I Could Never Love Anyone as I Love My Sisters
My relationship with my sisters has had so many ups and downs over the years—this piece is about a time when it was at its best, and how that memory sustains me even when our relationship is more difficult.
My relationship with my sisters changed when they started high school. As kids, we had always fought, and as twins they had frequently ganged up on me. But when I was a senior in high school and they became freshmen, something flipped. We went to a large high school and a lot of the kids at our new school had a lot of money. It was a pretty overwhelming change, and I wanted to protect them from feeling insignificant, I think. And they looked to me for advice about how to navigate this alien place. Also, having twin sisters was novel, unique, and a little cool! I was proud of them, not embarrassed by them for the first time ever. I went to their basketball games, they came to my plays. We sang Destiny’s Child songs on the radio together while putting on makeup in our bathroom. I drove them around with the car windows down and a breeze in our hair, our laughter carried away on the wind. We pigged out on sour gummy bears together, cried about the movie Titanic together, and made life hell for our parents together.
When I left for college, I made them picture frames with our picture and a quote from the 1996 Little Women movie: “I could never love anyone as I love my sisters.”
It’s been twenty years since I gave them that quote. And since then we’ve laughed and cried and fought. And we’ve loved—friends, husbands, babies. But that quote is still true—no matter how many others I love, I’ll never love anyone else the same way I love my sisters.