You know those first-day-of-anything-introduce-yourself sessions? Most of the time you have to say your name, what school you attended and a fun fact about yourself.
I’ve been getting off easy.
Amy Willsey. MU. Identical triplet.
But the truth is I’ve been lying for years. Being an identical triplet isn’t the most interesting thing about me. Sure, I guess it is pretty neat. And it does evoke the reaction one hopes when giving an interesting fact to a bunch of strangers.
“No way!”
“Tell us more.”
“Are you serious?”
It’s also great that a single fact excuses all my annoying personality traits right up front: always speaking in “we,” my co-dependent lifestyle and my inability to have successful friendships outside my bloodline.
But if I were being honest all those years, starting at 16, my interesting fact would not just be that I’m an identical triplet — it’d be that as an identical triplet, I shared a car with my two sisters for seven years.
I feel like people would be downright impressed with my ability to share. They’d also obviously assume I’m a great team player; therefore, I’d be recruited first for group projects.
Just two months before our sweet 16 it was decided that E, D and I would share a single automobile for an indefinite amount of time.
My parents were all like, “You guys do everything together so you can share a car and just go everywhere together, too. Power in numbers.”
And we were all like, “Do you want us to have unhealthy heavily reliant relationships?”
My sisters and I shared a ’99 Chevy Blazer for those seven years. Yes, the most significant seven years of a young girl’s life: high school and college.
Barnaby, as we lovingly called him, really saw it all — car paint when Tyler asked Evan to the Homecoming dance, the front-end of Wade’s car when Dana reversed into it in the driveway, the drives across I-70 to MU and back.
It was like an only child with three loving parents. Barnaby got all the attention and all the love. (It was irrelevant that the driver’s door was off its hinges, that it sounded like a diesel truck when it idled or that it started shaking at 80 mph.)
As the three parents, we often fought for custody and child support in the form of gas money.
It truly is an incredible survival story. One that I wish to tell the next time I'm asked for an interesting fact.
I’d hate to leave any questions unanswered, so for those wondering: Barnaby was replaced in May 2014 by three new-car smelling, smooth driving SUV impostors.
But that’s not where this story ends. We didn’t know anything about driving alone, as a single, through the rough streets of KCMO. It was so ingrained that we shared a car that Evan and Dana actually carpooled to their respective jobs for a few months this summer.
Old habits die hard.
As we’ve settled into the reality of driving our own cars, we’ve learned a few new things:
1. Buying your own gas and not splitting it three ways makes for heftier credit card statements.
2. New cars are needy. You’ve got to give it baths regularly, you can’t kick the door shut with cowboy boots on, you mustn’t eat cereal and milk in the backseat, etc.
3. Not having a passenger and backseat driver makes driving much more of a responsibility. Also, no one likes backseat drivers so our relationship is stronger than ever.
But the most important lesson learned thus far, in the 9 months Eddie the Edge has been with me, is that I’m 99 percent positive that my dad let the three of us drive an unsafe car for five of those seven years.