I didn’t know about the twin until after I met him. Michael was living with his aunt at the time and his twin and sister came for a visit. I knocked on her door, Michael opened it and I asked, “Have your brother and sister arrived yet?”
“Oh, you must be the person we have been hearing about!”
It was the twin, not Michael. It was amazing. They looked, moved, talked, twitched, and laughed alike.
After we got married, he would drive up and visit us on the weekends. Every weekend. This is when I began to teach myself how to cook. I would hunt through cookbooks and make a huge number of courses every Saturday night. We would have dinner, talk, watch Saturday Night Live and have lots of wine. We were barely 21-years old.
The thought of the twin driving 400 miles round trip every weekend began to seem crazy. We offered that he set himself up in our spare bedroom and save money for an apartment.
He stayed four years.
There is a sitcom in there somewhere! I remember those times as being very busy, very fun with lots of people in and out of our house. The three of us became very close. He married, had a child but they eventually divorced.
Several years passed.
He remarried. We lived through the first wife and now the new wife did not like me at all.
This was the period where I was staying home with William instead of working outside the house. One day, she looked at me and asked in a very condescending manner, “What do you do all day?”
“I do what your mom did for you when you were young.”
Her reply: “My mom worked.”
Thud. That was the beginning of the end. She got rid of me just after the wedding. The twin was dispatched to accuse me of things that didn’t happen.
It was a shock that this was coming from the mouth of someone who I thought knew me. We both told Michael about the conversation. He had not been there and didn’t know which of us to believe. It almost caused our divorce. (It actually took two years before Michael figured it out. He got it. Finally.)
We went to a birthday party in a restaurant for a mutual friend a couple weeks after the conversation. No one spoke to us. We were seated in a corner. Alone. After dinner when we got up to leave, I approached her to say something kind to smooth over everything and she turned her back to me. Afterwards, I told Michael that I was so done playing her games. I’m too old.
I wasn’t angry with her, as I hardly knew her. I was angry with the twin for not seeing his wife’s motives.
I also realized that he used me all those years as a weekend babysitter for his daughter, a cook, innkeeper, or anything else he needed. I was stupid. I was angry with myself for allowing him to use me.
Having not seen the twin or his wife since that dinner, several things have happened since then, which really made us grateful that the relationship is as it is. (Michael was irritated with her from the start because all she wanted to do was to put him on display for her friends. Every time we were with her, that was all she talked about – how much they looked alike. It got old very quickly.)
The twin and Michael see each other almost everyday. That is fine. I just don’t want anything to do with him. He deeply hurt me once and almost caused our divorce; he will not be allowed the opportunity to do it again.
My dad told me that the mistake I made was believing that the twin was anything like Michael. As dad said, he will never ever begin to come close to being like Michael. After all these years, that has turned out to be so true.
It has been interesting that since he has learned about my bad diagnosis in 2005, he has done nothing. Having never extended himself before, what else should I have expected?
Next: In Context
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