"There are two things in life for which we are never truly prepared: twins." -Josh Billings
I have always found identical twins interesting. As a kid I always wondered what it would be like if I had a twin sibling, well that and being left handed....and how cool it would be to fly, but I digress. How crazy would it be for there to be another person who looked just like me, with the same genetic information, but still a completely different person. The closest I could use to compare was that I was lucky enough to have many siblings including one brother, but the idea of twin I didn't know about crossed my mind.
I haven't personally known too many pairs of identical twins in my life, but I have known some. In Junior high, there was a girl, who I hate to say I don't remember her name, that was a twin that had a crush on me, or so said her letter. I remember thinking that I really wished I liked her cause how cool is it that she was a twin. I never really got to know her though as we went to different schools. My sophomore year in high school I met a girl who was a few grades older than me and was also a twin. We became good friends and it was the first time I started seeing twins as two separate individuals rather than as one entity. I grew to know her well in a short time, but I didn't know her sister very much at all. They had different personalities from what I could tell and my childhood preconceptions were being shattered or more appropriately educated the more I got to talk to her. The cool thing was how rarely it actually came up. I remember thinking that it was weird that I was just good friends with one of them, but not both. It didn't take long to realize how much that didn't make sense and in retrospect, I feel silly having thought things like that.
That same year I also became friends with another girl who was a twin and this time she was younger than me. I got to know both her and her sister, but grew much closer to one. She was probably the person that taught me the most about how everyone is their own unique individual and the effects of viewing people as a pair. I also got to observe the bond that some twins have. It doesn't take long to get past all the childish questions, but they were so much fun to ask. Can you read each other's minds? do you feel each other's pain? how did they not mix you up as kids? who is older? How do people tell you apart? Have you guys ever pretended to be each other? etc. This is actually in a small way similar my experience with one of my first openly gay friends where I was able to get out all my silly questions upfront and then just get to know them as a person after. I always enjoyed trying to tell identical twins apart. There were other twins in my school, but I just didn't know them as well.
I always thought that when I was ready to have kids, how great would it be if I had twins. It is a random comment I have made to family and friends. Yeah, I assume it would make the whole raising a baby thing twice as hard, but in the end you would have two kids in the same time it would take to raise one, though the effort and expense would probably also double. Maybe I view raising a child as such an enormous undertaking that I'd rather get two out of the way at once rather than have to go through it twice. Considering that I've waited to get married or have kids it would also let me have a bigger family than I might otherwise have had.
The thing is that twins don't run in my family, so the chances are low, unless I married a person who had twins in their family. I'm not completely knowledgeable about the science, but that is how I generally understand it. I also remember the adage, be careful what you wish for. I probably haven't thought much about this since I was much younger, but it has recently come to mind and it brought back a lot of memories. Twins are rare, which is what makes them interesting.
shellfish