One and the Same by Abigail Pogrebin

Author:Abigail Pogrebin [Pogrebin, Abigail]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-53222-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-12-25T05:00:00+00:00

PAMELA: I was thinking, as a mother who’s had an infant recently, what a profoundly different experience it is to have two infants—for the infants. Usually you have this baby and you are just gushing love—and you’re just this dyad: mother and baby. But with twins, there are two babies. You just don’t get an undivided mom ever. You never got that. And how does that feel? How does that change things? How is it better or worse? It never occurred to me to think about that until I had a child. It’s such an intense bonding experience, being alone with a baby. It actually made me want to find out: How does the attachment process happen with two babies? How is it different? Does the physical contact of those babies create that attachment with each other when it can’t happen with the mother?

ABIGAIL: What is it like to be friends with identical twins?

PAMELA: I was friends with you and then I was friends with Robin. And I don’t remember the in between. But I remember that your mom did kind of call a meeting about it, to talk about “Why are you now better friends with Robin?”

ABIGAIL: Who was there?

PAMELA: The two of you, your mom, and me—in your living room. I think her intention was to kind of negotiate what had occurred among the three of us. It was a separate discussion from the question of who was going to light a candle at my bat mitzvah. I think Robin did.

ABIGAIL: What do you remember about the meeting?

PAMELA: Just somehow Letty wanted to manage the expectations, to head off hurt feelings. And I remember feeling uncomfortable, a little on the spot, not at all mature enough to cope with it, but also wanting to be good and to say the right thing.

ABIGAIL: Do you remember thinking, This is too much to ask of me—to navigate their twinship?

PAMELA: No. I felt so privileged to be a part of such an intimate dynamic. I remember thinking, This is ground zero of a family’s stuff, and I matter. It was a little bit heady, I guess. I can’t speak to why I was friends with you and then I was better friends with Robin. I feel like some triangulation happened and that’s it. I can’t honestly say at twelve or thirteen, there was more of a kindred spirit in Robin. But I do remember noticing you were different from other twins I had known. There was one set of twins at my public school, and the identicalness of them was irrelevant; nobody thought of it. They were shy; they were quiet; they just were. There wasn’t a thing about them being identical twins. But when I met you guys, you already had, at twelve years old, a sophisticated sense of “We are individuals; but we’re also twins.” And it was this culmination of the power of the twinness, but the distinctiveness, too. The effort to be distinctive.

ABIGAIL: And you remember that?

PAMELA: Yes.

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