By Kirsten Mahon/tr news editor
Carrie Duke/The Collegian
If TR Campus students thought they’d been seeing double recently, they may breathe a sigh of relief.
Three twins from three different families serve students in TR disability support services. Out of the six women in the three sets of twins, five of them are employed at TCC and four of them work on TR Campus.
Ivette Buehler, TR student development associate, works in the disability services office. Her fraternal twin, Carmin Lopez, works a mere 50 feet away in the registrar’s office.
“Right out of high school, we wanted to pick a field that we knew would be useful later in life,” she said.
Though they had worked and spent most of their lives together, they were never joined at the hip.
“We’re not that kind of twins where we have to call each other and be each other,” she said. “My mom dressed us alike a lot, but we didn’t like it. It was kind of weird.”
Buehler’s mother and father have twins on both sides of their families. While growing up, the sisters sang in their church choir, studied together in school and danced together at school functions.
“It was rare to have someone ask us to the dance,” she said. “I think we intimidated the guys because we were always together. I guess they felt that they didn’t want to disappoint one of us if they didn’t ask the other one.”
Buehler said a divide can separate a twin from his or her sibling. Almost always, there’s a serious twin and a laid-back twin, an extroverted twin and an introverted twin, or a hardworking twin and a leisurely twin.
“And they always say the quiet one is the mean one,” Buehler said. “I’m the quiet one.”
Buehler normally sits next to Keioka Wood. Wood is also a TR student development associate — and also has an identical twin.
“I wouldn’t necessarily call it mean,” Wood said. “We’re just more serious, more straightforward and to-the-point, which may come out as mean.”
Wood’s identical sister, Meioka Alexander, works on South Campus as an administrative office assistant for continuing education. Alexander and Wood did everything together growing up too, including developing their identities.
The two were inseparable and shared a favorite color, classes and even a fleet in the Navy. When the two left the armed forces, they both applied to TCC to continue helping people.
“The biggest disadvantage is having our identities switched,” she said. According to Wood, the only differences between their Social Security cards are a few numbers and the first letter of their names.
“A couple years ago, I got sick,” she said. “And there was a huge mix-up with our names and the insurance.”
Identity mistakes are only a small trade off to having someone so close, Wood said. She and her sister are so much alike, they rarely needed to purposely separate their identities.
“We get a lot of attention,” she said. “We always get noticed.”
Leslie Seggelink, TR sign language instructor and also a disability services associate, has a sister who is two minutes younger. Seggelink said it was nice having a best friend to grow up with, but as twins, they were independent of each other.
“I think everyone needs to be their own person and have their own identity – by yourself,” she said. “Some parents don’t realize that.”
Seggelink said she and her twin were both popular, but Seggelink normally went out with her friends, and her sister often stayed at home with their mother.
“My mother was really good about making sure we had our own identity,” she said.
There were two ways they did this: by appearance and by personality and nature. Her sister, Kelly Lang, always wore pink and had a “K” monogrammed on her clothes. Seggelink was always in blue with an “L”.
“I remember doing that when we were really little,” she said. “But we didn’t have to do the same things.”
Seggelink and Lang were raised with two other sisters by their parents in Rochester, N.Y., near the headquarters of Kodak, a longtime maker of photographic equipment and supplies. They graduated high school with six other sets of twins, Seggelink said.
“They didn’t have fertility drugs then,” she said. “We always thought it was the Kodak water.”
Today, the two are still very close. While Seggelink lives in Fort Worth with her husband and Lang teaches home economics in Rochester, they still make the effort to stay connected.
“We talk. Every. Single. Day,” she said, “sometimes about three times a day.”
