I digress for legal reasons, it was tragic. My younger brother was born the day Ben Johnson had his gold medal taken away so I guess disappointment is a leitmotif of my mother’s births.
The funniest thing of all about this anecdote is perhaps I have not mentioned the most important aspect of my birth at all: I am a twin. Yet my parents didn’t know this the day I was born, even when they held the 5 pound globule that I was in their hands, they still did not know that I was a twin.
“There is still a heartbeat inside of you,” said the Nova Scotian Nurse to my mother.
“There’s another one,” added the doctor.
It was a moment of doubling down no one in our time can really comprehend. Technology allows us to understand how many babies we will give birth to when we give birth. I suppose this is similar in some ways to the “I didn’t know I was pregnant!” anecdote that has been glorified on television. Ultrasounds were an upper class frivolty that at the time my mother and father could not afford and so the two heart beats must have sounded like one to the stethoscope of my mother’s doctor.
After exchanging a series of looks I’m sure that would make the office cringe, the staff at St Joseph’s General Hosptial must have nodded off the anomoly of it, and went back in to fish out my sister. My older brother, only two years old at the time, was not able to adapt so quickly however. He was totally flabbergasted. His instinct kicked in and he was compelled to run up and down the hallways grabbing any stranger he could at the Halifax General Hospital to explain to them the pressing news:
“There are two!”
And so, I was never born. We were. Elise and I.