Mirror Images!

My sister and I were born almost three months premature. It was an emergency C-section, one my mom had been insisting on: her coworker was three months further along, with twins that also shared a placenta. They were born early due to twin-to-twin transfusion, a rare and often fatal disorder where an abnormal blood vessel in the placenta makes one twin a blood donor to the other. After expressing her concern, my mom’s high-risk Ob-gyn told her to “stay off the internet and let him be the doctor”. With a late June due date, Claire and I were born the morning of April 6th. Claire was soon diagnosed with auditory neuropathy, a form of deafness. Months later, when I was still pulling myself around on the floor with just one arm, the cerebral palsy diagnosis came. Though I can’t remember it, there’s a picture in my mind of my mom bent over the steering wheel of our minivan, crying for the things she didn’t know. I would inherit that insistence, the way she fought relentlessly to be heard, out of love and out of fear, for those close to me. It was my mom’s unbreakable character, and the obstacles Claire and I faced in our childhood that would propel me to use my voice: to advocate for myself and others, and open my eyes to the responsibility I held as a sister and as a citizen.
As the donor twin, Claire was a shrunken one pound, fourteen ounce wizard, myself a bloated three pounder. We spent almost three months in the NICU, in adjoining isolettes, not connected but still together. I was discharged five days before her and heard how she cried the rest of the first night after my mom took me home. Once we were reunited, there was a peace between the two of us, one that allowed me to settle into my identity as a twin. It is a fascinating and equally heavy thing to know that you could’ve been the reason for another’s death, and while I’m more aware of it now than i was as a baby, the responsibility I felt to be there for her was present at even a few months old, as she had given me so much, before even being introduced to the world. When we lied in our crib my duties were quite literally, in my blood. If the blood vessel we shared meant she couldn’t hear or talk as proficiently as I could, I would speak for her, just as she would eagerly carry me.

When I opened my eyes
My tiny hands colored blue,
You knew me like an old friend
You liked me
no matter what I had to say
A language only we could understand
And so I made a promise
I would learn to move mountains.

We’d often go out to recess together. Claire and I were in the same kindergarten class, thanks to the hours my mom had spent on the phone fighting with the administration. It was a rule, for whatever reason, that twins were not to be placed together. Obviously there were circumstances that reserved an exception, she’d asserted, and finally was able to get them to crack. We had spent the entirety of preschool together at a special program for kids with disabilities, and starting a regular elementary school was a daunting feat. My mom’s tireless effort of ensuring us each other’s company smoothed my settling into school, and positioned me to guide Claire. It catalyzed my role as her “lookout”, to repeat things when someone spoke too fast, or get her attention when we were going outside for a fire drill. One early afternoon on the blacktop, we had walked over to play foursquare. I stopped short in horror: the boy I developed a crush on was in the first box. Claire pulled on my sweater and dragged me closer to the line, “c’mon livy, what are you doing?”. I shrugged and said nothing.

“Hey guys, can we play?” Claire asked the boy and his friend.
He tilted his head and said “Why do you sound like that? I don’t speak chinese.”

My crush wilted like a flower in winter, and my heart was cold, then suddenly, burning with rage. The best insult I could manage at the time was “jerkface”, to which he was unsurprisingly stunned, and stood quietly as I told him she has a speech impediment, before yanking Claire’s hand away. I told her he was rude and she left it alone. At only six, I couldn’t articulate the feeling in my stomach, how it lurched when someone I’d assumed knew the same things as I did would be hurtful towards one of us. I learned that day that people would belittle you when you least expected it, and there was nothing that burned me more than someone trying to burn her. I commanded my voice in that moment, thinking of my mom, and how she always said we had a “built-in best friend”. I would defend Claire not because she needed me, but because if there was a list of people who deserved that she’d be dead last, and I wouldn’t be afraid to defend those I loved, even if it meant affecting others’ perception of me.

My mom has a tiny frame and a sharp mind: a partner at a big law firm working sixty-hour weeks, she is always in motion. Audre Lorde said in her speech “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.” I believe that my mom has unknowingly lived by this idea since I was born. With two other children older than Claire and I, and no experience with disabled babies, she dedicated so much time to make sure we got everything I needed, and never let her fear get in the way. As I’ve gotten older I feel myself respond to situations just as she would. In my junior year of high school, I was in the bathroom while a few girls sitting on the floor chatted behind me. Two of them continuously made passive aggressive comments to the other, ones Claire and I were all too familiar with. I turned around and only addressed the two girls, asking if the three of them are friends. They responded yes, to which I said I never would’ve guessed, because of the way they were speaking to her. I then only addressed the girl being targeted, and introduced myself, asking if she’d ever like to hang out sometime. I could understand the feeling of being ostracized in a way that people tried to make seem passive or subtle. As a citizen in my school environment, I felt responsible to make sure these girls knew I wasn’t oblivious to their ways, and tell the one being picked on that I was there to support her, even if I seemed like a stranger. When I got home from school that day and told my mom about those girls, she hugged me and told me how proud she was of me for speaking up. I just hugged her tighter with a rush of warmth at the fortune of having her in my life, because it was her attitude everyday that allowed me the strength to use my voice.

As someone with a disability, it was not easy to dismiss things people said about me or the way I walked, the different habits I had. Without my mother serving as a confident and forceful role model, I truly believe I would not be able to trust in myself and use my voice with such assertion as I am today. Oscar Wilde wrote in The Importance of Being Earnest, “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy.” To me, it is an honor. After all, she is the reason I am here, the reason I speak as I do.