Twin mementos

It's difficult to find a memento for someone who never had a name nor a face. Still, I assembled a collection of them over the years and here are some of them:

 This is a silver pendant showing two dolphins. I chose it - and engraved it myself with names for me and my twin - because they jump in different directions and are still connected.

 This is another silver pendant of two little angels kissing.

                                               
 This one is special. It's an ammonite fossil I found at Mainz Christmas Market two years ago. What makes it special is there are two of them. Ammonites are prehistoric marine animals whose shells are often found as fossils. They resemble a very young embryo in the womb. The booth trading in minerals at the Christmas Market had many petrified ammonites that day but only one that had two in one.

 Sometimes, when the unfairness of being a twinless twin hits me hard I take to this pendant. It's a pewter one showing twin skeletons in a fetal position twins often take in the womb, when one twin faces downward and the other upward. It may look a bit morbid but I still wear it sometimes. It's a reminder that not only life before birth is real but so is death. On the old ultrasound it may look as if a twin vanishes, like a soap bubble in the air. In reality the twin DIES and there will be a skeleton however tiny.

 This one is more comforting. It's made from Tibetian yak bone and shows the sun and the moon kissing. I choose it when I feel my twin may, after all, have been a brother, because there is more of a male and female completing one another quality in it.

You can order customised dogtags all over the internet and I have a huge collection of the ordinary US-Army type, but this one is made in the fashion of the German Bundeswehr. I assumed my twin was a girl when I ordered it and it's engraved with the names I chose for me and my (girl)twin and the words "Once a twin - always a twin". It's a bit large to wear it so I have it stored in my treasure shrine.

Here's another find from Mainz Christmas Market. These adorable little bears hugging I embossed with the letters A and B which may just indicate twin A and twin B or the names I chose. The little pendant hanging from them I orderer from a Dutch website where you can find all kinds of things made to order with your own photos. I used the water colour I made at age 4 of two identical girls rope skipping I described before on this blog.

Here is one of my dogtags US-Army style I ordered with the words "Once a twin - always a twin". The other "dogtag" I made from fimo and it bears the words "Surviving twin". I wear it when I'm in the mood to encourage myself. I made it to this life for a reason! One day I will know which one.

Last but not least the most fitting memento for my twin I ever found. It's a bone carving showing two dolphins positioned like embryos in the womb. Sometimes I wonder why I ever take it off.

What if...

...my twin had lived?
Sometimes I try to imagine what life with my twin might have been like.
Then I look at the picture I have posted before (a watercolour I did at age 4) and think of my sister (left) always a bit more outgoing, more adventurous than me.

Would our younger siblings have been born at all? I think so. Our mother conceived so easily our father once said he only had to look at her lovingly and she became pregnant.
But our parents may not have had a divorce. They may have had too much to do with four of us to become hippies and turn our family into a great aquarian experiment. We may have gone to a regular primary school, not the Montessori one I suffered at for four years. We still would have had much the same way to school, though, and we would have argued about which dog we wanted to have.

I would have wanted a Dachshound.
- And I a Whippet.
- Oh, yes, but I also wanted a Saluki.
- Then I would have wanted an Afghan.

Not so much different from how it was.

Our parents would not have sent us to separate classes at school. Too much trouble with parents evenings and all that stuff, but through puberty we would have drifted apart a bit. I would have had riding lessons (I really did) and always be a bit afraid of the horses (I was). You would have done some other sports - maybe handball or gymnastics - but you would have come with me to the stables once or twice and be less afraid of the horses than I. That would have been mean.
I would have been totally into animals and you would have been more popular, but I wouldn't have been lonely because I'd always have had you.

We would have graduated from school together and suddenly discovered we wanted to be together again and go to the same university. Would I still have studied theology? I think I may but probably not Catholic since becoming Catholic was part of my searching for you everywhere without knowing. Our parents may have stayed with the Protestant Church, we would have gone to Confirmation and I may have studied to become a pastor. You would have cancelled your studies - maybe geography - after two years and become a flight attendant. Yes,you would! Always with both feet in the air while I am trying to have one foot on earth and one in heaven.

Would I be married to the same husband? Probably not, but maybe to someone very similar in character. A fellow theologian, perhaps. We would have shared a comgregation.

You would have flown around the world and come to visit us often. You wouldn't have married but you would have felt like my children were yours, too, and you'd have been godmother to all of them (three at least, maybe four like I have now, or even five). They would have adored you.

Your favourite country would have been...

