Alex Carter had created his own romantic story of how he came into the world. But then he met the twin he never knew he had...

On a summer’s night in 1969, in the only maternity ward in a small town in North America, a woman gave birth to a baby. She was a teenager, unmarried, and she knew well before the little boy was put in her arms that she’d give him up for adoption. That little boy was me – but I was not the only baby born there that night.

Growing up, I did not have much in common with my older brother and two younger sisters, who were also adopted. Along with my adoptive parents, they would tease me for spending all my time reading everything from encyclopedias to comics, and call me “the intellectual”. There was no blood link to my parents or siblings, and we shared no characteristics or personality traits.

To make sense of this, I invented my own romantic story of how I came into the world. The only thing I had been told about my biological mother was that she was an 18-year-old student, so I decided my father must have been a visiting professor from a European university who had fallen in love with her. The truth would prove to be more extraordinary than any story I could have invented.

I studied hard and as an adult moved to Europe and became an academic, finding colleagues and friends who became like family to me, creating a new home for myself. This was a comfort when I came out as gay, and my relationship with my adoptive mother broke down. As a Catholic, she did not accept my sexuality.

Then, about 10 years ago, I was giving a workshop for doctoral students at the university where I worked. As I greeted each participant at the door, one man’s “Hello” prompted a weird jolt of recognition. He introduced himself as John and I realised he had my accent. I turned to a colleague and said, “I have a funny feeling I know this guy.”

My biological mother asks after me, I'm told, and calls me her cosmic twin. But she doesn't want to meet me

In the break, I told him I thought we’d met before. It turned out we were both born in the same tiny town, but he had moved to the other side of the country when he was six months old, with his parents and twin sister. We had gone to the same university in North America, and as we joked about the professors, we realised that, though we had studied for different degrees, we had sat in some of the same classes. We had even had the same supervisor for our master’s degrees, but a year apart. Chatting over lunch, we discovered that, before pursuing careers in academia, we had both worked in the media. We figured out that we had actually spoken briefly once by phone, when John was a journalist and I was working in PR.

It wasn’t just the parallels in our lives that sparked my curiosity: I could feel a connection. We continued meeting for lunch or drinks every six weeks or so, and over the months our friendship grew. We had so much in common: we both felt alienated in the country of our birth, and far more comfortable living in Europe; we were both fascinated by art history and music, and hated sport. In one conversation, we realised we were both about to turn 40, one day apart. We joked that four decades earlier, we might have lain in neighbouring cots in the maternity ward.

It was in July 2010 that I came home one evening to find the letter that would change everything. It was from social services in my home town, with a message asking me to phone the sender urgently. I knew immediately what it was about: each of my siblings had opened the same letter over the years. My biological mother wanted to find me.

I dialled the number and the social worker asked if I wanted to know more about the woman who’d had me adopted. I was told she had been a rebellious teenager, who loved sports but hated school. She had dropped out at 15 and later joined a motorcycle gang – its leader was my father. After I was adopted, she had problems with alcohol and drug addiction, and spent time living on the street.

As I heard this, I felt disturbed, untethered. Throughout my life I had relied on the fairytale about my brilliant student mother and professor father to make sense of who I was. Now my identity made no sense at all.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Strange as it sounds, my life is great’: Alex Carter, who was diagnosed with a terminal degenerative disease a year ago. Photograph: Beat Schweizer/The Guardian

Finally, the social worker said that my biological mother was of Native American descent. But I am balding, with a beard and blue eyes – three features Native Americans do not have. This can’t be right, I told her. She assured me there was no mistake: this was my mother, and the reason she was looking for me now was that she was dying of cancer and wanted to meet me before it was too late.

I had two weeks to figure out what to do. I didn’t want to hurt my adoptive parents, and I had my doubts that this woman – named, I was later told, Anna-Louise – was really my biological mother. But I believe in the Buddhist philosophy of compassion. If I didn’t meet Anna-Louise for my own sake, should I not do it for hers? I remembered what my father would tell me on my birthday: “There is a woman out there who thinks of you every year on this day, hoping everything is going well for you – that making the heart-wrenching choice to give you up for adoption was the right decision.”

