twin stuff!

Even though my girls have identical DNA they are looking less and less alike… just goes to show what a a bit of difference in their environment in utero can do.. well ok a lot of difference! I only caught a little of the show on ID twins on SBS last night…. it kind of freaks me out a little to hear that twins are still being treated as a single entity even though they are grown up and live in different states and it really freaks me out to hear that my girls may feel each other’s pain, and I am not sure how I feel about the possibility that at 32 they may still be choosing to wear the same clothes and share their entire lives…. but at the same time I am totally fascinated as well! I crave information about why it happened and what it might mean for my girls…

I’ve read through the transcript of the show (you can log onto the insight website and read the actual transcript there!) and I caught some of a radio interview the other day with the ID twin policemen who were on last nights show and the research professor from Curtain Uni. It was really interesting to hear the research guy say that almost all of the ID twins he has worked with have reported some kind of unexplained connection, and that although he is a man of science and can’t find any reason or explanation for this and thus can’t tell you it is real… he still can’t discount it! I also found a comment he made really resonated with me… along the lines of ‘by doing the same thing as your twin you ARE in fact being an individual!’

People are so obsessed with how my girls are the same or different and why! People want to know which one is the bad one, the smart one, the older one. Do they like the same things? Do they talk the same? ”Oh she has a fatter face’. ‘Her hair is different’ ‘She is more out going’. Or they go on about how alike they are, how can I tell them a apart? So they know who is who?

It seems the while world is looking to see how identical they really are.. and for my girls in looks at least there are a few differences that are obvious. Izzy really does have a fatter face… because she got all the goodies in utero for 6 weeks while Zoe didn’t and all the ramifications that caused on the outside too. But they are still very alike….. very alike and very different. Sounds like I am talking in riddles now but I simple can’t explain it!

There are some far out things that twin studies have helped us learn… like that religiousness and fidelity can be inherited traits! But one thing I find missing from all the research into twins is stuff about how twins develop… how being a twin is different from being a singleton (assuming it is here as I don’t have any personal experience being a twin and don’t have a singleton child) and how being a twin affects your life.

I have a lot of twin thoughts reeling around in my head at the moment… like I am wondering if it is normal for my girls to be so obsessed with each other and so incredibly social with each other but totally unsociable with other kids? The maturity of their social play and conversations together stagger me but they are definitely not like that around other children.

Surely twin’s social development is different to that if singletons? Especially twins who are first born like my girls? Who have each other and only each other for a lot of the time. I am sure their attachment to me is different to that of a single child.. they never had separation anxiety from me but still suffer from it badly with each other.

We know that language acquisition can be different but when you look for other information about the the early childhood development of twins that is about all you come up with.

I am toying with the idea of registering the girls on the twins register and making us available for research projects. The girls have been part of two projects directly related to them being born early and of course in those studies they are important because they are identical twins, share DNA but had very different environments in the womb. It was no question at the time that we’d be a part of these studies… both of them can directly help prem babies have better outcomes which at the time seemed like an important thing contribute to and still does. Also we gain lots of benefits from being involved.. access to medical care and experts we might never have had and monitoring of the girls and information about how the TTTS affected them that I badly needed and still do.

I am just not sure about opening them up to the twins register. On one hand I wonder if it may give us access to a wide range of experts that could answer some of my questions, and I’d like to think that we can make a difference to other’s lives even if only in some small way. But where do you draw the line on having your children studied? Would I allow them to draw blood for a study? Would I even allow them to do a psych study if it upset the girls?? Is me craving information about the world I suddenly find myself in a good enough reason to put my children out there??

Ah gees… and I decided not to post about fate this arvo in the hopes that this topic might be a little lighter?? Yikes!