StoryWorth: Siblings
Mar. 23rd, 2019 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lillibetHas your relationship with your siblings changed over the years?
In some ways my relationship with my sisters has changed profoundly, but in other ways not at all.
The three of us are all nine years apart. That is, Beckie was born when Anne was almost nine and I was born when Beckie was almost ten. Anne left for college the year I was born—my baptism was scheduled for the day after her graduation, since the grandparents would all be in town for that. Beckie left home when I was nine.
When I was little Anne was more like an aunt, in some ways—an exciting occasional presence in my life. She came home for summers when I was very little, and for holidays. When we were out alone together people automatically assumed that she was my mother. She bought me books and fed me strange things and took me exploring. Whatever interest or hobby she developed, she shared with me—I fondly remember the grave-rubbing phase and the hiking phase. She taught me to cook, mostly by telling me to make it up and assume it would be fine. In the summer Anne & George would take me along with them to Block Island and we would climb the bluffs and body surf in the waves.
My parents made a real effort to promote a relationship between us, sending me to stay with her for a week at a time, starting while she was still living in the dorms at Wellesley and I would have been no more than three. By the time I was eight they would put me on the Peter Pan bus and let me make the journey to Boston on my own, where she thought nothing of handing me T tokens and telling me where to meet her after work. She introduced me to science fiction and gave me Our Bodies, Our Selves, and taught me to be a feminist. I adored her and thought she was the coolest person in the world.
Beckie and I were much closer on a day-to-day basis while we were both at home. In most of my baby pictures it is Beckie who is holding me. My first word was “baby,” but my second was “Becca.” When she came to bed I would pound on the wall until she came to get me to snuggle with her—while my mother accused her of “never leaving that child alone!” Finally they put an extra bed in my room and Beckie slept there—the only way to keep me in my own bed. My mother still made most of our clothes in those days and Beckie had to endure my being dressed in scaled down copies of her clothes. We would watch tv together every afternoon when she got home from school—One Life to Live and General Hospital, followed by Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, and The Electric Company, before Dad got home and switched to the news.
When I was little and our grandparents were still alive, we drove to North Carolina and back at least twice each year—with me sprawled out and napping on Beckie in the days before carseats for toddlers. She got dragged along on the family vacation to Disneyworld, while I tagged along on trips to visit the colleges she was checking out. She had to endure my painfully honest comments chiming in at the most awkward times throughout her adolescence.
Anne’s relationship with our parents was always turbulent. The values that she embraced as a young woman in the 70s were very different from their Depression Era morality. My mother was always ready with a judgmental or dismissive comment and my father was very emotionally open and willing to go toe to toe with her in arguments that shook the house. Anne always wanted me to be on her team, to recognize our parents’ shortcomings and join her in criticizing and rebelling against them. I think that by the time I hit puberty, alone in the house with them, that—along with everything else—made me feel awkward with Anne and we grew more distant. And with Beckie also out of the house, I had somewhere else to go.
I spent much of Beckie’s college years hanging out with her at Smith. As a tall, precocious kid, I was generally assumed to be one of the more baby-faced freshmen and spent many long weekends and breaks roaming the campus while Beckie worked, or studied, and tagging along with her and her friends to movies, concerts, and lectures. When I wasn’t there I ran up huge long distance bills calling her almost every afternoon.
After Beckie graduated she moved to Boston. The plan was for her to stay with Anne and her partner, George, for a few months while she found a job and an apartment, but Beckie ended up living with them for nine years. During that time I visited often, so I was spending more time with Anne again.
There are lots of fun stories of the Hunter Sisters from those days. One time George made the mistake of referring to the musical “1776” as “forgettable,” so we sang the entire score from top to bottom, it having been a favorite to sing on car trips. Or there was the time that TV Guide said that record companies mistrusted MTV’s promises to play their videos at certain rates, but since there was “no way for them to tell,” they were having to take MTV’s word on it. “There’s no way to tell” entered our family language for easily-verifiable information.
While the gravitational pull of Boston was strong, I attempted to elude my fate by going to college in New York, but after two years there I bowed to the inevitable, moved to Boston—living partly with my sisters that first summer—and transferred to Wellesley.
While I was there, first Beckie and then Anne & George, bought condos and moved apart. Anne & George went into a big Indian cooking phase, at the time that my IBS was making Indian food really difficult for me to eat, so I spent less time with them. Beckie was living alone for the first time and especially once I had graduated we spent a lot of time hanging out together.
