When pregnant Donna Douglas and her husband Vince Aylmer went for a
scan in 1996, they discovered that they were expecting twin girl.
The
expectant parents who already had three children were excited, but
despite all the preparations they’d make to welcome two new additions to
the family, nothing could have prepared them for the shock they
received in the delivery room.
Maria and Lucy Aylmer were born on January 16, 1997, in Gloucester,
England. They have the same mom and dad and are, in fact, twins.
However, their mom was shocked when the twins were handed to her in the
delivery room. The twins looked nothing alike!
Throughout the girls’ young lives, their mom would dress them in
identical outfits. Nonetheless, it did nothing to conceal the difference
in their appearances; the two girls didn’t look like sisters, not to
talk of twins. In fact, while they were growing up, the girls struggled
to convince people that they were even sisters.
“No one ever believes we’re twins,” Lucy said. “Even when we dress
alike, we still don’t look like sisters, let alone twins. Friends have
even made us produce our birth certificates to prove it.”
“We were in the same class, but no one had a problem telling us
apart. Twins are known for swapping identities, but there was no way
Maria and I could ever do anything like that.”
The girls’ mom, Donna Douglas, a 49-year-old warehouse worker, is
mixed race with white and Jamaican heritage. While their dad, Vince
Aylmer, a 55-year-old scaffolder, is white.
As non-identical twins, Lucy and Maria were born from separate eggs, so they didn’t necessarily inherit the same genes.
The twins’ older brothers, George, 25, and Jordan, 23, and their
older sister Chynna, 24, all have a light-brown skin tone. Maria and
Lucy, however, bookend their siblings: Lucy has a very fair complexion;
Maria’s skin is a darker tone.
As Lucy explained, “Our brothers and sisters have skin which is in
between Maria and I. We are at opposite ends of the spectrum and they
are all somewhere in between. But my grandmother has a very fair English
rose complexion, just like mine.”
Maria often envied Lucy’s straight hair. As she admitted to
Inside Edition, “I used to cry about it. I hated my curly hair.”
For Lucy, things hit a low point when she was bullied at school.
“They thought I was adopted and called me a ghost,” she recalled
tearfully.
The girls’ differences don’t end with their skin color, either. For
instance, Lucy has blue eyes, while Maria’s are brown. Lucy is also a
red-head and prefers to straighten her natural curls, and Maria’s hair,
by contrast, is a mass of thick black curls.
Their differences,
however, did take a toll on the young twins. By the time they turned
ten, they told their paents they no longer wanted to dress alike. Lucy
even admitted that she didn’t feel like a twin. “We don’t look alike. So
why should we have to wear the exact same thing?” she said.
While they were never at war, it seems that
their individuality inevitably created a distance between the twins.
It’s a gap that Lucy feels could have been bridged had they looked more
alike.
“I think if we’d looked similar or even
identical, then the bond between us would have been stronger when we
were younger,” Lucy told Yahoo Style in 2015. “But Maria and I had such
different personalities, too. She was the outgoing twin whilst I was the
shy one.”
With age, though, the twins have grown much closer. Lucy told Yahoo
Style, “Now we have grown older, even though we still look so different,
the bond between us is much stronger.” They even consider themselves
best friends.
Source: Inside Edition
Why does this type of story always make headlines? We live in Canada and have twin boys who are also one black/one white. We never made big deal out of it nor did anyone else (except for the two years we lived in Northern Scotland).
ReplyDeleteThey are both healthy, smart and amazing young men who are almost 20 now.
For some reason, this type of twin birth always raises eyebrows in Britain.