The parents of Jorge and Carlos were deceased, but several aunts had helped raise them and they remained close. These two young men had to think of the best way to tell them that one of their beloved nephews belonged to another family. They also had to persuade their older sister that her real brother wasn’t Carlos but a young man named William, a task that would require some convincing since Diana had dismissed the matching photos as mere coincidence. Diana is a reality-based person, so the idea that one of her brothers of twenty-five years had been switched with another baby was preposterous. When her boyfriend looked at the photographs, he insisted that an exchange had occurred, but she still denied it. Because she didn’t believe it, she claimed that she wasn’t even curious, but her encouraging Jorge to meet his look-alike and tell her about it suggests otherwise.
The morning after the twins met, Jorge told Diana that William was like their mother, Luz, in how he thought and expressed ideas and that Wilber talked and laughed exactly like Carlos. This information did not change her mind—only a DNA test would convince her.
Finally, what of the friends who had teased Carlos and Jorge, and William and Wilber, about not looking like twins? Would these friends take the news seriously or think it was just one of Jorge’s usual pranks? Would others take it as a tall tale that William intended as a jab at his brother? DNA tests had not yet been performed, but the Facebook photos, birth dates, birth histories, and blood types foretold a compelling story of baby switching, one that seemed impossible to explain away, especially after all four had met at Jorge and Carlos’s home and the physical and behavioral similarities of the reared-apart twins grew stronger in full view. They were still twins but not fraternal as they had thought, so all their friends would be seeing them in a whole new way. Being an identical twin has that power because it is a relatively rare human relationship—only one-third of naturally conceived twins are identical—so when separated identical twins meet, they become objects of utter fascination, challenging cherished beliefs about human uniqueness and individuality. Of course, identical twins are never exactly alike, but they are as close as any two people can come. The four brothers had to relay their incredible news to friends and family members while trying to cope with how they would now see themselves. It was all still raw and new.
Siblings from La Paz
The media, and researchers to some extent, often overlook the thoughts, feelings, and impressions of the siblings of switched twins. Because these brothers and sisters grew up where they belonged and outside the twinship, it is easy to assume that their lives are untouched by the revelation of a switch, but that is hardly the case. These siblings have front-row seats that allow them to variously watch, take part in, and react to family dynamics as they unfold, making most siblings more astute observers and interpreters of events than their parents—after all, siblings share secrets and memories to which parents are never privy. So it was with the older brothers Chelmo, Efrain, and Edgar, and older sister, Alcira, in La Paz.
* * *
Chelmo was out in the fields working with his cousin in September 2014, when an ordinary morning became a horrific afternoon of dread and dismay after his cousin’s brother called. The cousin at the farm took the call, then stared intensely at Chelmo. When Chelmo heard him mention William, he grabbed the phone, worried that something had happened to his youngest brother. After listening quietly for a few moments, Chelmo said, “Promise me on your mother’s life that what you say is true.” The caller promised. The thought that William was not his brother and had been exchanged an as infant with his real brother was too much for this loving, gentle man to bear. The news came out of nowhere—and, if true, what would it mean for the future of his family? Things like baby switching just did not happen.
Chelmo headed home immediately, afraid that William was lost to him. Chelmo phoned William several times to learn what he had to say, but William was evasive—William wanted more facts, the same reason he had delayed telling Wilber what he had learned. But William quickly called Chelmo back to ask, “How are you, man?” and to say, “I’m here—God and the Virgin Mary will give us strength.” Then he summarized the events of the past several days.
Chelmo is emotional because his family means a great deal to him, and this made the next several days especially difficult. He worried that William would find a better temperamental fit with his newly discovered twin and family, but mostly Chelmo was in shock at learning that this “elegant boy” was not his real brother. This brother’s demeanor had set him apart from his siblings, but by elegance Chelmo did not mean that William was stylish or fashionable. What he meant was that, as a child, William had created things by pulling ideas out of his head, building objects using knives and mud, once nearly severing an index finger in the process. During their play times at home, the brothers and sisters would call William papito, or little daddy, and jokingly ask him why he was so appealing. His candid answer was that he was a modest and respectful little boy.
More important questions needed answers now. Chelmo assured William that they would be brothers until parted by death—and William assured Chelmo that things would never change between them. But their tears continued.
Their brother Edgar, born seven years before the twins, learned about the twin switch in a phone call from another brother, Efrain, who had heard it from William. Efrain is about twenty years older than the twins and had moved away when they were born, but he had returned home when they entered the military because of escalating warfare in his area. Although he grew up apart from his two youngest brothers, his sudden fear of losing William was powerful and kept Efrain largely silent on this subject.
Edgar had never suspected that William was not part of their family and didn’t believe what Efrain told him. Only when his parents said they believed it could he accept the truth, crying along with his family, especially his mother. That he had watched his young twin brothers grow from babies to children to young men made the news especially hard to hear. It was heartbreaking to realize that a brother he adored was part of his family only because of a terrible mistake. The chaotic days to come were made worse by the uncertainty of it all—would his younger brother sever ties with the family that had raised him?
