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

I was days away from giving birth and was discussing pain relief with my NCT friends when the WhatsApp message came through from my twin sister. “No baby.” To the point. No frills. Just like her. The message, a punch to the stomach, was followed by a sad-face emoji that seemed both insufficient at conveying the agony felt by its sender and utterly devastating in its everyday-ness. My extremities went tingly, then numb, and suddenly I felt oddly hollow and weightless, as though someone had scooped 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, was not.

It is a myth, I’m sorry to say, that twins are psychic, although it’s one my identical twin sister, Lydia, and I often played up to at parties by agreeing answers to set questions. (She was always thinking of a triangle; I was always thinking of the colour blue.) But when she messaged me just after lunch one Friday at the beginning of February 2021, asking if I was free to chat, I knew she was going to tell me she was pregnant. Perhaps it was twin instinct or perhaps it was simply because my partner and I had, that weekend, been discussing our own plans to start a family, but I was right: she was.

Jealousy is a natural human emotion but it is, I suspect, one that is felt more acutely between twins. Lydia and I had – have, still, I think – a crippling desire for fairness. When we were tiny, we would eat Hula Hoops in step, one at a time, just to make sure we had an equal number. So it’s little wonder that, when Lydia’s news broke, I was as envious as I was delighted. 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 scrabbling around with cycle lengths, basal body temperatures and figuring out 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 seemed duller than the one she’d taken a few days before. She’d Googled, checked the forums, and suspected that her pregnancy was slipping away. She had a blood test that day. It was inconclusive. And then, the next day, Valentine’s Day, another pregnancy test came back fainter than faint. “I think I’m about to miscarry,” she messaged. “I’m so heartbroken.”

If jealousy is felt acutely between twins, then so, too, is grief. Separated, as we were, by lockdown rules, we communicated over WhatsApp that day. I, rather helplessly, suggested podcasts that might distract her, and she sent me photos of her dog next to her on the sofa. The next day, early, another message came through. “I’ve started to bleed this morning.” And so Lydia lost her first baby.

Today, reading back through the messages we sent at the time, I realise that on top of the tragedy, the everyday business of being a twin continued. In the days that followed, celebrity gossip was exchanged; opinions on house renovations sought; work dilemmas shared. Our closest friend had her baby, and we discussed that at length. (“I guessed she’d call him that. Did you?”) We talked about how funny her dog looked in his cone after an operation. We planned a house move for my partner and me.

The move to our new house, our first home together, is significant because it was when my partner and I had always planned to start trying for a baby. A house together represented stability, security and – in lieu of a wedding cancelled due to Covid – a certain commitment to one another. Except our move came just two days after Lydia started miscarrying. I was due to ovulate the following week and my twin, the closest person to me, my flesh and blood, was still actively losing her baby. While I was dutifully weeing on ovulation sticks each afternoon, her partner was accompanying her each time she visited the bathroom, sitting with her, his hand in hers, while she wiped away the blood.

I had to ask. Did she want us to wait? We could, I told her. Still separated by lockdown restrictions, we WhatsApped. “I want to say yes, but is that bad?” she wrote. “I don’t and shouldn’t have control over what you do and that isn’t fair. I don’t want to be that sort of sister.” Of course, neither of us knew how long it would take me to get pregnant, or how long it would take her. We opted to see how things panned out.

Three weeks later, I took a pregnancy test. There was a whisper of a line. Nothing concrete enough to tell my partner, who I suspected would need the news in black and white. I sat on it until lunchtime when Lydia sent me a message: “How many days past ovulation are you?” I told her. Told her, too, about the whisper. She asked to see a picture. We both agreed there was something there but neither of us could be sure. That night I took another test and the whisper increased by a decibel. “I feel sad,” Lydia told me, and I stressed that that was OK, that I didn’t expect her to be giddy with excitement. Then, the following morning, another pregnancy test. And there it was: the whisper suddenly a shout. Two clear streaks of pink confirmed what, really, I already knew. “OMG huge congratulations!!!!!!” came Lydia’s message within minutes, the six exclamation marks working hard to conceal the pain I knew she was feeling. But then, later, she sent a voice note. “I feel,” she said, somehow both cheerful and stoic, “like my baby has just switched wombs.”