-South-Africa!
-Why South-Africa?
-No idea, it just may have been.

Okay, South-Africa. You would have sent us pictures from Krüger Nationalpark and always dream of finding a South-African husband. I would have been jealous of all your boyfriends.

I would have been worried your plane might crash all the time...

Now, at age 50+, you would have thought about retirement with work conditions at Lufthansa becoming tougher every year. I would have wanted you to settle down near me but been afraid to say so for fear to drive you away. Because, of course, you would have been talking about moving to...

-South-Africa.
-Yeah! I got that. South-Africa.

I would feel a bit abandoned by you, now, because you'd mostly be away and life would be getting more exhausting (it really is) and I would think we should be more together and help one another.

Not so much different from how it is.

We would have talked on WhatsApp daily, sometimes by the hour. You would have said "WhatsApp is really almost like being in the womb together again. We don't talk novels but we're always in touch."

Not so much different from how it is...

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.

Twin-Story

This is a painting done in words do describe what can't be described: the loss of a twin before birth.

Twin-Story

My name is Gina and I am a twin. My brother died when we were born.

I know it sounds crazy and when I try to tell this to people, especially professionals, I can see it in their eyes they think I need a good dose of psychotherapy. Well, maybe I do. It's not so bad when they blurt out right away „you're loony“ or „you're making it up“, but when they are like „you have a fair amount of projections going on“ or „is this how you try to deal with life's hardships“ I could kick their shins with a relish. Anyway, this is what I know.

I remember lying in an incubator and seeing my brother die. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, babies CAN'T remember lying in an incubator. It's not like I remember going shopping the day before yesterday and never finding that yellow jumper I wanted so badly. It's more like a picture that's saved somewhere in my brain, in a region words have no access to. I can see it all at once, in one piece, but when I try to describe it, things become blurry. I guess, this is what it must be like if you see something with your eyes and have no words to attach to it. So this is what hides behind the words I now have to use and hadn't at that time.

My incubator stood next to the door, opposite an opaque window. It had been pushed there because there was nothing really wrong with me that made an incubator necessary. I now think they just had it ready for the twin's birth and put me there to get their hands free.

They were all working on my brother. Nurses, doctors and midwives. Someone was sobbing. Our mother, I guess. I had been tucked into a blanket and a loose strand was tickling me. This was one of the sensations I feeled. The other one was my brother dying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah again, I KNOW it's not possible.

We were due to date and big for twins. Sixpounders, both of us. Mom did quite a job carrying us around. I had slipped out nice and easy and now everybody was waiting for Granny to appear.

My brother's name is Grant. Our parents have this fixation about the letter G. Since our last name is Galiano and my father's called George and my mother Gretchen, they thought never to change a winning letter and picket out names with G for both of us. Actually I am Grazia-Angelina and my brother is Grant Anthony. What a name! Sounds like a Roman Emperor. When I'm in a very flippant mood I think it's the reason he didn't stay around. He just couldn't face life with such a name.

Mom an Dad called us Gina and Granny even before our birth and afterwards they talked a lot about Granny and always called him that. Sounds like they talk about my grandmother. Makes it easier in public. For me, too. I can say „I love my Granny“ and nobody raises an eyebrow. Cute, isn't it? A young girl loving her grandmother AND wearing a golden bracelet with her name on it. But that's a different story.

Granny did appear some twenty minutes later, sure enough. He slipped out just like me, head first, perfect position – and he didn't start breathing.

They worked on him, worked their fingers raw. They injected substances into him. They tickeld him – or so I've been told later – and they cut his umbilical cord. They wouldn't do it nowadays, but back then they were sure it would make him breathe. He'd have to with the cord cut, he didn't get no oxygen anymore from our mother's body that way. They thought it would make him breathe but it didn't.

Mom told me, years and years later, when a baby is born lots of things happen in the little body. A hole in the heart that's supposed to be there till then, closes, the lung is sort of connected to the blood circuit and the blood starts running the other way round. When the baby breathes for the first time the lungs inflate and everything is fine. In Granny's case something went wrong and if you come to think about all the things happening within literally one breath's time it's a miracle it doesn't go wrong more often. Somehow Granny's lungs did not connect to the blood circuit, he COULDN'T breathe – and he didn't.