Bereavement studies highlight the tragedy of loss among surviving family members and have found that the grief following the loss of an identical twin is more intense than for the loss of any other relative.1 A bereaved seventeen-year-old twin tried to fill the void by reaching out to others, but hardly anyone understood what she was going through. “Our relationship was so wonderful and close. I lost the person I loved the most and even though I appear happy and strong, I’m absolutely devastated and my inner self is in shatters.”2 Even identical reared-apart twins who have known each other a short time feel the loss intensely. And in an unusual case of three separated sisters originally from Sri Lanka, two, Sita and Sharon, met for the first time when they were thirty-one and thirty-four, respectively.3 But when Sita learned that she had a twin named Charlotte, she began an extensive search. Her sadness at separation was deepened by the shock and disbelief of learning that her twin had ended her life the year before; DNA samples confirmed their genetic identity. Perhaps if she had found her sister sooner, they would be together today because twins are 25 percent less likely to commit suicide than nontwins—identical twins’ close relationship generally provides a high level of emotional support that sustains them through trying times.4 Such a promising relationship left unfulfilled is a tragic loss and difficult to overcome.
I have also known twins whose twin cut them off socially, as a result of disagreements or misunderstandings, leaving them isolated and alone. Their squabbles are variously caused by differences in lifestyles, religious beliefs, or choice of partner. The inability to regain or maintain the trust and affection of a living loved one is painful and perplexing—Edgar and his family wondered whether that would be their fate. Growing up, Edgar was often the twins’ surrogate parent, constantly breaking up twi
n-on-twin combat. Typically, William attacked his brother by hitting him, pulling his hair, and scratching him. Wilber didn’t hit back because William was smaller, although he was physically stronger. “You couldn’t put the two of them together,” Edgar recalled, but he still loved them both.
* * *
Alcira, the La Paz brothers’ oldest sibling and only sister, was away from home while they were growing up. She was sixteen when she left La Paz before they were born, to be a domestic servant for a family in Bogotá, and she stayed there eight years. When she returned to La Paz, she met her future spouse, married, and moved to Vélez, the small city twelve miles from her family’s farm where the twins had been born. But she remained part of the same tight-knit family, and news of the switch brought extreme shock and sadness.
It took three people to convince Alcira that the life-changing family event had actually happened. First, William called her and told her to look at some photos online. But the photos had little impact because she didn’t know what to look for and hadn’t been told about a possible switch. The same thing happened when Alcira’s youngest daughter Natalie showed her mother a different set of photos and asked if she recognized anyone. She thought they were her brothers, William and Wilber. Even after Natalie told her to look more closely, the photos made no impression. In fact, Alcira had seen shots of William and Wilber and Jorge and Carlos, but she assumed that she was looking at her brothers in every picture. It is unclear why no one explained the situation to her, but perhaps William wanted her to figure it out as he had, or maybe he and Natalie felt that allowing her to figure it out herself would soften the blow. But Alcira had to be told.
The next day Alcira’s brother Efrain showed her more pictures, telling her plainly that one of the twins had been switched and that William was not their real brother. This time she believed it was true. Alcira recalled the intensity of those early days—feelings of sadness at losing a brother, and joy at gaining one, mixed with lots of tears. But she dreaded telling her mother that her favorite son belonged to another family—Alcira still grows emotional when this subject comes up.
William was the special child, the only one of his siblings who looked after their parents and the only one to phone Alcira on her birthday and on Mother’s Day. Alcira found it ironic that someone who was not a blood relative treated her better than someone who was. Her observation raises the question of sibling identification—how do people know who their siblings are? Genetic relatedness cannot be seen directly, and people do not typically take DNA tests to confirm the identity of their brothers and sisters. Moreover, DNA testing is a recent technology, devised in 1984 by Sir Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester, and therefore was unavailable through nearly all of human history. Nevertheless, distinguishing relatives from nonrelatives, acknowledging maternal and paternal family lines, and differentiating close genetic relationships from distant ones have been universal organizing themes within all families and cultures.
Evolutionary psychologists suggest that humans possess “detection mechanisms” for assessing kinship. These mechanisms involve perceiving cues relevant to genetic relatedness, plus a kind of “built-in algorithm” that allows people to process this information and decide who is, and who is not, a relative. Researchers have described two key cues for sibling recognition: one is maternal perinatal association, or seeing a newborn in a lasting and caring relationship with one’s mother. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that a baby breast-fed and cuddled by one’s mother is part of the same family. The other cue is duration of coresidence, or continuity of the particular mother-child association, until the child reaches adolescence.5 Virtually all parents nurture their children until they reach their late teens, at which time they leave home for school or work. Therefore, it makes sense that other children who remain in the home from infancy on are one’s bona fide brothers and sisters. Even when some children leave home earlier for boarding schools or extended vacations, their parents attend to them through phone calls, emails, and texts, unambiguously affirming their membership in the family.
