulses received from the other one, responses to impulses sent - all this was what I experienced as presence, as existence. So did my twin. The other's presence was part of our individual presence, part of our individual existence.

So, when my twin was lost I did not lose a person, I lost a presence. And I lost part of my existence.
What had been a daily, normal and substantial part of existence, what had been a decisive part of my very exyistence, the PRESENCE of my twin, was suddenly lost.
And is lost to this very day.
My twin was not taken from my side, s/he was taken from my core.

At the same time psychologists in one country still doubt that prenatal twin-loss can have any effect on the survivor at all, in other countries statistics show that such a loss is experienced the more devastating the earlier it occurs. (http://www.primal-page.com/twiner.htm)
And how could it not be?
There are no words to express the panic when the loss happens. There is no name to cherish and no pictures to keep. There are just feelings, very profound feelings of mortal danger, existential fear, the dire need to curl away from the source of danger... All this is stacked away neatly in my amygdala and gets fired at me in odd situations.
When a WhatsApp message I sent does not receive a reply a chasm opens beneath me.
When my keys are not where they ought to be panic engulfes me.
And sometimes, for no apparent reason, a convulsive pain grips me, as if something was ripped from my midriff.
It's the lack of a presence that should be there to confirm my existence.
When I reach out to that presence and it isn't there, my body flies into panic mode.
The amygdala is a stubborn conservative. Nothing can convince this small gland in my brain responsible for storing emotions, preferrably negative ones, that what happens now isn't connected with what happened then.
To my amygdala I'm a wholesome entity. No difference between embryo-me and university-graduate-me.
And both, the embryo-me and the university-graduate-me, are twin-me.

These things are getting worse the older I get. The pain is getting more piercing. The despair is holding as firmer grip.
The inability to consciously comprehend and articulate what happened then and what is happening now gets more frustrating.
At times I feel like a veteran from a war with a shrapnell shard still embedded in my body somewhere (When I was I child there were many men suffering from that). It can't be operated upon, maybe it won't kill me but it's a constant reminder of a wound I received before I was born.