I had felt him all those months. You can't be anything closer than in the womb, you just can't. You snuggle up with a friend in one bed, you share a bath-tub we some veeery close friend, you crawl into one sleeping bag up on Everest in a very cold night, but you'll never be as close as in the womb. I could feel Granny's heart beating, could feel the life pulsating in him. He would kick me in the face or touch my bum with his fingers. The membrane between us – us being fraternal – did not prevent us from touching, not a bit. I would push him around and feel his legs entangle with mine. I could even feel him pee – don't you laugh – the liquid became a little bit warmer when he did. He felt all these things from me, too. There was our mother's slow, steady heartbeat and our small, fluttering ones, but I would never know which one was mine and which one was Granny's. I did not know where my body ended and his began. I do not know now.

I know I'm not supposed to remember all this. What you gonna do Mr. Shrink? Sue me?

I was lying in my incubator and I felt him slipping away. He was alive when he was born. Mom later, a very long time later, told me she could feel the life in him when he was born. She could feel his heart beating.

So could I. The double puls was still there, but while mine was quickening up and getting stronger, his was slowly faltering. Like a line getting thinner and thinner, like a thread of wool being worn finer and finer until it's no more than a gossamer thread. He was drifting away from me.

I didn't want that. I became stronger by the minute. With every heartbeat, every breath I took – I had no trouble breathing – I felt stronger and more able to hold on, to go on, to feel myself, to sense things, do things. Sensations loomed around me. Smell. Termperature. Noise. Life opened up around me and clutched at me, claiming me for its own. And Granny was slipping away from it all, away from life.

They cut his cord. Did I say that before? They wouldn't do it today. They cut his cord and then there was no way his blood could get the oxygen it needed, the oxygen it should get from breathing. They hustled and bustled and somebody shouted and somebody sobbed and nurses were running and getting things and putting things back and a doctor was in charge … and Granny just didn't heed them and went off on his own on a journey of his own and didn't take me with him.

That wasn't fair. I felt him die. It felt like falling. Like falling into a bottomless abyss. He fell and fell and I felt the falling while being held back by all this reality, the white walls, the humming and piping and clicking and ticking of instruments, people's voices, cool air rushing over me when somebody ran past my incubator. All these things held me back, tied me to life, while I felt my brother falling away. I can still feel him falling. I have never completely lost this feeling of falling into nothingness. Like when you step down a stair and you suddenly go two and you weren't counting on it and your body goes down two steps when your stomach only expected one. It's a sickening feeling and I don't like it. It isn't there all the time, now, but every other day I will suddenly experience it and then I'll remember: my brother is gone.

I was a fussy baby and a difficult toddler. I would sit by myself and talk to myself. I would scream at night for no reason. I screamed when Granny died, my mother told me. It was a high, piercing scream that made nurses rush to my side, but apparently I was fine. All the instruments said so.

It's at night that falling feeling gets strongest and then I scream. I don't know if I'm afraid of falling, too, or of my brother being gone. It's one and the same feeling.

My mother put a small, golden bracelet round my wrist when I was two. „Granny“ was engraved on it but she never told me, she just called it „my keepsake“, or „my precious“. People at kindergarden thought it was a present from my grandmother.

I was a nuisance at kindergarden. I would sit and look at the boys playing. Once a girl tried to approach me and make me play with her. Family legend has it I threw toys at her. At home I would tell how „Rory made a sand-castle“, „Josh pushed Ryan off the slide“, „Matthew has a new shoe on the one foot and on the other too“. I resented girls. But I also never played with the boys, I just looked at them.

When I was four, I lost my bracelet. I came home sobbing „I lost my Granny, my Granny's gone“. It was weird, because I couldn't read at that time and nobody had ever told me my brother's name was on that bracelet or that it referred to him at all. I never got it back and although to this very day I collect things with a G on them or even order them to be engraved „Grant“ or „Granny“ I somehow think of having lost my brother for good that day when I lost my bracelet. But,s till, it's only a date and in reality, MY reality, it all merges: him slipping away, both of us falling, us being together in the womb, me being claimed by life, me trying to claim my share in having a twin-brother by watching the boys, loosing my bracelet and finding my brother in the memories and feelings I ought not to have. It's all the same thing, really, twin-loss.

Twindream

It's time for a new photo. Truth demands that I mention from time to time that I don't really know if my twin was a brother or a sister. My mother never stopped to look and there is no neutral source to turn to. My parents's accounts about my mother's pregnancy differ a lot, so it's even harder to tell. A twinless twin-friend of mine did this painting for me when I first told her about my twin. From looking at photos from me she said I looked to her like a person who was in the womb with a brother, and she did this painting for me. She did it on a T-Shirt I have hung on a wardrobe since then, so it's always the last thing I look at at nights and the first thing in the morning :-).

