Instead of me, me, me, a sisterhood of we.
STORY BY Marion Winik ILLUSTRATION BY Paige Vickers
When I learned in 1988 that my first child would be a boy, I was nervous. I had grown up without brothers, with almost exclusively female playmates, and would be confronting the mysterious culture of boyhood for the first time. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. At the time I couldn’t have identified either an athletic cup or a video game controller.
In my family, there were two of us. I was the smart one, she was the pretty one. I was the plump brunette falling over her own feet, she was the little 
blond cartwheeling across the lawn. I was the teacher, the president and the big boss of everything; she was the student, the employee and the lovely assistant. And equally important as all these differences was our sameness. We were the girls. Marion and Nancy. Or Mancy, as my father sometimes called us interchangeably. My mother dressed us alike in stretch pants and striped tops she bought wholesale because Daddy was in the garment industry, long past the age when we hated looking like bookends. Finally, in our preteens, we put our foot (well, feet) down.
Until our mid-40s, when we lived in different states and each drove with our families to the dock in New Jersey to meet our mom for a cruise. My mother and sister were already fighting when I arrived, as my mother, decked out in a jaunty nautical costume, simply could not believe my sister had shown up for a cruise in overall shorts with a tank top. Until I arrived in the exact same outfit.
“You have to admit it’s kind of funny,” I said to my mother that night as I sat beside her at dinner beneath the plushy dining room’s glittering chandeliers.
My mother hadn’t made it to the amusing hindsight phase. “Is anybody else dressed like you two in this place?” she asked, gesturing around the three-tiered hall. “I don’t know what’s wrong with you girls.” My mother is no longer here to wonder what is wrong with us girls. Which is too bad because there’s not as much wrong with us as there once was. We were a handful when we were young, wild teenage hellcats running around without the sense we were born with. Now I spend most of my time urging people to clean their rooms and my sister barely drinks caffeinated coffee. Not only are we not crazy, we are kind of boring.
Even sadder than my mother missing our descent into dull middle age is that no one is left to think of us as “you girls.”
Except us. To us, we will always be a we.
As a teacher of memoir, I have noticed that there’s a certain “we” that people use when they tell the stories of their childhoods, reflecting the sense of being one of a pack or a litter, a gang of siblings or neighborhood kids. We never wore shoes. We played hide-and-go-seek in the dark. We bought candy at the Little League ball field and ate it under the bleachers. We were afraid of our mother and we worshipped our father, who took us to Burger Chef, the very first fast food place we had in our town. We stole Larks, and later Merits, from our mother. We made out with boys on the 9th tee of the golf course behind our house. We hitchhiked down to the beach, bought some beer and drank it in the cool dark sand under the boardwalk.
After you leave your parents’ home and go your separate ways, the “we” of childhood becomes more theoretical, but my sister and I have never fully left it behind. Mainly because we never left each other behind. We lived in a fifth-floor walk-up in New York and in a series of ramshackle bungalows in Austin, Texas. We got married at our parents’ golf club, at least the first time we did. We lost our husbands young. We both had two sons without fathers, and much later, we had little girls. We love hot tubs and movies and artichokes. We diet, relentlessly and fruitlessly, and we do yoga. We grew up with a miniature dachshund, we have miniature dachshunds now. We don’t like to imagine a life without miniature dachshunds.
Several studies in the past 10 years have shown that people with sisters are happier. Originally it was suggested that having a sister means you always have someone to talk to about your problems. More recent research has amended that conclusion — it’s important to have someone to discuss serious personal matters with, but it’s even more important just to talk. Sisters tend to talk to each other a lot, even when they are far apart, and that, they say, adds up to happiness. Quantity trumps quality. Conversely, I’ve noticed that people who have lost their sisters — to death, to misunderstandings gone out of control, in one case I know of, to a cult — tend to be a little stunned. Permanently.
Margaret Mead is quoted as saying that sisterhood is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest.
Sharing the experience and the burdens of our mother’s final illness made my sister and me The Winik Girls again in a way we hadn’t been in a long time. Since my mother died, the conversations we used to have with her, we now have with each other. When something very good or very bad happens, we call each other. It doesn’t feel so much like bragging to tell your sister about the great thing your son did, or the promotion you got at your job. Or if it’s a bad thing your son did, or a big mistake you made at work, it’s not as shameful and unimaginable to air it out with a sister. (With the latter, we often say we’re glad Mommy’s not around so we don’t have to tell her.)
We also feel free to discuss such mundane topics as a stain we got on our pants or what is wrong with the boiler or this weird thing the neighbor said the other day. What are you doing this weekend? How was that party? Do we have to bring a present? Have you tried those new tofu things at Chipotle? Are you still mad at Jane?
Margaret Mead is quoted as saying that sisterhood is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest. That is exactly right, I think. When all that me-me-me-pick-me drains away, it is replaced by pride. I am so proud of my sister, who is smart, hardworking and loyal, committed to her family and community-minded. She might be the more grounded these days; at least, she’s the one who does our taxes. I very much doubt she would want to write an essay on the topic of sisterhood, but I think she will be proud that her big sister did. *
