One and the Same

by Abigail Pogrebin

  Pediatrician Dr. Elizabeth Bryan observes that often “parents are reluctant to separate their twins even for short periods, so that they might spend quality time with each one. Others find that even short separations are hard to organize for practical reasons. Still others believe that by letting someone else, even a relative, look after one of the babies, their ‘special’ status as a parent of twins may be diminished or their competence questioned.”

  Robin and I give one piece of advice to parents of twins: Spend separate time with each twin. It seems so simple, but our parents never did it, and Robin especially feels that this oversight cemented a feeling of our having been blurred together.

  When I ask my mother why she and Dad never took us separately, she looks pained. “Because we didn’t think that way. We just thought in terms of the family. I feel I should have been aware of it because I should have been smart enough to figure out that something is gained when you’re alone with a person. I should have realized that. I didn’t. … I don’t know. It never occurred to us. It always was a matter of “Let’s.” Not: ‘You come with me and you go with him.’”

  She said they realized their mistake in one powerful instant when I was eighteen and they invited me to go with them for a weekend at a bed-and-breakfast. “You said you were uncomfortable coming along because you’d never been alone with us. It was like somebody shot us between the eyes; we couldn’t believe it. ‘How could this have happened?’ We never noticed that we had never been with one child.”

  “It was clear that you felt you had a performance level,” my father recalls, “and you felt that, without Robin, you wouldn’t be able to hold up your end in terms of pleasing us, as if that was anything you had to do. So that was a real realization that we’d missed something. I think we were always so careful to have equality of treatment that it turned out to be undifferentiated. We’d never done anything individually with you, all this time.”

  Dad adds, however, that we also “bought into the constant togetherness. Anytime there was the slightest deviation between you, you girls would accuse us of being unfair. So it was mutually reinforcing. Like if you would have an experience that was better, the other would resent it.”

  Dr. Joan Friedman, author of Emotionally Healthy Twins, who has a bohemian style with long blond hair, says parents must insist on separate time with each twin, even when the twins balk. “If you haven’t introduced alone time really early, you’re going to get resistance,” she says. “The parent has to believe that having that separate relationship is crucial.”

  She is adamant about this because she says individual time gives rise to distinct relationships, which gives rise to concrete identities. “If you don’t, as a parent, make a solid attachment with each twin, then you’re left with the twin parenting the twin,” she explains, which means one twin’s overreliance on the other for a sense of self, one’s confidence, one’s place in the world. “Because of the parents’ failure to work hard toward developing a separate relationship with each child, the children, by virtue of their proximity and their developmental age when they’re growing up together, end up attaching more importantly to each other, and they shut the parent out. ‘I want to go with my sister; I don’t want you to take her and leave me home.’ The twinship ends up becoming so powerful, and parents are afraid of it. They’re afraid if they do anything to disrupt it, they’ll ruin the twin attachment. … So by virtue of the parents not understanding what each child needs, the twinship becomes powerful, and the parents get left out. … My discovery is that, while it may seem counterintuitive, when both twins are securely attached to the parents, the twinship becomes a more cherished, healthy, balanced relationship. The counterintuitive piece is that if you separate twins as much as you may have to—in order to encourage that parent bond—then people think you’re hurting the twinship.”

  She says her patients report the same regret my parents have. “I can’t tell you the number of times a mother says to me, ‘Why didn’t I ever take them separately? Why didn’t I think about it? I could have left one home.’ These women had nannies; they could have done it. But they didn’t want to. In their minds, they’d be breaking up something so wonderful that they couldn’t justify doing that. Or their twins resisted the idea and they listened to them. Even though everybody knows—it’s not my research—every attachment theorist tells you every infant needs alone time with its mother.”

  Jean Kunhardt, cofounder of the Soho Parenting Center in Manhattan, echoes Friedman. “The intimacy dance is such a one-on-one thing, it’s a monogamous thing. My biggest urging to new mothers is to really take the time to have an individual moment with each twin. Twins demand it less because they don’t need it as much. So it’s the quiet moments of engagement with your baby that are sometimes missing with twins.”

  Skipping one-on-one time seems to backfire both ways: Twins miss out on forging a clear identity, while parents miss out on a specific intimacy.

