My Baby B

Since the day my daughter was born, I was never sure she really wanted to be here.

By being here I mean in a body. Alive, embodied, and on the earth.

My identical twin daughters weighed 4.1 pounds at birth, born at almost 34 weeks gestation, so they were little rugrats. The first one out of the hatch is known as Baby A and the second one as Baby B.

When she and her sister were about two months old, I took them to a Jewish women's group I was part of, meeting on the new moon each month. 

A kind woman, leading the group blessing for them, asked me what they were like.

What an amazing question, one that affirmed that all of us, including my babies are spirits inhabiting bodies, with lessons we come into this life with and very distinct personalities.

I said that her sister, Baby A, was raring to go. She wanted out of the womb, breaking my water after 12 weeks of bedrest, in a staged break-out!

I said that she, Baby B, was just very chill, and hadn't decided if she really wanted to be here yet. She was just a bit removed and aloof.

One of the first things I learned about being a mom of twins, was not to compare them. But it was clear Baby A wanted to be alive. So in my guilty comparison, Baby B was quite a bit calmer, less prone to crying fits, and held back a bit in her own sweet way. 

I have been thinking about that story of her being a baby who exuded ambivalence from the outset lately. 

I still see these basic traits in her and it is almost 27 years later.

So we were talking one night and I told her the story.

Her response was immediate and precise. She said "Sounds right."

I was amazed by her ability to accept my point of view.

I don't know how much is personality. After all, twin research shows that the social environment of the twinship causes differentiation of behaviors and personality.

Maybe its just the samskaras, karma, life questions and life lessons she was born with to work out in her journey this lifetime.

Maybe she and her sister are working through some past lifetime stuff.

Maybe its just the way she is wired, neurologically-speaking.

Maybe its just random and arbitrary.

I find her to be a gentle and innocent soul, with a wonderfully sarcastic sense of humor, very quick to deduce and distill the core idea in a conversation, and amazingly spacey, disorganized, with a real lack of executive functioning.

I love her madly.