It's funny, because the big age difference between us always seemed so important when we were younger--in many ways it was defining of our relationship. But by the time I was about twenty-five, it really didn't matter any more. We were all working women, living in apartments, managing our relationships...shocking as it seems, we'd grown up. Though I do have to remind Anne from time to time not to tell stories about how awful I could be when I was little!
In the mid-90s, Beckie got married and I moved to California to try my luck on the West Coast, so we necessarily spent less time together. Then I met Jason and we married and moved to London, where both my sisters visited, and I had a cheap calling plan, so we spoke often. When we decided to move back to Boston, Beckie did us the enormous favor of finding a house and dealing with the purchase. Not long after our move back, we founded Theatre@First with Beckie and worked together closely on that.
When our daughter, Alice, turned three, Anne announced that she was exercising her big-sister right to have her come stay at least one weekend a month. Alice loves staying with Anne & George—much as I did when I was younger. It’s sometimes funny to hear about their adventures together, because they are similar in many ways to my time with them. Every summer they take her along for a week on Block Island, just as they did when I was a kid.
During my parents' decline, we all had to pull together to help care for them and make decisions. It was such a relief that we were all on the same page about the big issues. My therapist, listening to me talk about dealing with my mother's medical care--because I'm the one without a day job that could easily take her to appointments, that part fell to me--asked once if I felt like my sisters were doing enough and I said "We each do all that we possibly can, and most days that's enough. And if it isn't enough, it's still all that we can." Having that kind of mutual support made that awful time bearable.
Both of them are getting ready to retire and it will be interesting to see what changes that brings to their lives and our relationships. I talk to each of my sisters at least a couple of times a week and see them once a month, or more. We still celebrate holidays together--usually at my house.
In some ways nothing has changed--Anne is still the rebellious older daughter, Beckie is still the peacemaker, and I'm probably still the brat. In other ways, it's all changed--we're none of us young any more, even if they forget sometimes. But in the most important ways it's just what it always was--we're sisters, we grew up in the same family even if our parents were pretty different over time, we share a common history and language and connection that is different from anything I share with anyone else in the world.
In some ways my relationship with my sisters has changed profoundly, but in other ways not at all.
The three of us are all nine years apart. That is, Beckie was born when Anne was almost nine and I was born when Beckie was almost ten. Anne left for college the year I was born—my baptism was scheduled for the day after her graduation, since the grandparents would all be in town for that. Beckie left home when I was nine.
When I was little Anne was more like an aunt, in some ways—an exciting occasional presence in my life. She came home for summers when I was very little, and for holidays. When we were out alone together people automatically assumed that she was my mother. She bought me books and fed me strange things and took me exploring. Whatever interest or hobby she developed, she shared with me—I fondly remember the grave-rubbing phase and the hiking phase. She taught me to cook, mostly by telling me to make it up and assume it would be fine. In the summer Anne & George would take me along with them to Block Island and we would climb the bluffs and body surf in the waves.
My parents made a real effort to promote a relationship between us, sending me to stay with her for a week at a time, starting while she was still living in the dorms at Wellesley and I would have been no more than three. By the time I was eight they would put me on the Peter Pan bus and let me make the journey to Boston on my own, where she thought nothing of handing me T tokens and telling me where to meet her after work. She introduced me to science fiction and gave me Our Bodies, Our Selves, and taught me to be a feminist. I adored her and thought she was the coolest person in the world.
Beckie and I were much closer on a day-to-day basis while we were both at home. In most of my baby pictures it is Beckie who is holding me. My first word was “baby,” but my second was “Becca.” When she came to bed I would pound on the wall until she came to get me to snuggle with her—while my mother accused her of “never leaving that child alone!” Finally they put an extra bed in my room and Beckie slept there—the only way to keep me in my own bed. My mother still made most of our clothes in those days and Beckie had to endure my being dressed in scaled down copies of her clothes. We would watch tv together every afternoon when she got home from school—One Life to Live and General Hospital, followed by Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, and The Electric Company, before Dad got home and switched to the news.
When I was little and our grandparents were still alive, we drove to North Carolina and back at least twice each year—with me sprawled out and napping on Beckie in the days before carseats for toddlers. She got dragged along on the family vacation to Disneyworld, while I tagged along on trips to visit the colleges she was checking out. She had to endure my painfully honest comments chiming in at the most awkward times throughout her adolescence.
