Simon, my twin, and I were different beginning in the womb. He met all his in-utero milestones and flourished, taking up most of the space. I barely survived on the few nutrients he hadn’t already scarfed down. If you could have seen us inside our mother’s uterus, you would have seen a very healthy fetus and something half its size that looked like its pet.
in-utero* * *
At birth, Simon weighed a whopping nine pounds and went home with my mother two days later. I weighed two pounds, two ounces, and lived in an incubator for three weeks until I tipped the scale at four pounds and was allowed to leave the hospital. Given my precarious existence, I had to be fed a super-enriched formula every two hours by increasingly irritable, sleepless parents. Simon, who was breast-fed, quickly packed o