What makes a brain a twin-brain?

Well, science may not back me up - yet - but reading Dr. Barbara Klein's book "Alone in the mirror" started me thinking a bit. There are numerous articles on the web telling you how you might proove (at least to yourself) that you had a twin who died before birth and there are some things always mentioned - changing partners often, unable to be alone, eating disorders - and some things mentioned very rarely or never at all.
Like "instant response". A twin fetus in the womb experiences instant response whenever he kicks his co-twin. It's part of normal existence to get a reaction to your every action. How could it be otherwise since there is no way for human beings to be closer than in the womb.
And here we have a child whose brain developed with a pattern of instant reaction to action born single after the co-twin vanished, was miscarried or stillborn. The brain which developed in this peculiar environment does not magically turn into a brain which underwent a different development only because the co-twin is no longer there, instant response is still a normal feature.
And here we have parents, family, teachers, peers who do not know this child has a twin-brain. They only realize he/her expects an instant response to his/her actions and they say "you're too demanding", "everything isn't about you", "you set too much store by yourself", "he/she is unable to socialize with others, be part of a team, let others have their share, is egotistic" and so on.
The twin-child does not know what's happening because he/she mostly does not know she's a twin herself and if she knows doesn't realize what it means to have a twin-brain. The only thing made clear to this child is: you are wrong. The way you behave is wrong. Your attitude is wrong.
The child ideed is wrong. He's in the wrong world. She never was meant to live in a world without someone to provide instant response. He was made to live in a twin-world, he's a twin.
This may sound like a minor thing, but it isn't. It may ruin a family, send a person to therapy for years with nobody able to really help. It's NORMAL for a twin to expect instant response as it is normal fort a twin to expect nonverbal understanding. It's not normal to expect the singleton world to understand this, but how is the twin-child to know. Since the brain can't be redeveloped the only help I can see, so far, is to remember every time the inevitable disappointment occurs to remember: I have a twin-brain. The other do not NOT respond to me because they don't like me but because they aren't twins.

Books on twins in general N° 1 "Alone in the mirror" by Barbara Klein

I wrote this review for Dr. Barbara Klein after reading her new book "Alone in the mirror. Twins in therapy." I still benefit from reading this book every day. It first opened my eyes to the simple truth that Dr. Brandt in saying "once a twin always a twin" was not just making a comforting statement especially for early loss twins - he simply stated the truth,.

Review of Alone in the Mirror

So, I've read the new book by Barbara Klein and it's an absolute MUST-READ for anyone who wants to understand twins—or him/herself, if you are a twin. I have read some scientific approaches to twinship before, including Segal and Sandbank, but Klein presents the reader not only with twin-behavior but with the underlying psychological reasons.

Dr. Klein carefully balances nature vs. nurture speculation (that is, she takes the primary attachment between twins into consideration and also describes the way this attachment develops through early and later experiences in the twin's life but she avoids judging what behavior is due to one or the other traits, inborn or acquired). So, for me as an early-loss twin, it is possible throughout the book to identify with twin-behavior and still take the different experiences I necessarily had through growing up without my twin into consideration. I was surprised how much I resemble the twins described, not always in behavior, but in the underlying principles. Since it is common knowledge that a multiple pregnancy is very different from a singleton-pregnancy, I don't see why this shouldn't be true for the babies as much as for the mother. Twins develop in a different prenatal environment than singletons, they ARE different and they are born fully equipped for a different world than the one they'll encounter. This is doubly true for the single born twin whose brain was exposed to stimulations which were entirely normal for him/her and which suddenly no longer exist after birth. Tricky situation. Although growing up with your twin is very different from being a twin and growing up single, the ideas and tips on how to deal with having to cope in a non-twin world are extremely helpful even for an in-utero-loser. Before I knew I was a twin I considered myself just a freak—which is a bad thing. After I learned about my twin's miscarriage I considered myself a twinless twin, a wombtwin survivor, a traumatized victim of early twinloss—which is not a good thing in itself, either.

After reading Dr. Klein's book I have just started to consider myself a twin trying to cope in a non-twin world (with additional handicaps)—which is in itself not a bad thing at all. It makes a great difference to see my expectations toward closeness and communication either as over-demanding, freakish or pathological or as a pattern stemming from an in-utero experience. It greatly helps to understand myself and be more tolerant with others. Before I ordered the book I was reluctant because of the more than 20 Euro I had to pay, but it was worth every cent. :-)