To say my pregnancy wasn’t affected by my sister’s miscarriage would be a lie. I was anxious – my worries fuelled, I’m sure, by Lydia’s loss. I analysed every cramp, every twinge, every new sensation. I expected to see blood every time I went to the toilet and I took pregnancy tests obsessively – different brands, different times of day. I didn’t throw any away – as if, in disposing of the evidence, I would tempt fate into disposing of the pregnancy itself. But, as the anxiety receded and scans provided more and more reassurance, it became apparent that it had been masking something more pervasive: a guilt that bit into my very core. That I was the one who was pregnant and not Lydia. That I dared feel anxious when, surely, I should feel only joy. We discussed my pregnancy – we couldn’t not – but always on the understanding that if Lydia wanted to step back, she could. And sometimes she did, ducking out of group WhatsApps or quietly disappearing to make cups of tea whenever the conversation came round to the baby. A baby I can now admit I found it hard to connect with: the intense guilt of his existence – healthy, strong, growing – overriding the love I should, surely, have felt.

On the due date of Lydia’s lost baby, we lit candles and, the next day, she got a positive pregnancy test. She sent me a photo of it: a digital test this time with the magic word displayed, almost nonchalantly, on the tiny screen. Pregnant. I was fast approaching my due date by this point and grossly, heavily uncomfortable. But, suddenly, I felt a weight lifted, the guilt receding. For the first time, pregnancy was a shared experience: me with my watermelon, Lydia with her sesame seed. In the days after her positive test, Lydia wasn’t as anxious as you might imagine. She flitted between acknowledging that the worst could happen (“I’ve been through the shit – if it happens again I know how to manage it”) and getting excited about her baby (“Shall we talk about names?”). We discussed due dates, scans and the best pregnancy vitamins to take. Initially, at least, we felt untouchable and, thus, allowed ourselves to tempt fate. “I don’t know why, but I feel like things will be OK,” I messaged a few days after the test. “It feels right that this is your time.” We gloried in the hope of it all.

The bleeding was faint at first, barely there. All normal, Lydia was told, nothing to worry about. But, of course, we did. She booked an early scan for two weeks’ time and then, as quickly as it had come, the bleeding went and we steadied ourselves. Still, our conversations changed. Lydia’s voice notes were now imbued with a sense of unease, of encroaching dread. She still sent photos of her bloating stomach (“I guess it’s a good sign!”) but these were now accompanied by screenshots from a website that calculated her chance of miscarriage each day. “I just can’t visualise good news,” she told me the night before her scan. And then, an hour later: “Had some more bleeding this evening.”

When Lydia woke the following morning, the day of her scan, she was bleeding dark, red blood. “I really think it’s over,” she messaged as she waited for her appointment. “I still want to go to the scan, even if it’s to say goodbye.” I remember instinctively resting my hand on my stomach, trying to locate the steady kick, kick, kick of my baby’s feet. That day, I met my NCT friends, drank coffee, ate cake, still hoping – and, I think, believing – there would be good news. But when my phone buzzed two hours later and my hand went, again, to my bump, I think I knew. I opened the message. “No baby :(” it read.

It is excruciating to witness someone else’s grief and know you’re about to make it worse, about to pour salt into their open, weeping wound. When Lydia had her first miscarriage, I had asked her if she wanted me to wait before trying for a baby. This time, I had no such option: my baby was due. I was a careering train with no brakes. That afternoon, while Lydia went to hospital for a checkup, I returned home and lay on the sofa, paralysed by a visceral cocktail of grief and terror. As darkness crept across my living room floor, I didn’t get up to switch on the light, choosing instead to lie in the pitch black, hands on my stomach, noting my baby’s movements and saying to him, over and over: “Not yet. Please don’t come yet. We need more time.”

I wanted to see my sister straight away, but I was also terrified that my very physicality, the protruding balloon of my stomach, would be agony for her. When I did see her, the next day, I tried to cover myself, layering jumpers, coats and scarfs so as to hide my bump. But, of course, when I hugged her, there was no hiding the expanse between us.

