Last updated on April 17th, 2015 at 01:37 am

 

This is a “Re-blog” from my old blog! This was one of my favorite post to write, so I’m including it on RunMommyRun so you can see that Julie is a large part of my life, even if we live so far away! We’ve been influencing each other our whole lives! 

I was  born with a womb mate! She’s my sister, my best friend, and because she lives so far, my missing half. I am one half of a set of identical twins.  I often get asked what it feels like to be a twin. I really can’t answer because I don’t know what it feels like not to be but I do know that I am very lucky.

There are a few things that inspired me to write this post. I was reading an article today  from  CBC.ca about an episode of The Nature of Things  Two of a Kind. I got to watch a snippet of the episode and it touches on so many things that we have encountered as twins. The other thing that inspired me to write about this post was a comment left on my other blog www.runmommyrun.ca where my friend Myra mentioned that she loves the post where I include Julie.

Growing Up With One Identity

Growing up, we always dressed identically. My mom would buy everything in duplicate, however, Julie was dressed in blue, and I was in pink or red. My mom did this so others would be able to differentiate between us. That didn’t always work since people couldn’t remember which one wore blue, which wore red.

We were in the same class for pre-kindergarten and senior-kindergarten, but my mom decided to place us in separate classes from grade 1 and on so that we weren’t always competing with each other. I remember that first day of grade one. My dad drove us to school, we were late.  The principal and our dad walked us to class. When we arrived , Julie entered and I followed, but I was stopped. I was told I was going to the other class. Tears formed in my eyes. It had never occurred to me that we could be separated. They walked me over to my class, and when they opened the door, I saw the boy down the street and a few more of my friends and decided it was going to be OK.

 

Searching for individualism

The Twins and The Twix, are only some of the monikers people gave us collectively. There are many other french ones; les bessonnes, les jumelles, LuciepisJulie (and they said it like it was one word, not three). Till about grade 8, we still dressed the same often. It was once we hit high school and university that we started to fight for our individualism. In high school we took the same classes, but tried to take them in different semesters so we wouldn’t always be together. But that we both graduated from University from with a HBSc in Environmental Earth Science didn’t help us to set ourselves as individuals.

Julie met and fell in love with her husband back in our first year of University. You would think that would help to set us apart, however, people forgot which twin was dating Kevin, so he just became known as the Twins’ boyfriend.

After University, Julie got a job locally, I decided to pursue my schooling. I did  a one-year of Post-Graduate  program in Ecosystem Restoration at Niagara College. Finally, I was happy that I would go somewhere where people had no idea I had a twin sister, but I missed Julie terribly. I do think this was an important step for the both of us. Separately, we both became more confident in ourselves and we were forced to socialize by ourselves. I had always had a default companion, so to find myself eating at a food court by myself was a very new experience at 22 years of age.

The more we change, the more we stay the same

We  have lived 500 km apart for over 15 years, but have not grown apart . We communicate in some way, shape or form every single day. We use text, email, FaceTime and even my blog.  We now have very different jobs, yet technology and graphics are something we both have in common in our work.  We are both married with kids and we each have a dog. Julie has two boys however, I only have one. We both run. Currently, Julie has very long hair while mine is styled with a short bob.  The funny thing is that we are no longer fighting to be different, we now embrace being same again. In fact, when we ran in the Run For The Grapes 5 Km race together, I made some identical T-shirts that said Twin #1 and Twin #2 in the back. No matter what we do, at the end of the day, the two of us, we are just two peas in a pod.

 

Do you have any questions for Julie and I about being a twin? Post it in the comment section and I will answer!