  Even back in 1954, psychologist Dorothy Burlingham wrote in her study of identical twins that mothers can’t connect to their twins until they get to know them apart from each other. “Several mothers have plainly said that it was impossible to love their twins until they had found a difference in them,” Burlingham wrote.

  According to psychologist Michael Rothman, one way mothers of twins compensate for the disquieting feeling that they don’t really know their twins apart is to categorize them. If they can tag them, they must know them. “Labels or personality styles are assigned to each twin and scripted by the mother and family quite early,” Rothman writes, “likely as a means to soothe their own anxieties.”

  Joan Friedman agrees. “The labels are created in order to convince yourself you have a separate attachment. And if you don’t do the work and really have the separate attachment, then you’ve just created sort of a myth that helps you define one child in relationship to the other. … That’s the difference between being known and being noticed. If you’re not known through your attachment to your parents, then you’re noticed because you’re like your twin or you’re different from your twin. It’s not about who you are, but how you compare to this other person.”

  Being known versus being noticed. I realize that this is what Robin had been trying to tell me—that twinship had made her feel noticed but not known. She was never sure if friends really knew us, or even if our parents did, and so the fact that we always got noticed by people, and still do today, is no consolation. Friedman tells me that not feeling “differentiated” can make a person feel lost. She speaks from experience. “My sense of self was organized around my sister, so once she and I were apart in college, I had no idea who I was. … I think that’s an extreme case, but it gives you some sense of what can happen if your identity is only organized around the twinship.”

  I interviewed our childhood friend Pamela Koffler, a film producer, who first met Robin and me at age twelve at a summer camp in New Milford, Connecticut. Though she lived in Tenafly, New Jersey, and we lived in Manhattan, we stayed in touch after camp, and then we all ended up in college together.

  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 betw
een. 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. Plus, you were dynamic and theatrical and performative. And the combination was big and alluring. … It was almost like the identical twinness wasn’t even a good-enough gimmick for you two. You were going to be interesting, fascinating, exciting friends, and oh, there’s this other cool thing too, which is that you’re identical twins.

  ABIGAIL: Do you remember that we played on our twinship?

  PAMELA: No. It was the opposite. You had almost settled into the identity of “We’re sisters, we’re twins, but we’re going to be so much more.” I had to catch up to that, because identical twins by themselves are so incredible. It’s such a huge, crazy thing to see two people who look exactly alike who aren’t the same person.

  ABIGAIL: Do you remember meeting us for the first time?

  PAMELA: Yes. I remember you had really long hair and Robin had short hair, and I thought that was already so ballsy, like “We’re young twins, but we’re going to have different hair.”

  ABIGAIL: And then college—do you have memories of us there?

  PAMELA: I feel like I was finding my social footing freshman year and you guys weren’t a part of it. For some reason, my identity there needed to be separate from what came before. I think it had to do with the ease with which you guys socially found yourselves—or I perceived it that way. … Then I really noticed how you and Robin found different social strata, and I often thought about it because yours seemed more interesting to me—the theater people who were sexually ambiguous and all of that. And Robin’s was “square,” “jock.” That seemed not true to her somehow; but back then, we were in college, and I made an allowance for it—like, We’re not all ourselves quite yet. But it seemed a little unfair that you got that crowd and she got the other crowd. And then Robin and I reconnected junior or senior year.

  ABIGAIL: Did you feel the twinship complicated your friendship with Robin?

  PAMELA: I don’t feel like it was complicated, because I feel like somehow the environment of friendship with one of you instantly creates an ease with the fact that you can’t be best friends with both. So it was really uncomplicated. It was just an absolute given: At a certain point I was Robin’s friend and that’s the friend I had. It felt like a force field. A magnet goes here—you just don’t go to the other pole, because of maybe some rules that you guys wrote between each other that got communicated nonverbally. But a nice artifact of that is, I always felt de facto friendly toward you and that there was a loyalty because of my friendship with Robin. Like, Okay, there’s some refracted friendship here. … Maybe it has to do with a nice aspect of being a twin, that you double your circle of friends because of the closeness.

  ABIGAIL: Tell me as honestly as you can, even though I’m sitting in front of you, since I know some people in college felt “the Pogrebin twins,” as we were sometimes called, were just too much, too visible and self-satisfied, did you see us that way?

