I was days away from giving birth and was discussing pain relief with my NCT friends when the WhatsApp message came through from my twin sister. “No baby.” To the point. No frills. Just like her. The message, a punch to the stomach, was followed by a sad-face emoji that seemed both insufficient at conveying the agony felt by its sender and utterly devastating in its everyday-ness. My extremities went tingly, then numb, and suddenly I felt oddly hollow and weightless, as though someone had scooped out my insides and replaced them with helium. And then, another punch to the stomach, a real one this time: my unborn son reminding me that I wasn’t, in fact, hollow or, indeed, full of helium. I was full of baby. And my sister, my other half, my womb mate, was not.
It is a myth, I’m sorry to say, that twins are psychic, although it’s one my identical twin sister, Lydia, and I often played up to at parties by agreeing answers to set questions. (She was always thinking of a triangle; I was always thinking of the colour blue.) But when she messaged me just after lunch one Friday at the beginning of February 2021, asking if I was free to chat, I knew she was going to tell me she was pregnant. Perhaps it was twin instinct or perhaps it was simply because my partner and I had, that weekend, been discussing our own plans to start a family, but I was right: she was.