William and Wilber’s older siblings were always in physical and social proximity to their mother—in fact, both twins were breast-fed and everyone could see that. The older siblings could also see that they and the twins lived with the same parents, although this cue has proven to be less salient than maternal perinatal association. Researchers also have proposed phenotypic matching—comparing someone’s features, such as voice quality or skin tone—with a learned standard that represents that same trait in yourself or in other relatives as a way to distinguish kin from nonkin. Research suggests that, under certain circumstances, people are sensitive to such cues regarding genetic relatedness.6 However, these cues are not essential to kin recognition or the development of close social relations. An interesting question becomes: Would identical twins or other close relatives recognize each other if their paths crossed by chance? The answer is a tentative yes, and here is why, based on several revealing anecdotes.
The identical reared-apart twins Caroline and Margaret Shand of Scotland met for the first time when they were sixty-four. Each knew she had a twin sister, but they had never met—they were raised by different families and told never to ask questions. One day Caroline, who worked in a church, heard a strange noise and went outside to investigate. She noticed two women standing by a gravesite and wandered over. She recognized herself in one of them, and realizing it was her twin, they hugged each other and cried. Neither twin had married, so they decided to move in together and become a family.7 Had they not known they were twins, they might not have responded to one another as they did, but we cannot be sure of that. There are, however, other separated siblings and twins who became close friends before they knew they were related, including several sets of male-female twins who became a couple because of their strong attraction to one another. Shared habits and behaviors are probably the social glue that drew them together and kept them close. (Spouses generally resemble each other in age and ethnicity, but especially in behaviors such as attitudes and values.) Furthermore, these coupled twins did not develop the incest taboo or sexual aversion to one another that evolves among relatives living together. Such aversion most likely evolved to prevent the production of genetically defective children, which is more likely to arise from mating by close kin because they carry common detrimental genes in recessive form.8
William looked and behaved quite differently from his other siblings—everyone said so. Why didn’t William’s older siblings question his relatedness to them, which happened in an extraordinary case of switched nontwin infants in Japan? In November 2013 Japanese newspapers carried the story of an unnamed sixty-year-old factory worker, born into wealth and privilege, who was inadvertently exchanged with a male infant from an impoverished single-parent home. Desperate for an education but financially responsible for his putative mother and brothers, the man worked days and studied nights. Eventually he became employed as a driver for a transportation service. His switched counterpart received private tutorials, attended university, and eventually headed a successful real estate company.9
The misplacement of these two nontwin male babies was not revealed by mistaken identity, as happened with William and Jorge. Instead, the three biological brothers from the wealthy family strongly suspected that their oldest brother came from a different family because they believed that his appearance was so different from theirs that it went beyond what biological connectedness would allow. The three never raised the possibility that their mother had had an extramarital affair, probably because a baby switch seemed more likely—when a nurse returned the newborn to his mother after his first bath, she had noticed that he was wearing different clothing.10 However, the mother never questioned the nurse about the change in clothing, which might have suggested that a switch had occurred. This case was closely guarded, with little information seeping outside the courtroom where the case was successfully tried against Tokyo’s San-Ikukai Hospital. When I met wi
th the brothers’ attorney, Yoshiko Oshima, in Tokyo in 2015, she provided few new facts.
The three brothers reviewed hospital records that showed which babies were born on which days, and DNA tests were performed on likely candidates. When presented with the difficult truth, the impoverished exchanged brother sadly replied, “I might have had a different life.… I want the hospital to roll back the clock to the day I was born.”
This story of the Japanese brothers has a quasi-happy ending. The three wealthy brothers have embraced their older biological brother, and the four have continued to bond over beers. Oshima had no knowledge of the actions and reactions of the initially disadvantaged baby who became wealthy just because a nurse gave him a bath.
As I left Oshima’s office, my thoughts focused on that oldest brother, who was hardly mentioned in the newspaper coverage. Perhaps he drew little sympathy because he had slipped into a life rich with opportunity. We cannot know the mental anguish he may have suffered from feeling out of place, surrounded by his three brothers’ suspicions that he belonged elsewhere. Their collective efforts to confirm his outsider status must have hurt. Carlos, the switched twin who accidentally grew up with Jorge in Bogotá, comes to mind—his place in his family was never questioned, but perhaps he felt adrift from his assumed twin, his sister Diana, and their mother. And what about William, raised with Wilber in La Paz where he didn’t belong? Did he, like the sixty-year-old Japanese factory worker, want to turn back the clock?
The three younger Japanese brothers seriously doubted and actively challenged whether their oldest brother was biologically related to the rest of the family. Perhaps the differences between them were too great to be explained away by different genes, or maybe the three also worried about the family fortune their brother would inherit—however, the few studies conducted on primogeniture in Japan show that just 40 percent of city dwellers believe that the eldest son should receive a larger share than his siblings.11 It is also possible that they recalled their mother telling them about the baby being returned to her in unfamiliar clothing. A final possibility is that the particular personalities of the Japanese brothers led them to ask questions when things did not seem quite right, whereas the La Paz brothers were more accepting.
Accidental Brothers Page 13