I had a baby just when my twin sister lost hers. Would our relationship ever be the same?

I was days away from giving birth and was talking about pain relief with my NCT ​​friends when the WhatsApp message arrived from my twin sister. "No baby." Up to the point. No frills. Just like her. The message, a punch in the stomach, was followed by a sad face emoji that seemed both insufficient to convey the agony felt by its sender and utterly devastating to his daily life. My extremities tingled, then went numb, and suddenly I felt strangely hollow and weightless, like someone had hollowed 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, wasn't.

It's a myth, I'm sorry to say, that twins are psychic, even if it is one. identical twin sister, Lydia, and I often played at parties by agreeing answers to set questions. (She was still thinking of a triangle; I was still thinking of the color blue.) But when she messaged me just after lunch on a Friday in early February 2021, asking if I was free to chat, I knew that she was going to tell me she was pregnant. Maybe it was a double instinct or maybe it was just because my partner and I had been discussing our own plans to start a family over the weekend, but I was right: it was the case.

Jealousy is a natural human emotion but it is, I suppose, an emotion felt more intensely between twins. Lydia and I had – I think still have – a crippling desire for fairness. When we were little, we ate Hula Hoops in stages, one at a time, just to make sure we had an equal number. It's no wonder, then, that when the news broke about Lydia, I was as envious as I was thrilled. With just two pink lines on a stick, my sister was sucked into a world of hospital appointments, scans and baby names while I was still searching with cycle times, basal body temperatures and that I was looking for when the hell I was going to ovulate. It wasn't fair.

Eight days later, Lydia sent me a voice note. She was anxious: you could hear it in her tone. The Clearblue digital test she'd taken that morning hadn't shown the correct number of weeks, and the pink dye on a second test looked duller than the one she'd taken a few days earlier. She had googled, browsed forums and suspected her pregnancy was going away. She had a blood test that day. It was inconclusive. And then the next day, Valentine's Day, another pregnancy test came back weaker than weak. "I think I'm about to have a miscarriage," she said. “I am so heartbroken. »

If jealousy is felt intensely between twins, then so is grief. Separated, as we were, by confinement rules, we communicated on WhatsApp that day. I, rather helplessly, suggested podcasts that might entertain her, and she sent me pictures of her dog next to her on the couch. The next day, early, another message arrived. "I started bleeding this morning." And so Lydia lost her first baby.

Today, re-reading the messages we sent back then, I realize that in addition to the tragedy, the daily work of being a twin continued. In the days that followed, celebrity gossip was exchanged; home improvement reviews wanted; shared work dilemmas. Our closest friend had her baby and we talked about it for a long time. ("I guessed she'd call it that. Did you?") We talked about how her dog looked funny in her cone after surgery. We have been planning a move for my partner and I.

Moving to our new home, our first home together, is important because it was when my partner and I had always planned to start trying for a baby. A home together represented stability, security and – instead of an annulled marriage due to Covid – a certain commitment to each other. Except our move came just two days after Lydia began having a miscarriage. I was due to ovulate the following week and my twin, the person closest to me, my flesh and blood, was still actively losing her baby. While I was dutifully peeing on ovulation sticks every afternoon, her partner accompanied her every time she went to the bathroom, sitting with her, her hand in hers, while she wiped away the blood.

I had to ask. Did she want us to wait? We could, I told him. Still separated by lockdown restrictions, we WhatsApped. "I mean yes, but is it bad?" she wrote. "I don't and shouldn't have control over what you do and that's not fair. I don't want to be that kind of sister. Of course, none of us knew how long it would take me to get pregnant, or how long it would take her. We chose to see how things went.

Three weeks later, I took a pregnancy test There was a one-line whisper Nothing concrete enough to say to my partner, who I suspected would need the news...