When I was growing up, my mother called us — my sisters, my brother, and me — the “friends of the friendless.” In retrospect, it was like something out of a movie, especially considering that we all looked alike.
People used to joke that there were strong genes in our house, and as my mother’s name was Jean, it took me a while to understand what they meant. All I knew was that people were constantly exclaiming over how much we resembled each other, and they still do, though we’re no longer dressed the same at every major occasion.
One of the rare things I remember getting in trouble for — when I was very small, at least –, was not getting along with my sister, just shy of two years younger than I am. For years, we were at one another’s throats.
“She’s your sister,” my mother would admonish us. “She’s going to be your sister forever.”
Well, finally, it stuck.
Our relationship now resembles much more closely the one you see in photos from the past: strapped into the same stroller, wearing the same dress. Sometimes, I’m fairly sure she can read my mind.
But in that period of ten years or so when we spent more time yelling at one another, beating on each other or — worst of all — saying those horrid things that you can only say to someone you know so well that you can find the exact knife to twist, the exact wound to rub salt into — I had a different friend at home, my brother, four years my junior.
My sisters — separated by four years as well — had developed a friendship, a club just for them. They shared a bedroom, shared interests that I tried and failed to adopt myself.
While they were playing Mary-Kate and Ashley make-believe games, my brother and I bonded over the Star Wars encyclopedia, and, later, over facts. When he came to visit me in Paris a few years ago, we spent our days wandering Paris and telling each other stories. “Did you know… Did you know… But did you know…”
His friends raised eyebrows as they watched us. “Yeah,” they said. “You’re related.”
Developing a relationship with my youngest sister took more time; that was my fault, probably. I moved out of home at 14 to go to boarding school, when she was only eight. The relationship we had, while close, was forged in two-week spurts, at Christmas, at spring break. Through all that time, her nickname was Little Emily; even though we spent so much time apart, we resembled one another, or so people said.
It wasn’t until she moved to France four years ago and lived with me for five months that we finally realized how similar we were, not just because you can’t tell us apart in baby pictures, but because of how often we’re thinking exactly the same thing. She’s perhaps the only person in the world who organizes her time better than I do, who also craves an adventure every single day, and I love her for it.
And now we’re adults. As someone who was always looking forward, obsessed with possible futures (and child of two people who were also one of four children) I often wondered what this would look like; it doesn’t look like the relationships that my parents share with their siblings — that much was a given, in my mind. But it also doesn’t look the way I had thought it would.
For one, my status as oldest has been firmly erased by the fact that we’re all in our 20s now, all gainfully employed, all living our own lives. In fact, my younger siblings, bonded, perhaps, over the shared time they spent together once I’d flown the nest, take pleasure in noting all of the bad habits I never shook that make me, at 29, perhaps the most adolescent of the bunch — my pigheadedness, my absurd lack of sense of direction, the clumsiness that the Country Boy kindly calls my “lack of delicacy.”
It’s a strange sort of entre-deux, the time we spend together, particularly when it’s a whole month, as it is now. We don’t drift back to the way things once were, not really. We make appointments to see one another, plan to grab lunch “later this week.” My brother and I don’t stay up late talking; he has to be in bed at 11 for work. My sister and I don’t spend hours waxing poetic about the boys we like; I have a husband, and she lives with her guy. And as for my little sister… well, maybe I still have a bit of time to just be with her, before reality takes hold. After all, she’s moving back to Paris with me in just two weeks, and there, we really will have an adventure every day. But we do spend far more time running errands now than we once did playing make-believe.
Growing up is growing apart; I think that we all know that, and yet that’s not what I feel, not with my siblings. Our relationships are different; that much is certain. But the more time I spend with them, the more we speak, the more we share glances over dinner about inside jokes so old and so engrained that they’d be impossible to explain and yet they can be conveyed with just a look… the more I become convinced, as though I needed convincing, that blood is blood, that roots are roots, and that my siblings are my siblings — a piece of me — forever.
Winter Root Salad: Beets and Carrots with Chimichurri (serves 2)
2 orange carrots
2 yellow carrots
2 purple carrots
1 red beet
1 pickled Greek pepper, thinly sliced
1/2 bunch parsley
1/4 bunch cilantro
10 leaves mint
5 leaves fresh oregano (omit if you’re serving to my siblings)
1 shallot, minced
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
Roast the beet whole in a 350 degree oven for 45 minutes. Allow to cool, then peel.
Scrub the carrots and trim the tops. Halve any larger carrots lengthwise. Steam in a steamer until cooked through, about 10-15 minutes, depending on their size.
Arrange the beet, carrots, and pepper over a plate.
Chiffonade all of the herbs, and combine with the shallot. Season with the vinegar, oil, salt, and pepper. Drizzle generously over the salad. Share with someone willing to tell you if you have parsley in your teeth.
