Mother’s Day always brings up complicated memories of my first taste of motherhood nearly 50 years ago, in November of 1969:

Something seemed terribly wrong. My lower abdomen was swollen and sore. I could no longer keep food down, and had lost nearly ten pounds in the past two weeks. In order to keep this mysterious condition from my strict Mennonite parents, I ran outside after almost every meal and vomited behind the hedge near the veranda of our house.

But finally, terrified that I was dying, I checked myself into a clinic. An overweight woman in a starched white uniform ushered me into an examination room. The strong smell of chemical disinfectants assaulted my senses. The nurse asked me to undress and pointed to the examining table.

“Lie here and put your feet up in these stirrups,” she said.

I turned toward the wall and shut my eyes tight when the doctor entered. “Let’s take a look,” he said, pulling up a stool and seating himself between my spread legs. He pushed my knees farther apart. My body began to shake and I let out a thin wail when his ice-cold instrument penetrated my burning vagina.

As abruptly as he had entered, the doctor left the room without a word. The overweight nurse asked me to get dressed. I sat in a chair, hunched over my aching body, and waited.

After what seemed like hours, the doctor called me into his little office cubicle. He settled into his chair across the desk from me, now wearing wire-rimmed spectacles I hadn’t noticed earlier. “Marlena, you are pregnant, but you also seem to have an abnormal growth in your abdomen. I am hospitalizing you until you are stable, and then we’ll need to do exploratory surgery.” He sighed and shuffled some papers on his desk. “You’re barely 18. I have to let your parents know. Who is the father of this baby, and how did it happen?”

I stared at the metal rims of his spectacles. Pregnant? How could I be pregnant? We were so careful.

Then reality set in and I panicked. This was a terrible sin. Would my parents ever forgive me?

My mother was sitting beside my hospital bed when I awoke from the anesthesia.

“Am I…was I…?” I groaned. Pain washed over me and dragged me back deep into a blessed dark, empty place.

When I awoke the second time, the single burning question in my mind came together more clearly.

“No. You’re not pregnant, Marlena,” Mom said, tears welling up in her eyes.

I touched my bandaged belly gingerly, carefully. There was no baby in there. I wasn’t pregnant.The thought that I might have had a cancerous tumor never occurred to me. All I could think about was that I wasn’t pregnant.

I drifted back to sleep.

“Marlena, the doctor wants to talk to you about the tumor.” Mom was gently tapping me on the shoulder to awaken me. “He’s here now.”

The surgeon pulled up a chair next to my bed.

“Marlena, here’s a photo of the mass we removed from your body.” He handed me three little black and white Polaroid photographs.

“It just looks like a big blob,” I said.

“Well, it’s more than just a blob. Look here. You can see a deformed head, bones, teeth, hair and fragments of a spine.”

My mouth fell open and I stared at my mother. “I thought you said I wasn’t pregnant?”

The surgeon continued.

“Marlena, listen to me. You weren’t…you aren’t pregnant. This is not your baby. This is your twin.”

His words fell on my ears like a mixed-up jumble. “As far as we can tell, when you and your twin were conceived, both of the fetuses shared the same placenta. But apparently you wrapped yourself around it and enveloped it. In response, it became a parasite by drawing on your blood supply. Its survival depended on your survival. It had no brain and lacked internal organs, so it was unable to survive on its own.”

“What are you talking about?” I didn’t understand.

“You carried your twin around in your abdomen, and until you reached puberty, it probably remained very small. Now at 18, it had grown quite large and squashed your stomach and intestines to where they could no longer hold down any food,” he explained patiently.

This can’t be happening to me, I thought. I’m not only a sinner. I’m a freak.

I looked at my mother hunched beside my bed, still holding onto my hand, and then at the surgeon, wondering how I was supposed to react to the news about this thing that had grown inside of me. I really didn’t want to think about any of it.

But that night, lying on my back alone in my hospital bed, images of my twin haunted my tortured still-sedated thoughts. Who were you? And why didn’t I even suspect you were with me all those years? Tears made tracks down both sides of my head, soaking into the pillow.

And who decided which one of us should live, and which one should die?

Placing both hands over the bandages on my belly, I whispered, “I’m sorry.”