Gemini Heart Series - Soul Sisters

I am often asked what is it like to raise identical twins. It's a loaded question for me, which generally ends with me asking the asker if they have time to pull up a chair and let me fill them in on the copious notes I have taken throughout the clinically controlled, scientifically documented nature vs. nurture experiment known as raising twins. It is nothing short of fascinating to watch them at their best and at their worst. 

As such, I've decided to feature a regular post here at Stalking Sunsets and by regular I mean when something happens to warrant a post or when the mood strikes me.  This is a case of the former. I feel it is indeed warranted to share; ultimately because I want these girls to have a record of the years that will eventually cloud with age and clutter of the adult female mind, but also because it's damn good stuff.

I suppose it goes without saying, identical twins have a bond like no other. I didn't fully understand the depth of the bond until I watched helplessly as the older twin (by four minutes) endured the sight of her little sister screaming from the pain of a ruptured appendix, surgery, complications, nausea, tenderness, etc. Everyone was focused on the one in pain but looking back, I believe the experience was actually more difficult for the one who had to watch. It was as if she felt the pain, the uncertainty and the fear deep within her soul.

She would later write in her journal, "Once my sister was in the hosbidell and it was very hard for me watching them poke her, lisaning to the screaming and crying but every day I would go to the hosbidell, after school of course because she is my sister, my one and only twin sister".

One day during her hospital stay, my daughter was asked by one of my friends if she thought it was hard on her sister to see her in pain.  She answered the question by telling a story:

Well it's kinda like this. There was this one time when the ice cream truck came down the street and we all grabbed our money and ran out the door just in time to catch him.  After we bought our ice cream, a whole crowd turned around to walk away and somebody bumped my sister, causing her ice cream to drop on top of all the gravel along the curb.  It was ruined and there was nothing we could do about it because the ice cream truck was already too far gone. You know how that would make you feel, right? If everybody else had ice cream and you didn't, it would make you want to cry.

To which my friend replied, did it make you cry? And with a slight nod of her head we understood exactly how deeply her sister must have been affected by this horrible "hosbidell" experience. It made us, sitting their on her bed, want to cry for them both.

When they were once again reunited at home, this is how they slept together that first night back. To call it a bond seems trite and cliche. It is more like a deeply entrenched connection where they are literally one half of the same soul.