I needed to give her that peace before she died. I told the social worker that I was willing to meet Anna-Louise, unless she had any problem with my being gay, in which case I would not go any further with the reunion. The response came back: I could be whoever I was, so long as I was myself, and she would be proud of me. That was an emotional moment: I had never heard my adoptive parents tell me they were proud of who I was.

Over the next few months, we exchanged messages and photographs via the social worker. We did not look alike, but it was too late to back out. I flew home for Christmas, and in early January went to meet her. I felt nervous, stressed. What would we say when it became obvious there had been a mistake, that we could not possibly be related?

My brother had told me that when he was reunited with his biological mother, he walked into the room and instantly knew she was his and he was hers, and they embraced for 10 minutes, overwhelmed by this certainty. When I met Anna-Louise, I just felt awkward. She hugged me and cried, and I felt no emotion. I played along, because I was happy for her, because she was ill, because I wanted to give her whatever she was searching for. I met her two daughters, who looked so much like her, and who told me they always knew they had a big brother. I just thought it was weird.

I agreed to stay in touch, but after our meeting I told the social worker there must be a mistake. She denied it was possible. She said, “Your father must have been blue-eyed and blond.” Everyone was refusing to see what was really quite obvious.

I wanted to hear what John would make of all this, but I didn’t see him again until April. His PhD was not going well and he had decided to finish it at a different university, in a different country. We met for a farewell dinner by a lake. We spent most of the evening discussing his news – it wasn’t until dessert that I told him about my disappointing reunion, how I looked nothing like the woman everyone was telling me was my biological mother.

He said, “Well, genes aren’t everything. Look at me and my twin sister – she doesn’t look anything like me or my parents. We all used to joke that we picked her up in a train station.”

I said, “Well, I’ve promised Anna-Louise I will be there for her for the rest of her life.”

John’s face changed. He looked puzzled. “My mother’s name is Anna-Louise,” he said.

The seconds passed in silence as we stared at each other. I asked if he had a picture of his twin sister on his phone, and as he searched, I found one on mine of my Anna-Louise. The woman on John’s phone had brown hair and brown eyes, just like the woman in my photograph. His sister’s picture was just like one I had seen of Anna-Louise as a younger woman. The photographs, which I have shared with the Guardian, made it clear that they were mother and daughter.

As we silently stared at one another, I felt the ground open under my feet. I was a twin

I felt the ground open up under my feet. For 41 years, I had lived not the life I was supposed to live, but somebody else’s. I was not some alien creature who had nothing in common with his family – I was a twin. John, the man who had walked into my classroom thousands of miles from home, was my twin brother. He had grown up with our biological parents, and a sister by his side where I should have been. My place had been taken by someone else.

We started giggling, nervously. I asked about his parents, what they looked like. He told me his father was bald like me; his mother blond with blue eyes. “You do kinda look like my grandfather,” he said.

Suddenly there were people who looked like me; who shared my interests and, I now believed, my DNA. My head spun. For the first time, everything made sense.

We pieced together what must have happened. Two women, both called Anna-Louise, gave birth in the same maternity ward on that summer night in 1969. Back then, there was no ultrasound, so no one knew a baby’s sex before birth. Neither of the fathers was at the hospital and, a million to one chance, they also shared a first name. The three babies were born around midnight and, as was common at the time, the new mothers were sedated so they’d be rested in the morning. Perhaps at night there were fewer staff, and a confusion arose over which baby belonged to which Anna-Louise. The next morning, instead of being returned to my mother with my twin, I was given to the wrong woman, and then adopted. And now my twin and I had found each other, 5,000km from the place of our birth.