Anne’s relationship with our parents was always turbulent. The values that she embraced as a young woman in the 70s were very different from their Depression Era morality. My mother was always ready with a judgmental or dismissive comment and my father was very emotionally open and willing to go toe to toe with her in arguments that shook the house. Anne always wanted me to be on her team, to recognize our parents’ shortcomings and join her in criticizing and rebelling against them. I think that by the time I hit puberty, alone in the house with them, that—along with everything else—made me feel awkward with Anne and we grew more distant. And with Beckie also out of the house, I had somewhere else to go.
I spent much of Beckie’s college years hanging out with her at Smith. As a tall, precocious kid, I was generally assumed to be one of the more baby-faced freshmen and spent many long weekends and breaks roaming the campus while Beckie worked, or studied, and tagging along with her and her friends to movies, concerts, and lectures. When I wasn’t there I ran up huge long distance bills calling her almost every afternoon.
After Beckie graduated she moved to Boston. The plan was for her to stay with Anne and her partner, George, for a few months while she found a job and an apartment, but Beckie ended up living with them for nine years. During that time I visited often, so I was spending more time with Anne again.
There are lots of fun stories of the Hunter Sisters from those days. One time George made the mistake of referring to the musical “1776” as “forgettable,” so we sang the entire score from top to bottom, it having been a favorite to sing on car trips. Or there was the time that TV Guide said that record companies mistrusted MTV’s promises to play their videos at certain rates, but since there was “no way for them to tell,” they were having to take MTV’s word on it. “There’s no way to tell” entered our family language for easily-verifiable information.
While the gravitational pull of Boston was strong, I attempted to elude my fate by going to college in New York, but after two years there I bowed to the inevitable, moved to Boston—living partly with my sisters that first summer—and transferred to Wellesley.
While I was there, first Beckie and then Anne & George, bought condos and moved apart. Anne & George went into a big Indian cooking phase, at the time that my IBS was making Indian food really difficult for me to eat, so I spent less time with them. Beckie was living alone for the first time and especially once I had graduated we spent a lot of time hanging out together.
It's funny, because the big age difference between us always seemed so important when we were younger--in many ways it was defining of our relationship. But by the time I was about twenty-five, it really didn't matter any more. We were all working women, living in apartments, managing our relationships...shocking as it seems, we'd grown up. Though I do have to remind Anne from time to time not to tell stories about how awful I could be when I was little!
In the mid-90s, Beckie got married and I moved to California to try my luck on the West Coast, so we necessarily spent less time together. Then I met Jason and we married and moved to London, where both my sisters visited, and I had a cheap calling plan, so we spoke often. When we decided to move back to Boston, Beckie did us the enormous favor of finding a house and dealing with the purchase. Not long after our move back, we founded Theatre@First with Beckie and worked together closely on that.
When our daughter, Alice, turned three, Anne announced that she was exercising her big-sister right to have her come stay at least one weekend a month. Alice loves staying with Anne & George—much as I did when I was younger. It’s sometimes funny to hear about their adventures together, because they are similar in many ways to my time with them. Every summer they take her along for a week on Block Island, just as they did when I was a kid.
During my parents' decline, we all had to pull together to help care for them and make decisions. It was such a relief that we were all on the same page about the big issues. My therapist, listening to me talk about dealing with my mother's medical care--because I'm the one without a day job that could easily take her to appointments, that part fell to me--asked once if I felt like my sisters were doing enough and I said "We each do all that we possibly can, and most days that's enough. And if it isn't enough, it's still all that we can." Having that kind of mutual support made that awful time bearable.
Both of them are getting ready to retire and it will be interesting to see what changes that brings to their lives and our relationships. I talk to each of my sisters at least a couple of times a week and see them once a month, or more. We still celebrate holidays together--usually at my house.
In some ways nothing has changed--Anne is still the rebellious older daughter, Beckie is still the peacemaker, and I'm probably still the brat. In other ways, it's all changed--we're none of us young any more, even if they forget sometimes. But in the most important ways it's just what it always was--we're sisters, we grew up in the same family even if our parents were pretty different over time, we share a common history and language and connection that is different from anything I share with anyone else in the world.
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