So I've got a bit of an odd dilemma and I'm not sure very many people will be able to see my point of view here. I saw a picture in the paper today of the children of one of my high school acquaintences, a pair of 5-year-old identical twins. They were cute little boys - and they were dressed exactly alike. I wanted to scream with frustration.
You see, I'm an identical twin. Until I was ten years old, my mother and grandmother dressed my sister and I exactly alike, as if we were dolls or toys and not two different people with individual personalities. The vast majority of people at my school, including the teachers and administrators, couldn't tell us apart and gave up on even trying to learn my name. I was always just an anonymous face in the crowd, and that feeling has presisted into adulthood. Even now, 22 years later, I'm shocked and grateful when someone actually remembers who I am. If people want to dress their twin babies alike, that's fine with me, but once a child is old enough to start meeting people and making friends, and developing a unique personality, it's really unconsionable to make it more difficult for them just so that the parents (or grandparents in some cases) can get attention forbeing the progenitor of twins. When I see parents with twins who are dressed alike, I want to go up to them and mention that they are doing their children a disservice to treat them like objects instead of people, but I worry that the parents will be offended by my purporting to know more than they about the raising of twins (never mind that the parents probably have no actual experience in BEING a twin).
This then brings up the question of what do I do when I know the parents in question? True, we've drifted apart over the years, but we're now friends on Facebook, and I always feel an obligation to step in and defend the rights of twins to be individual people too. Since I've always been a twin and don't really know what it's like to be a 'singleton', I would really appreciate the advice of other singletons out there for how to deal with this. Do I say something or mind my own business?