My five-year-old fraternal twin boys are in a preschool class with 18 children, 12 of whom are boys.  Even though all the boys in the class look fairly similar (mismatched clothes, Lightening McQueen sneakers, one tooth missing), I don’t have any trouble distinguishing Jack from Billy and Matt from Jack. Yet when it comes to identifying my sons, all of the other kids’ parents scratch her heads and ask, “Which one is which?”

I get that twins can be tricky.  I would understand the confusion if I made things difficult by dressing my boys in matching outfits, switching their name tags, or referring to them as one entity as in “Twins! I’m over here!”

However, I don’t.  My boys look like brothers-both are blonde, have skin pigments that are one step above albino, and have a penchant for wearing their shoes on the wrong feet—but they are hardly identical. One of my sons has blue eyes while the other has brown.  Kellen is a good two inches taller and five pounds less than his brother.  In short, anyone who looks at the two for longer than 2 seconds can tell that they are not the same person.

Yet, herein lies the problem, I think.  It is unfortunate, but true that in today’s society the title of “twin” often trumps any individualizing marker of identity, including one’s proper name. Because people know that my boys are twins, they don’t make any attempt to distinguish them from each other, or see them as anything other than twins.

As my boys grow up, all of this is bound to change.  I look forward to the day when the world sees them as individuals, but feel slightly bad that they have had to spend the past school year being known to many simply as “one of the twins.”

(photo by MRBECK)