To Sisterhood

Today was my sister Tatiana's birthday... which is weird, since I still remember holding her in the hospital when she was born, and now she's gone and grown up into a real live adult and stuff.

I commemorated the day by 1) sending her a gift, 2) sending her a card in the mail, 3) writing on her Facebook wall, 4) calling her on the phone, and 5) watching the 1994 remake of Little Women and bawling my eyes out.

Growing up, Little Women was one of my favorite novels— I must have read it at least twenty times straight through before I hit twelve. I could see each of us in the March sisters— Sarah was Amy, with her cool blue eyes, her blonde hair, and her natural ability with people; Tatiana was shy, quiet Beth; and I was some unholy combination of Meg (vain, showy, determined, and always trying to mother everyone) and Jo (easy to anger, ease to please). And, of course, our mom was much like Marmee, with her insistence that we grow into the people we WANTED to be, not the people society told us to be.

Little Women explores a lot of interesting themes— it's a feminist book, for one thing, and the film version touches on this at several points, most notably when Jo, upon being told that her intelligence suggests that she ought to have been a lawyer, replies sadly, "I ought to have been a great many things." For another thing, it weaves in a lot of transcendentalist philosophy, something that the film acknowledges briefly as well.

But mostly, I love the book for its examination of sisterhood, something that many people profess to understand and yet few can accurately portray. It drives me nuts when books or movies depict sisters as either spiteful rivals or sappy best-friends-forever; in truth, I can think of no family relationship more complicated than sisterhood. Sisters can simultaneously love and resent one another; they can both fear and admire one another; they can be rivals and partners at the same time. It's because we're so similar in some ways and so different in others; my sisters all have my flashing, changeable temper (albeit perhaps not as violent tempers, overall), and so that makes it easy for a misunderstanding or a misstatement to escalate into a fight. We're also so different in tastes and preferences that we can sometimes have difficulty seeing eye to eye; Sarah loves Taco Bell and infomercials, Tatiana is a Wiccan vegetarian, and I'm a bookworm who's married to a priest.

But while we can often conflict with one another, we can also offer each other more love and understanding than anyone else alive. For some reason, even when we're hopping mad at one another, we still love one another. I guess that's what family means— that no matter how often you argue or disagree, you'll always still love one another fully and completely.

I miss my sisters every single day. I get letters (Sarah writes me beautiful handwritten snail-mail letters!) and emails and texts from them, but it's still not enough. I still wish I could spend the evening with them, watching "Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus" and self-translating Korean soap operas (hint: none of us speak Korean) and eating vegan marshmallows and playing board games (who else will play board games with you, other than a sister?) and piling onto my mom's bed to spend time together.

I won't pretend that we get along 100% of the time. Sometimes we drive each other crazy, and I'll admit, most of the time it's my fault— I can be hypercritical and hypersensitive and pushy and nosy and very, very loud, and that contributes to some small amount of discord among us. But the good times always outweigh the bad, and remembering them makes me wish for a nice long holiday when we can actually hang out together again. I mean, right now we're scattered across the country: I'm in Manhattan, Tati's attending college in Michigan, and Sarah's still in high school in Ohio. It's sad, missing people who are so close to you in spirit but so far away in the world.

So happy birthday, Tatiana: here's to you, and here's to sisters everywhere. Know that you are loved.