  PAMELA: I think it’s unavoidable; I think it has to do with your personalities. You guys were a force. It had to do with your interests; even at twelve years old, you liked to perform. You were creative; you made up clubs. … While I sat and read Archie comics. It didn’t occur to me to be in a dramatic, interesting fantasy world. I think it was that, combined with the twinness; I don’t think they can be separated. Because there were other twins who didn’t have that effect. You guys were dynamos. … And there are two and you’re identical.

  ABIGAIL: Do you think our twinship made us cocky?

  PAMELA: Not cocky at all. You were generous, inclusive people. There was also a kind of naïveté mixed in with your self-possession. You guys weren’t edgy. There was a sweet innocence to how worldly you were. It was an interesting combination. There was a guilelessness to how you guys were just “Ta-da!” about yourselves. And I think what people responded to is the jealousy of being that young, mixed with the lack of guile, because I think a lot of people don’t have that.

  ABIGAIL: How do you see Robin and me now when we’re together?

  PAMELA: I would have said it’s an ideal relationship, except that I know from discussion with Robin that nothing is perfect. I would have said there’s a fluidity of intimacy that is special: how well you know each other, a lack of the discomfort that I sometimes feel with my siblings, that I imagined you didn’t have. Very normal, very close, very at ease, supportive. And when we were younger, I imagined a secret intimacy.

  ABIGAIL: Is there anything you have wondered about in terms of Robin and me?

  PAMELA: I guess, not having had a sister myself, I wonder: Whatever isn’t perfect about your relationship, you still have to admit that it’s an extraordinary closeness, right? It has to be.

  ABIGAIL: It is.

  PAMELA: That, to me, is the precious thing.

  • •

  7 MAKING THE BREAK: SEPARATION

  The “pushing away” and “holding on” …

  —Ricardo Ainslie, The Psychology of Twinship

  On April 22, 2008, Carl Zimmer wrote a New York Times science article about how genetically identical E. coli bacteria differentiate themselves. In the article, entitled “Expressing Our Individuality, the Way E. Coli Do,” Zimmer explained that despite the bacteria’s exact likeness at the moment they split in half, they ultimately go on to display their own personalities and behavior. He addressed society’s assumption that when two beings are genetic copies, that must mean they’re the same. “We put a far bigger premium on nature than nurture when it comes to our individuality,” Zimmer wrote. “That’s one reason why reproductive cloning inspires so much horror. If genes equal identity, then a person carrying someone else’s DNA has no distinct self.”

  In my nonscientific, lay-twin opinion, this hits upon the core twin anxiety—especially for identical twins: If I’m the same, how can I be distinct?

  Zimmer answered this, albeit unwittingly, in his analysis of the microbes: “A colony of genetically identical E. coli is, in fact, a mob of individuals. …” (Italics added.) “At the very least, E. coli’s individuality should be a warning to those who would put human nature down to any sort of simple genetic determinism. Living things are more than just programs run by genetic software.”

  Ah, so science affirms that individuation is possible.
Yet, for so many twins I’ve talked to, identical or fraternal, establishing separateness seemed to be the primary stumbling block.

  Steve and David Colman, handsome, assured thirty-seven-year-olds, say they needed to live closer together to be able to pull apart.

  Gretchen Langner, forty-three, balked at one attempt by her twin, Belinda, to put some distance between them; she told Belinda that a decision like that couldn’t be made unilaterally.

  In the case of the identical Farley boys, twenty-five, one of them went so far as to become a woman in order to differentiate himself from his twin.

  I meet Steve and David Colman for lunch during an August heat wave. Both have blue eyes, smallish ears, and pink complexions, although Steve’s lips are thinner, his nose wider, and he has longer, downtown sideburns. (He’s a performing artist.) Both have freckles on their arms. Both order panini sandwiches.

  The Colmans grew up in New Jersey; their dad was a Presbyterian minister and their mom was a feminist activist in their church. They have an older brother, John, with whom they tried to downplay their twinship so he wouldn’t feel left out. They say it wasn’t until they were adults living in the same metropolitan area after ten years in different states for school and work that they were able to make an emotional break. “I think the physical separation prevented us from getting to a point where we could separate in our relationship,” says Steven, younger by eight minutes and a performing poet who cowrote and costarred in Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway and won the National Poetry Slam championship as a member of the Nuyorican Poets Café slam team.

  “We couldn’t separate until we started talking,” says David, who, at the time we talk, teaches labor history and African-American history at Ramapo College in New Jersey.