The next nine days, before my son arrived, are now a blur. It’s only by combing through the WhatsApp messages we sent each other at the time that I see how tortured we both were: me trying not to draw attention to the fact that I was about to have my first baby and Lydia grieving the loss of her second. Three days before my son was born, I messaged her to say that if she didn’t feel able to visit when he arrived, I would understand and, crucially, that her nephew would know how loved he was by his auntie regardless of whether she was present. It was during one of these conversations that I realised Lydia wasn’t just grieving the loss of her babies; she was also, in a way, grieving the loss of her twin. In her eyes, I was embarking on a new adventure, sailing into the unknown to a place where she couldn’t join me.

I arrived at this new place in mid-November 2021 when Fabian came, calmly, into the world after a 19-hour labour. Lydia, who due to Covid restrictions had been by my side via WhatsApp for the birth, messaged me minutes after he arrived: “I didn’t think it was possible to love you any more but I’m bursting.” I had sent a photo of my son, tiny and red, to the family group and, quick as a flash, my mum responded: “He looks very like Lydia when she was born.” And he did. I don’t know why it was such a surprise that my baby looked so much like my twin, but it was remarkable. He had her round face and saucer-like eyes. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to wonder, in that moment, whether the baby that should have been a month old and in my sister’s arms would have looked anything like the baby that was a minute old and in mine.

We had to stay in hospital for a few days while Fabian recovered from an infection but Lydia – still bleeding – visited us, bringing food, clean clothes, tiny sleepsuits. She has since told me that those days were the hardest. “I needed you so badly, and before I met Fabian I was so angry that he got you.” One day, leaving my son with his father, I escaped the stuffy ward and Lydia and I sat in Costa on the hospital concourse. Other patients and visitors went about their days as though nothing remarkable had happened. But for us, there had been a shift in the tectonic plates of our twinship. We had both undergone metamorphoses, had been reborn mothers, but while I had emerged, babe in arms, she had not.

We were, for the first time in our lives, separated, starkly, by our lived experiences. This separation was made physical when I returned to the ward after our coffee. Covid restrictions meant Lydia couldn’t come in. Instead, she met her nephew through glass, gazing at him, now safely returned to my arms, through the window isolating the ward from the real world. Back in my hospital bed, apart from my twin, I was tormented by the same grief and guilt that had hounded my pregnancy. Whenever I picked Fabian up, smelled him, held him to my breast to feed, I felt Lydia’s losses keenly and I cried, often.

Five days later, we were able to leave and, the next day, Lydia visited, the first of our friends and family to do so. Without a thought, I handed Fabian over, releasing him for the first time into arms that were not his father’s or a medical professional’s, and he nestled into her, gazing up at this new but familiar person with his hand on his chin as though deep in thought. And then, completely at ease in the cradle hold of my twin, he sighed contentedly, closed his eyes and fell asleep.

I could write reams about Lydia’s relationship with my son – her baby who switched wombs. Fourteen months on, he still looks like her, right down to the way they both scrunch their noses when they smile. He has her temperament as well. Happy-go-lucky, curious, kind, cheeky. Mostly, though, I’m in awe of how she loves him. At every turn, she has not just tolerated me having a baby when she does not, but has embraced it. When I asked her how she felt about him, for this piece, she said: “I feel like he’s part of me. I’d fight to the death for him.” She sees him often, usually at her request. If she’s away, she will FaceTime him and he will beam gorgeously at his auntie on the screen. The trimmings of motherhood – the baby classes I go to, the joy of breastfeeding, the firm friends I’ve made – Lydia still finds difficult. But the baby himself? No, she says, that bit is remarkably easy.

Her miscarriages bookended my pregnancy. It’s not fair: we acknowledge that often. And, while there is much I want to teach Fabian as he grows – to value friendship, to embrace silliness, to be kind – perhaps the most important thing I want him to know is that he exists, in large part, because of his auntie’s strength of spirit and unceasing selflessness. If we’d waited, if she’d asked us to, we wouldn’t have conceived him: our sweet, happy boy made so curiously in her image.

It’s why, sometimes, on a difficult evening when Fabian has only just fallen asleep after two hours of crying and is pressing his body so close to mine that I am teetering on the edge of our bed, tangling with insomnia and trying to accept that sleep may not come for me tonight, I lean in to smell his milky breath, brush my lips gently across his warm cheeks and whisper as quietly as I can: “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Auntie Lydia.”