Sisters

I have two younger sisters, Tiffany and Kim. Most of our lives we were never friends but like survivors of a cataclysm, we were bound by the ties of our fucked-up childhood.  Our parents divorced when we were very young and my mother had custody of us.  Unfortunately, our mother was very emotionally unstable and alcoholic.  I am sure there are drugs today that would have benefited her greatly, but unfortunately, they did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s; what did exist - alcohol and valium - she consumed copiously.  Growing up with her was a daily crap shoot.  We had to be able to determine her mood within a few seconds of her arriving home from work.  A false step or word could result in terrifying punishment.  

This is not a story about our mother, but rather a tale of the relationship between me and my sister Tiffany. My mother was very smart in that her preferred choice of warfare was “divide and conquer”. The result was that I trusted no one in our home, and tried not to love either of them.   Recently, I found a picture of the three of us standing in our matching Easter dresses with our mother.  In the photo, Tif was trying to hold my hand, and I was angling away from her and had clenched my hand into fist in an effort to deter her.  The photo makes me sad today; but at the time I couldn’t afford to love anyone so, I walked my own path and  seldom felt like a “sister”. The more I could be away from my family, the safer and happier I was.  

Then there were the years of separation.  For reasons too varied and complicated to get into here, in our pre-teen years, my sisters went to live with my mom’s best friend’s in a different state and then later, with our father and his new family. I felt abandoned and unloved - my mother told me that my dad and stepmother didn’t want me to come live with them.  I believed her because you are supposed to believe your mother, not realizing until much later in life that she had lied to me, but the damage was done.  I was sent to live with a couple from my church who had lost their only daughter to a violent murder when she was 17.  Regardless, this couple still managed to give me a glimpse of what it felt like to be a part of a normal family and I like to think that I brought something to their lives that they needed as well.  I never felt safer and happier.  

That came to an end a year later and I was living again with my mother and had to deal with her by myself; a part of me resented my sisters for escaping my fate and it drove the wedge between us even further. We never had the chance to bond as children or teenagers.  Tif and I went to the same college in Texas for a year until she transferred to another school her sophomore year.  We both participated in sorority rush, I was going to be a junior and she was a freshman.  We wanted to be in the same sorority but I was blackballed and she was asked to join.  I was crushed and terribly embarrassed and I pushed her even further away.  

When she transferred the next year to a different school, I was glad.  In short order, she got married, had a baby and was on a different path than I.  I would come to visit, but we could never establish a connection and always ended up fighting bitterly.  We tried for the next twenty plus years to be friends but the anger from childhood always stood between us.  When our mother was dying in 1994, we were all there with her and our sadness brought us together, but generally, we mostly tolerated each other. There were brief moments of connection but they were few and far between.  We didn’t know how to be sisters.

The shame and specter of our past was a shadow between us.  We never really spoke about our childhood to anyone else - maybe some very dear, trusted friends knew how bad it was, but generally we were survivors of a war.  No one understood but us and we hid it well - a common effect of this type of disfunction is to not speak of it and act as if everything is all right.  Our interaction followed a common thread - one of us would invariably recount a story about our mother, and one of the other of us would laugh and the third would become offended and upset and the discussion abruptly ended.  After my mother died, the “don’t speak ill” philosophy made the events of our childhood ever harder to face.  

In my early sobriety, my sisters came to visit me in Los Angeles and I took them with me to my appointment with my therapist.  She listened to us and was utterly astounded.  There we sat, three beautiful women on her couch, recounting tales of horror - each story worse than the one before, with smiles on our faces - that’s how we handled it; smile and never let anyone see you cry.  Never show weakness.  These methods worked well in childhood, but certainly did not serve us well as adults.  Still we kept trying to be friends.  We just couldn’t get past the resentment.  When I looked at Tif, I saw my childhood looking back at me. She were the symbol of my wretched childhood as I was hers.  

What happened?  I don’t know exactly.  It seems that we both went through some big life changes around the same time. Several years after Charles’ death, I began to deal with the three legs of my health - emotional, mental and physical.  I let go of many things.  I hiked with Blue up Runyon everyday and as my body began to grow stronger, so did my head and my heart.  I worked with a psychiatrist to stop trying to figure out my mother, and just accept that she did the best she could, but that her best wasn’t enough. To be able to finally say that it freed me.  I deserved better.  We deserved better.  I allowed myself to finally have empathy for my sisters.  I discovered that I had always loved them, but we had never found a way to be friends.

 We started talking - as women, as friends, as sisters.  Tif came out for Thanksgiving with her family and she stayed with me a couple of nights in my little apartment; I gladly gave her my bed and slept on the couch.  I wanted her to be comfortable.  We talked and laughed and talked some more.  We cried.  It was the first time that I had spent with her that I felt like we had lived up to our roles as sisters. Both of us had changed.  We were sisters who found our way onto the same lifeboat - we weren’t going down on the Titanic.  She asked if she could come back for Christmas.  I was excited but fearful too. Could we go a week without a fight?  Would we have fun like we did at Thanksgiving?  It was all so new; new and wonderful, because it was possible that we were finally going to be true friends.  

She came as planned and in short we spent the week talking about our relationships, our careers, our joys and sorrows.  All of these subjects that I had shared with my best girlfriends but never with my sister.  The policy was not to trust, not to get hurt.  We reached past our safe, comfortable but empty and angry relationship and we were finally sisters of the heart.   We discovered we are more alike than we ever knew.  We laughed and shared childhood stories that only surviving siblings can share and still manage to laugh.  We laughed at the past because we fucking beat it.  We trusted each other with our innermost secrets and hopes.  We danced and sang. We took silly pictures and took Blue on hikes.  We went out for coffee every morning and we ate Mexican food as much as we could.  I made her watch “Love Actually” and she loved it as I knew she would.  We went to the mall and tried on $300 jeans.  I laughed at the ridiculousness of paying $300 for denim and she bought a pair.  They were cute on her, I admit.  She is taller than I, elegant, beautiful, blonde and blue eyed.  She is both kind and self-obsessed.  I understand.  She is funny, loud and smart and has a wonderful laugh.  She is a princess and I have learned to live with that and love her in spite of it...or because of it.

She opened her heart to me and I accepted. At Christmas, there was no money for a tree, we didn’t decorate.  The celebration was about the day and us being together; it was wonderful and spiritual and we went to a friend’s house Christmas Day.  We flirted with my friend’s 82 year-old father.  Tif wore a beautiful silk shirt of which the button across her breasts kept popping open.  We laughed every time it happened and made fun of her.  No one got drunk or angry or had their feelings hurt.

The one concession we made to Christmas decorations was to put out these fabulous two and half foot tall Santa and Mrs. Claus puppet-like stuffed dolls.  They stand on shaped metal that extends beyond their feet and are dressed in flannel - a nightdress for Mrs. Claus, and red trapdoor footy flannel pajamas for Santa.  They are wearing nightcaps and holding hot water bottles.  They still have the Garfinkel’s price tag on them where my mother bought them 40 something years ago.  I don’t remember a Christmas where the Clauses weren’t prominent next to the tree. They exemplify the spirit of Christmas as I wished it could have been growing up in our house. Tiffany and I put our little secret gifts to each other (that we had promised not to exchange) under Santa and Mrs. Claus and it was perfect and beautiful and all we needed because, we had already received the greatest gift - the sisterhood that had eluded us for all of our lives.