two one
I spent too much time today researching vanishing twins. (There’s a stupid origin story for that phrase of a group of doctors who saw in a woman at six weeks a set of beating hearts and then at eight weeks just one. It’s like the other one vanished! A doctor said, and voila. The simplicity of that origin story sticks with me, somehow, that that silly doctor got to have his slightly poetic word made into a term that we can google when so many doctors get little recognition for other bigger findings.)
Apparently when the ultrasound equipment began to be used for IVF patients, doctors began to realize how common vanishing twins are. Some say that 1 in 8 of us begin as a pair, but then, just for the reasons that one-quarter of pregnancies miscarry, one of the twins is absorbed into the mother; the heart stops beating and becomes just tissue. 1 in 80 become twins. I find out on Wednesday morning if that is true for me.
I take it personally, that one twin could vanish. Because I am one of two, and if one of us had disappeared, maybe that means I wouldn’t be. And a big part of my identity is being one of two, so who might this one be without the original two? And I take responsibility for it already. One sign of a vanishing twin is cramping, so when all day Friday I was indeed cramping I lay in bed and worried that it was because I walked too far on Thursday or because I cried the week before hard enough (hormone wife) that I thought I had dislodged my heart.
But then today I went into the bedroom and saw the black dog and I felt so much love for him, just this overpowering love I feel when I look at him. And it was clear to me that I couldn’t be sad with just one, because Moby to me is just one; he’s not one of a set of twin-Mobys, and I wouldn’t love him more if he were.
I was explaining this logic to Steve and he laughed: You can be so complicated and then so simple. I would never think to take responsibility for and have guilt over and obsess over the details that consume you, and then so often your solution involves a dog.
It’s true. Maybe the simplest answers are the elegant kind. For now I feel content with this logic. Just now as I am typing this Moby has bound out onto the porch, completely black silhouette back-lit by the light in the house. He bounds like a floating balloon in a parade: an unreal amount of lightness in his movements compared to his weight. More up than down.
