Click here for past issues of the Globe Magazine, dating back to June 22, 1997

Letters to the Magazine editor:
Mail can be sent to Letters to the Editor, The Boston Globe, P.O. Box 2378, Boston, MA 02107-2378. The email address is [email protected] or use our form.

Relative comfort

As girls, the sisters sparred constantly. Decades later, they're learning to enjoy family ties.

My mother is almost 80, but one of the stories she still likes to tell has to do with raising teenage daughters. "One day, I was sitting in the living room," the story begins, "and the girls were in the kitchen doing the dishes. But something was different that day. Something didn't feel right."

At this point, she pauses, for effect. "Then I realized what was wrong," she says. "They were actually being civil to each other."

Days when my two sisters and I got along were historic events in our household, where insults were traded as often as hair curlers. We weren't at one another's throats every moment, but often enough that our bickering drove our mother to acts of exasperated melodrama. ("I'm going to take the gas pipe!" she'd threaten in mock - I think - despair.) From our perspective, we had so little in common (five years separated oldest sister from middle; another five separated middle from youngest) and so many things to get ticked off about: why this one hogged the bathroom, why that one escaped chores or got away with keeping her nose buried in a book.

"Mom, say something to her," I'd wail at my mother when I was feeling particularly aggrieved. "Something," my mother would say sarcastically, resigned to it all. The family propaganda - instilled fruitlessly by our father - was that nothing in the world was more important than family, but you wouldn't have known it from this gang.

Now that I've been a parent for 15 years, I've realized that eye-rolling, door-slamming, and verbal warfare are business as usual with teenage siblings. A lot of families, though, have a chance to set things straight; my sisters and I never really did. With such a large age gap among us, the oldest was out of the house before the youngest was out of elementary school, before we even had a crack at a family vacation. And then the years flew by, like the pages of those calendars in old newsreels. As adults, we've lived in different countries, even on different continents, and never really gotten to know one another.

Of course, our cold war thawed, with the help of visits, phone calls, and frequent e-mails. Still, we'd never vacationed together, until a few months ago, when our widowed mother announced it was time. True, her daughters are middle-aged by now, but she theorized it was better late than never. She was taking us all on a cruise.

If ever there was a bizarre time warp, this had to be it. We were back in the original sibling unit, sharing two bedrooms and a bathroom - and clothes and nail polish - just as in the late '50s. And here is what I learned about the nature of families and their enduring qualities:

First, it's never too late to bond. We had a glorious vacation together and would happily do it again. We even discovered that somewhere in the genetic makeup of long-separated siblings are strange, fundamental similarities. We all collect blue glass. We all carve vegetables into the shape of animals. We all cheat on our diets by reaching for bread.

Being on a cruise ship for a week, we reverted to our sibling habits, ignoring our mother at every opportunity. "Wear a hat!" she'd yell when we were out in the sun. "Put the book down!" she'd lecture when it was time to eat dinner.

We also learned that despite our chronological ages and ostensible maturity, some things never change, and probably never will. This became apparent the day daughter number two cajoled me into posing for a picture at a tropical port of call, with an oversized parrot on my arm.

The parrot sat there for a minute, then took a chunk out of my arm. And as I watched my skin swell and turn blue, it came out of nowhere, from the deep recesses of my memory bank: the urge to rat on her. I couldn't help it.

"Mom!" I whined, "It's her fault."

"Life is tough," our mother said, quite predictably.