There was so much still to say, but John was leaving the next day and had to finish packing. I went home but couldn’t sleep. I called my brother back in North America; he was driving and had to pull over as he listened in amazement. There were so many unanswered questions. Wouldn’t my biological mother have been told she had given birth to two boys, and objected the next morning when she was handed a boy and a girl? Was the switch intentional – did my biological parents not want two boys, or the authorities think a boy would be adopted more quickly? Is this why I sometimes dreamed I had a twin? Did any of this really happen?

The following week, John told his parents he had a friend in Europe, born in the same hospital at about the same date, who had been adopted and who had very little in common with his biological mother – a woman who in fact looked just like John’s own twin sister. He asked them, “Is there anything that happened the night of my birth that I should know about?” They told him, “We don’t ever want you to talk to us about this again.” Not a denial, but a shutting down.

His sister followed suit and said she didn’t want to know – she still doesn’t. I cannot tell the woman who believes she is my biological mother – who continues living, defying her doctors’ prognoses – that I am not her son, because it would crush her. Nine years on, nothing has shifted. Everyone is telling the stories they have always told, trapped in a pretence to protect everyone else, as I suspect my biological family has been for nearly 50 years.

I did speak to my biological parents once, by Skype. I was chatting online with John, who was visiting the family home, and when I asked how they were, he invited them to join the conversation.

I was very scared. I didn’t think it was a good idea: if they weren’t interested in me, I didn’t want to force it. But he introduced me as “a friend from Europe” and that is how I met my biological father for the first time. I looked at him and thought: so that is what I will look like in 25 years. I could recognise myself in him: we have the same eyes.

Then I spoke to my biological mother. I felt: here she is, the woman I have known for ever. It was like coming home. John told me that after the call ended, she said: “That was your twin, wasn’t it?” She asks after me, he says, and she calls me the cosmic twin. But she and her husband still don’t want to meet me, and that is painful. I think I’m a good person, I could be a son they would be proud of. I would like to have a relationship with them. But at the same time I can understand that not meeting me is easier than opening up everything they have hidden for so many years.

Perhaps that is why, every time John and I talk of doing a formal DNA test, he pulls out, feeling it would be a betrayal. I did a test that showed I have no significant Native American blood. I have requested a copy of my file from social services, but because so much time has passed, it is possible the original documents have been destroyed.

For John and me, there is no doubt. When I told colleagues our story, they all guessed who my twin was before I said his name. Although I have never met my biological parents, and John and I have seen each other only a couple of times in the seven years since he moved to another continent, I do feel grateful for the relationships in my life – both old and new. My adoptive brother and I have always been very different, and we still are. But now I understand ours is not an innate connection, not the ease of finishing each other’s sentences that I share with my twin, but a deep-seated tie of togetherness, woven from the threads of a shared childhood, of years of caring for one another. Over the course of our lives, we have grown into brothers.

When I finally told my adoptive father this story, he looked at me and said, “So I guess we’re really lucky to have had you as a son.” Our relationship had never been straightforward, but after that we became closer, better at talking about our lives, until he died four years ago. Then, a year and a half ago, I met the love of my life. He is showing me a partnership, a closeness, I have never known.

A year ago, I was diagnosed with a terminal degenerative disease. My life is going to be shorter than I had wanted. I now use a wheelchair, and my breathing is deteriorating; I cannot work, I cannot travel, I cannot go to concerts and galleries. Accepting this has been difficult, but I am working on it with a psychologist and, strange as it sounds, my life is great. I have my partner, I have my music and my art books, my memories and my friends.

When I contemplate the end of my life and the people I want to have around me, it is my brother I think of, not John, my twin. I want my partner to be there, of course, as well as my doctoral supervisor, who has been a mother to me, and my last boss, who has been like a father, and two close friends I picked up on my travels and have held on to ever since. This is the family I have chosen – the family who chose me.

• As told to Moya Sarner. Alex Carter is a pseudonym. Other names have been changed to protect his family’s identities.

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