This past week, my sister and I stood in line for 90 minutes in a bookstore so that we could spend two minutes with the adorable, relatable, hopeful Hannah Hart (@harto) best known for her YouTube cooking show and accompanying parody cookbook My Drunk Kitchen. Hannah is one of those people who can bring these two very different twins together to share in an evening of being giddy and star-struck.
I’m not sure my sister and I have ever gotten along better than we have the other night. As we get older and grow into different phases of our lives, we’re becoming more and more similar. It’s awesome. It’s such a stark difference between our relationship even two or three years ago.
Growing up, she and I were very different. There’s this theory that twins are more or less “zero sum”. That theory basically says that if one twin is more social/academic/athletic/geeky/etc., the other twin is going to be less of that to sort of cosmically make up for it. That theory basically describes my sister and I. I’ve always been really social. I like team sports like soccer, social academic pursuits (I was a journalism major and look forward to studying project management soon), and my free time is almost always spent physically with people playing board games or cooking or walking around the city. My sister is the introverted opposite of me. She excels with computers and technical things. She likes getting her exercise by taking walks. She prefers take-out to a noisy restaurant or kitchen. She prefers hanging out with friends in World of Warcraft guilds (? is that even the right name?) and I prefer having a bunch of people in my living room to watch football.
Sadly, because my interests and hobbies are more glorified in the media and entertainment, I used to think these things made me better than her. I regret that, and I hope she forgives me for projecting that on to her.
Not only do we have different hobbies, but we’re finding that the more we talk, the more it seems like we grew up in different universes.
We had a rough go at it when we were kids. We grew up very poor, rarely staying in one dirty apartment or house more than a year or two. We spent about six months bouncing around homeless shelters, one of those nights with our family of six sleeping in a two-door Honda coup. We grew up in a very loud and violent household, though she definitely experienced that more than me. Our oldest brother beat the crap out of her and our other brother while hiding it all from me so he could maintain his hero-big-brother status. Our parents were constantly on the verge of breaking up, but wouldn’t lest they incur church discipline or be caught “living in sin.”
Our dad was always sick (diabetes, chronic bronchitis, thyroid cancer, and an array of mystery ailments) so he was rarely working and therefore always at home, imposing strict gender expectations. We grew up very religious, which meant that anything outside of “men are the head of the household and women are to submit” was scorned. Anything outside of strict gender binary or heterosexuality was absolutely forbidden. I was the one in the kitchen or doing the cleaning. I was the one allowed to play with Barbies. I was the one allowed to express any emotion besides happy and bad (though rarely and it was expected I would “stop being so sensitive” quickly and without inconveniencing anyone).
I was given more freedom to explore hobbies outside of my gender expectations (as girls usually are), but I think that may have been more a matter of convenience and being able to take the whole family to sporting events or air shows. As a result, we both tend toward the middle of the gender spectrum when it comes to sports (I love to watch football, and play anything) and cars (classic American ones for looking at, fast ones for riding in).
Despite all that, she and I can agree that there were some positives to growing up in our volatile household. We both love to laugh. Our dad does ventriloquism, a hobby he shares with my sister. He also loves puns, cartooning, and magic. We grew up knowing that laughter, especially with family, can get you through anything. We both treasure learning that early and often.
Our family fought loudly and frequently. Neither of us could really appreciate that until we were adults and saw our friends get blindsided by their parents, who never fought, breaking up. Or until we were in friendships and romantic relationships with people we cared about but didn’t always agree with. It’s amazing to know that you can love and respect someone, and also not always have to be perfectly happy. We did note, while wandering around that bookstore waiting to hug Hannah, that it was a struggle for both of us to learn that anger did not equal love. I had to learn that through a very abusive marriage, and I have to work not to resent the parents that taught me that.
She and I also realized that the two of us were the only of our family of six to learn that our differences are what make us stronger. We can both understand that there are more than two sides to basically everything, and that those grey areas are what make life and people so interesting. We get that you can disagree with someone (notably between her and I the issue is gun control) and still deeply appreciate that you’re coming to different conclusions from the same starting place (we both want protection for people we love). And we’re both holding out hope that the other four members of our immediate family come around to understand that our differences are valuable, and that they’re worth celebrating, not being ashamed of.
Until that happens, we’ll continue enjoying twinship and sisterhood and blushing around tiny, blonde, inspiring authors named Hannah.