Mirrors
A twin explores the blurry boundaries between self and other.
By Vienna Scott
Identical mirror twins are exactly the same but opposite. Like kindergarten squish art, paint splatters on half a page, God folds it over and splat: you get one baby with a freckle on the right cheek and another with a matching freckle on the left. That was us, two wings on the same Crayola acrylic butterfly.
This was a new phenomenon that medical researchers discovered. Mirroreds are monozygotic like traditional identical twins, one egg and one sperm join and then divide into two babies with indistinguishable genetic codes. The division happens in a slim window, around seven days gestation, right before conjoined twins and right after the garden-variety identical. Embryos that split this late in development have already activated the genes that determine the right and left side of the fetus so the newly independent halves have their own unique directions. Two become one and produce two again: a perfect return on parental investment.
Scientists hypothesized that mirror twins would resolve age-old nature-nurture debates. They weren’t quite sure how. For us, it was just a genetic magic trick used to wow the second-grade recess. If one of us lost a tooth in the morning, we could be sure the other would lose her tooth, the one in the exact same position just mirrored across the tongue, later in the school day.
A few days before Christmas, I got tired of all the sameness and took my petty triumph over nature. I pulled—and yanked and twisted and door-slammed and plied—out one of my front teeth before it was loose, giving myself a lisp for the better part of January before the unsprouted adult tooth had time to erupt. Even with the matching jammies, we would remember who was who in these holiday photos. My sister lost her front tooth a few days later. I paid too high a price for a matching gap-toothed grin. After that vain victory, I didn’t fight nature anymore.
Plus, we don’t look perfectly alike anyways. You look at your twin and it’s like looking at yourself in the mirror (which is really the only way you ever get to look at yourself). Your twin looks more like you to you than they do to anyone else. Other people can tell the right and left wings of a butterfly apart.
We didn’t know there was a name for these magical powers until we were six years old and the pediatrician realized my blood was mis-typed at birth. We went from fraternal twins—each our own egg and sperm, 50 percent alike, just like any other siblings—to identical twins, to identical twins perhaps worth studying in the span of one check-up. They gave us a research referral and princess stickers for our troubles.
We schlepped down to Boston Children’s Hospital and let them observe us for their budding philosophies of selfhood. The white coats watched us write with opposite hands and muttered about right brains and left brains. They tested our eyes: I’m nearsighted and she’s farsighted. My glasses are pink and hers are blue. I really wanted green, but they didn’t have any green glasses for girls at the store. She told them that she loved blue; it was the color of the ocean and 1950s diner booths and the sky when she was coloring her robins and cardinals and chickadees. I told them pink was boring. If any smart kid picked a color, it would have to be green. Green is grass and trees and soccer fields. You get to see green everywhere. If you choose to love it, you get to be happy whenever you see it and you definitely see green the most.
They discovered that I favor my left eye. She favors the right. We had to wear eye patches to school for months to even out. We looked like some mythic creature the universe hacked together, skipping around sporting matching smock dresses with four arms and four legs and four ponytails but only two good eyes and two good hands between us. My eyesight got better over the years. Hers got worse.
They tested our ears and measured our right-earedness (her) and left-earedness (me). This has never impacted my life in any significant way. That doesn’t really impact her life much either because her hearing aids adjust to hear however she likes.
White coats asked about freckles and birthmarks and cowlicks. She likes chocolate ice cream. I like vanilla. These all seemed like silly ways to answer big questions about selfhood. They hoped that our oppositeness would help them argue that much more of the self is genetically determined than white coats thought before they met our matching dimples and contrary mannerisms. Why do you like vanilla ice cream? I’m not picky. I’ll eat the chocolate ice cream too. Hayleigh’s the picky one. But even she isn’t that bad. She is scared of cereal though. I’m not scared of anything but spiders. Does that tell you something about my eternal soul?
Everything is your biology, he said. You’re interwoven forever, he said too.
Growing up evangelical, I had my own curiosities about the white coats’ studies. I had an idea that the sperm, the egg, and the soul somehow made the self. My preacher loved to say You knitted me together in my mother’s womb to the Lord when he led prayer. If the soul was there at conception, did it tear in half when we split? Do we share eternally? Was there a soul at conception that got snatched up by one grabby body and then God sent down a second soul seven days late? Did a divine clerical error send two souls to fight over a fetus? That could be why it split Solomon-style, right down the middle, in the first place.
The mechanisms were messy, but I knew from Sunday School that there were only two sets of twins in the Bible: Jacob and Esau, Perez and Zerah. After warring in the womb, Jacob was born grabbing onto Esau’s heel, trying to yank him back into the amniotic spray so he could claim the title of firstborn for himself. He had to cheat Esau out of the title later. Perez succeeded where Jacob failed. Zerah stuck one hand out of the birthing canal which the midwife tied with a scarlet thread to mark the firstborn. He somehow got sucked back into the womb and Perez broke out first. It was a noteworthy enough victory that Perez was literally named Burst Forth. The cheat and the bully got to be ancestors of Jesus. He chose the lowly. Nature selects the older twin. God selects the younger. That’s how the pastors at my church always preached it. The first will be last and the last will be first. Salvation comes through the second-born.
This wasn’t just a kindergarten concern. I was six: self-interested and curious. It wasn’t a question of family inheritance but a question of religious inheritance. I wanted to know where I fit in the great Christian cosmos. But I needed to know who got knit and pearled first. As a C-Section-born duet, I was pulled out of the womb in the same minute as my sister. According to my mother, I came first, red-faced as Esau, screaming with jazz hands. Hayleigh followed less than 30 seconds later, gray and silent. But her name came first in the alphabet, so some overworked nurse jotted us down as H and then V and we got our birth certificates and social security numbers doled out in that order. In the family myth, I’m the eldest child. In the eyes of the government, Hayleigh beat me out. I just didn’t know about the eyes of God. The whole seven-days-to-ensoulment business would’ve split the thirty-second window wide open.
The white coats didn’t help much with my questions. They only cared about the ones they had for me. I peppered; they just jotted extrovert down on my chart.
The twins in literature were even more depressing than the Genesis duos. Authors can’t imagine an identical other. It’s all Tweedledee and Tweedledums. The closest thing to mirrordness was mythological. Anything Greek was unhelpfully dualist. The good twin-evil twin trope was overdone. To love a thing that is outside your self but is, in many ways, part of your self is a tricky exteriority. It shares your clothes and house and friends and memories and genetics. Authors wrote only rivalries and eternally entangled souls.
As we grew up, our differences led us apart. She was homeschooled; I went to public school. We shared less of our lives and I spent less time wondering about our sharedness. She moved south to study Bible and education at a Christian school, and I stayed north to study chemical engineering in the Ivy League. But by some stroke of chance, I changed my major to religious studies and got a teaching job on the side. I started to wonder again about fate. A twins researcher at Yale learned about us and set up a Zoom call. He poked and prodded like the white coats before. He even cared about the ice cream.
Everything is your biology, he said. You’re interwoven forever, he said too.
With enough coincidences, I’m starting to believe him—at least on the second point. I’m six years old again, wondering with scientists, God, and my sister to figure out what my mirror means.
Vienna Scott is an MAR student in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School. She graduated from Yale College in 2021 with degrees in Religious Studies and Political Science. In her free time, she enjoys baking, hiking, and hanging out with friends.