Three Sisters
By Rachel Irving
I was an only child, and any ideas I had about sisters were based on fiction and observation. I watched friends battle brutally with their sisters every single day: pulling each other's hair, biting, kicking. I'd never see boys fight with that much raw, unselfconscious aggression. Or else there were the sisters whose relationship resembled the Machiavellian intrigues of a major European dynasty. The eldest resenting the fact that she had had to fight for freedoms that the youngest took for granted. The youngest resenting not having the authority her big sister had. The struggles never ended, but it seemed to me that the periods of expulsion never lasted long, and if an outsider ever dared to wrong one of the sisters he or she would immediately face a formidable united front. Throughout all the noisy conflict there was a background hum of family love.
Still, to me conflict seemed to be the default setting of sisters in childhood.
When it came time to have children of my own, I was secretly relieved that my firstborn was a girl. I imagined that a daughter would be easier for me because I would remember my own girlhood. That was faulty logic. I can, perhaps, given enough peaceful time for reflection, make an extreme effort and have a flash of memory of what it felt like to be me as a child. I don't think for one moment that that helps me understand the workings of my daughters' minds. I struggle, for example, to comprehend why one considers it more important to tie a sequined belt around her ankle before going to school than to brush her teeth.
Then I wanted another child, and it wasn't because I imagined that my darling Lol would need a sibling to battle with in order to make her childhood whole. (I guess we could always have found her a sparring partner somewhere in the neighbourhood.) It was because I wanted the adult Lauren who would someday exist to have someone who would absolutely understand everything to do with family, without the need for explanations. I theorized that a therapist would listen when you explained exactly how your parents messed up your existence, but a sibling would say “Oh, yeah! Me too!” I wanted her to have a collaborator in family life.
Lol would not tolerate the possibility of having a brother. “No, not a boy, I want a girl, a girl,” she declared with three-year-old determination. We decided to take her along to the 20-week ultrasound so that she'd find out exactly when we did. That was when we all discovered we were having monozygotic twin girls. Lol shrugged. “One boy would have been alright." When I'd recovered from the shock I felt as though I'd betrayed Lol. I'd pictured her with a single buddy, two of them kids balancing two of us grownups. Instead of providing her with one partner in childhood, however, I was giving her two teammates who'd been in cahoots from the womb. I worried. Recently she told me about how she'd listen to them, as toddlers, talking their twin language, and imagine that they were plotting against us.
Now Lol is ten, and Alice and Grace six. I've watched them; I've photographed them; I've seen them change. Their relationship is neither the daily violence I remember from the sisters I observed in childhood, nor the fairy tale that people who see pictures of them might imagine. Though they aren't aware of it at this moment, I think they do all rely on each other, and though twinship is undoubtedly a strong bond, it seems that Alice and Grace need Lol as much as they do each other. The girls' need for sisters is perhaps based on the ways in which they differ from their friends. We've been immigrants for most of Lol's life and all of Grace and Alice's.
In California they looked different to our predominantly Asian neighbours, with whom we shared a common sense of how to survive as immigrants. In British Columbia no obvious physical difference sets them apart from the majority of their peers, but as they get older they are beginning to realise that they've traveled to different places and had different experiences to their friends. They're noticing that they have parents who are clueless about hunting, fishing and camping, who don't watch ice hockey, avoid the mall, and who never learned to skate. I'm glad that they have each other, because otherwise surely they'd sometimes feel like freaks.
I've often seen families of brothers form platoons, with roles either chosen or allocated, but rarely challenged. There is always a team-leader, and there might be an engineer or an explorer; it seems that boys accept these early roles and stick with them. Perhaps it's because physical strength is an essential part of so much boy play, so there's an easy way to establish a pecking order. It's not like this in our home. The roles the girls take in play and in life are constantly changing. Grace and Alice accept that their big sister knows more than they do, but often refuse to believe that this gives her any power over them. They can be more like a pack of dogs, always scrabbling to be the first through a door, than like an organised team. And like dogs, it's when they relax that they show themselves to belong together. On a Friday night after pizza when they collapse together in a pile to watch a movie, their kinship seems at its strongest.
One day when we were walking home from school Alice told me that Grace had flopped over and rested her head on her during assembly.
“It was annoying,” she paused. “I did it to her, too.”
“Would you do that to one of your friends?” I asked her.
“Well... maybe I would, but I'd always ask if it was okay first,” she answered.
I suppose I imagine that's the difference between a sister and a friend. You don't stop to think about annoying your sister a bit, for the sake of your own comfort, and you assume that she'll feel the same about you. Friends have changed the dynamic of their relationship, though. As soon as they started school the influence that their friends had on their behaviour and opinions became very clear. Friends are always cooler than sisters; it's a known fact. You get to choose your friends—you gravitate together—and if you start to develop different interests, there's nothing but a short history to hold you together. Your sisters will inevitably embarrass you in front of everyone, but sometimes a friend will surprise you by being impressed with something they see in your sister that you'd never really noticed.
So I watch them grow up. I watch them fight, and laugh, and be stupid together with the pure, unabashed, shameless energy that you rarely see anywhere outside of improvised comedy, and I wonder what they will be like as adults. This summer we were spending time with my parents and their friends, people who grew up in very close-knit Eastern Mediterranean families. It's the tradition there to provide your daughters with a home as a dowry, so many of these women lived in the same village as their sisters or even in adjoining houses. Some of them emigrated and raised families elsewhere before returning to their family homes, spending almost all their adult lives away from each other. Others had always lived just a wall away from their sisters. Yet they all still had the same bonds of love and conflict. They might support each other during a family crisis or feud, or refuse to talk for years on end. When I consider it, I know sisters who wouldn't add each other as contacts on Facebook, but who are fundamentally tied so closely that they must find release in separate online lives.
I try not to take too much for granted about my daughters' future. With their background they might choose to make their homes at different sides of the world. Like every parent I have a million hopes for them. I hope that they read every day, don't suffer fools, wear sunblock, brush their teeth, find true love, drink lots of water, walk outdoors, be careful crossing the road, roll with the punches, remember that they are beautiful, get plenty of rest, dream, explore and enjoy all their senses, eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables and of course, when they grow up, I hope they still get together from time to time, eat pizza and flop on the couch, to watch a good movie.
Photos By Rachel Irving
