Women can frequently be heard exclaiming, “I love her like a sister!” I shake my head. No, you can’t love your best friend like a sister. A sister’s love is separate from any other kind of love. A sister knows not only your entire history, but also what your thoughts and emotions were at every milestone. A sister knows not only who you are, but also what made you who you are.
She knows what has been passed down in blood and tradition. Sometimes this isn’t a comfortable feeling. It can feel a bit naked, a bit too exposed. When a sister shoots you a meaningful look over Thanksgiving dinner, what she’s saying is, “I know exactly what you’re thinking and I know exactly where it’s coming from.” Sometimes, there just isn’t a place to hide. In the end, this is probably a good thing. A sister can make you face your dark side. Sometimes, a sister shares the same dark side as you, and you have to break through it together. You see things in her that make you see things in yourself. She becomes your mirror.
My sister and I literally shared our own language. It started with my having a speech impediment, and her learning to talk from me. It culminated in her becoming my translator. ”She wants a glass of water,” she’d announce to my frustrated mother. It landed us both in speech therapy classes for several years. We still have our own language of sorts; our own catch phrases that will cause us to dissolve into laughter every time that the other utters one, our own silly nicknames for each other, and our own identical and infectious giggle. We look strikingly similar, and are very often asked if we are twins. Sometimes I say, “Yes, we are twins but we were born two and a half years apart.”
Every set of parents will consciously or unconsciously choose the one driving force behind all of their parentage. Some parents choose athleticism, academic success, or sociability. Our parents chose independence. They chose to raise their girls to have their own minds and to form their own opinions. They did a good job. I’m sure that they regretted it many times during our adolescence. We were raised on twenty-seven acres of land in the middle of nowhere. This sort of environment will also make children independent. You must find your own entertainment. When other children were playing house, my sister and I were playing journalists. When other children were watching television, my sister and I were making business plans or pretending to be stockbrokers. We’d bored of playing house years ago.
When I was around fourteen and she was around twelve, there was a split in our relationship. I don’t think that there was a defining moment. I think that it was a gradual process, a realization that maybe we weren’t so similar after all. Children will do this. They will even lie to themselves just to make their own identity, separate from their clan. So perhaps this is what we did—we exaggerated the differences between us as a way of forging our own ways.
It took six years for us to begin to find our way back. We were both in college by then. There is something unique about going to college at the same time as your sister, even if your experiences are quite different from each other. Your hyperactive youth feeds off of each other’s. Sometimes the stress of college makes people revert to their childhood selves. Sometimes a twenty-three-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old will, for instance, find themselves having a picnic inside on a rainy day. They will find themselves eating potato salad and playing Go Fish, and laughing hysterically for hours. Or, a few months later, they will find themselves icing Christmas cookies together in a very non-traditional manner, and suddenly reindeer will be pink and Santa’s hat will be blue—and that’s okay, because your sister thinks it’s funny. She gets it.
She’s an artist and a writer. I’m a cook and a writer. She stays too long. I leave too early. She gives away too much. I don’t give enough away. We are both sensitive and imaginative. We are both business-minded, although not in the conventional sense. I say that she’s courageous, and she doesn’t quite believe it. She says that I’m courageous, and I don’t quite believe it. She came to stay with me a few months ago, and we went to an upscale restaurant on her expense account, and then proceeded to act like children through all five courses. This is a perfect depiction of our relationship.
