Q J Med 2002; 95: 417-418
© 2002 Association of Physicians
Coda |
Seeing double
I doubt that I have much in common with William Shakespeare or Margaret Thatcher. However, we do share one important bond—as parents of opposite-sex twins.
Once you have twins, you join one of those invisible networks of affinity that cut across class and culture. It is similar to the affinity that people discover when they share a particular medical condition, for example, or are immigrants. What unites you is the realization that no one—least of all professionals such as doctors—can fully understand that particular aspect of your life unless they have had the same experience. You also suddenly find yourself taking an intense interest in an aspect of the world to which you were previously quite indifferent.
Parents of twins all report one thing: twins are regarded as public property. As Anne Shakespeare wheeled Hamnet and Judith out in their oak baby carriage, you can be sure that the citizens of Stratford stopped her to inquire: ‘Are they boys or girls?’, ‘Which is the dominant one?’, ‘Do they get on?’ Dennis Thatcher, on his expeditions with Carol and Mark in their Silver Cross perambulator, no doubt soon tired of scowling at people who pointed out: ‘You've got your hands full!’ The phrase, with its asinine claim for originality, echoes endlessly in your ears. It usually sounds like a mixture of exorcism and envy.
Yet the phrase at least shows you that people understand the size of your task. Twins bring with them a merciless kind of arithmetic. With only one baby at a time, parents can take it in turns to go to the toilet unaccompanied. When you have twins, neither of you has this luxury. Both parents have to learn to do most things while carrying a child, unless someone else is willing to get stuck in too. The intrusiveness of strangers may in fact be an evolved response to your need for communal help.
The commonest question you face is, of course, ‘Are they identical?’ The question has a kind of ritual, mantric quality, quite dissociated from any knowledge or understanding of zygosity. Even doctors have asked if our boy and girl are identical. (‘No,’ I sometimes answer, ‘the boy has a penis.’) Ignorance about the difference between monozygous (MZ) and dizygous (DZ) twins is almost universal. Contrary to obstetric myth, you cannot tell by looking at the placenta. The placenta of MZ twins can split into two, and DZ placentas can fuse. From intrauterine life, MZ twins can vary greatly in appearance—particularly in size—while same-sex DZ twins, like any siblings, can look like peas in a pod. At 20 weeks of gestation, the behaviour patterns of MZ twins, visible on ultrasound, can be as different from each other as any DZ pair. The only true standard for zygosity is DNA testing.
The frequency of twins in Britain, especially DZ twins, is increasing fast. This is partly because of the dramatically accelerated success rate in implanted embryos. It is also because women are having children when they are older—a factor that also increases the chances of twins. Twinhood is sensitive to other maternal parameters too. In the words of Elizabeth Bryan, the doyenne of twin studies in Britain, and co-founder of the Twins and Multiple Births Association, if you want to have twins ‘it is best to be a six foot Nigerian in your late thirties who already has five children including a set of fraternal twins’.
Twins have always been common in literature. Not surprisingly, Shakespeare was himself fond of depicting them. The farcical plot in The Comedy of Errors revolves around two sets of twins, while in Twelfth Night, Sebastian and Viola are meant to look so similar that ‘an apple cleft in twain is not more twin’. One of the greatest novels of recent years in English—The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy—tells the story of opposite-sex twins, and of the consequences of their separation.
One story, perhaps more than any other, has influenced our perception of twins and how they relate to each other: that of Jacob and Esau. Most people can recall learning about their enmity, especially Jacob's extortion of his brother's inheritance for ‘a mess of pottage’, and his trickery in persuading their blind father Isaac to bless him, in the guise of his hairier sibling. However, the prolonged tale of their rivalry and estrangement, which extends over eight chapters of Genesis, ends in a moving reconciliation. After his long absence from Canaan, Jacob returns to meet his twin: ‘And Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him: and they wept’ (Genesis 33:4).
The reconciliation is so startling, and perhaps so challenging emotionally, that not all readers have accepted it at face value. The seventh century Massoretic editors of the Hebrew Bible, for example, indicated that the words ‘he kissed him’ could also be read as ‘he bit him’. Whatever the reason for this—and many have been suggested—they captured the ambivalence that twins can show to each other, sometimes moving in a moment between fierce conflict and mutual generosity. And yet, since my wife and I became parents of twins and started to inquire about such things, we have scarcely ever met a twin who did not feel blessed to be one.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||