Sisters First: Stories from Our Wild and Wonderful Life

by Jenna Bush Hager

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

My mom is good at remembering names, while my dad is better at remembering people’s nicknames, most of which he has given them. He has a nickname for almost everyone—and once christened, it’s impossible to escape whatever he has dubbed you.

When Gampy, my grandfather, was inaugurated, I thought every family had at least one grandfather who got an inauguration, that it was a special celebration thrown for grandfathers. One big party and America shows up because America loves grandfathers. I remembered all the talk of “our forefathers,” so I had just conflated the two.

it was the family moments, the light moments, and the joyous moments, on which we should make our lasting memories.

Our grandfather, like many men in West Texas, was a gambler. The boom-bust economy of oil and cattle, gushers and droughts, made cards, dice, horses, and football betting seem like ordinary risks.

scamper

I love the word "scamper."

The memory cabinet was a large Victorian bureau that had been Pa’s mother’s. Inside its doors was a well-organized archaeological dig into our family’s younger lives.

A kind man once told me that in Japan, broken pottery is pieced back together using gold as the glue, highlighting the cracks, making them beautiful. And maybe that could be my heart—hurt and healed, but filled with gold because I’d known Kyle.

Now we live in an era of twenty-four-hour news cycles and breaking news alerts, but I can’t remember ever having a political discussion with my high school friends twenty years ago. We would bring in our carefully clipped newspaper articles and discuss current events in class. I was often passionate about a particular event because, as a human, I wanted to make the world better. But our discussions were never heated or intense or partisan. When we left the class, it was over. We were focused on the minutiae of high school: school dramas and school lives.

We did understand, too, even at an early age, that a house is not automatically a home.

What made the space a home were the people, past and present.

In New York, it’s always a surprise to ride the subway on Ash Wednesday. For one day, hundreds of people walk around with an ash cross in the middle of their foreheads, and suddenly an intimate, profound belief of a complete stranger is shared.

When I had my first devastating heartbreak in my early thirties, I’d ride the subway, wondering if anyone could see that inside my chest, my heart was torn in two. And when my heart hurt so badly I couldn’t help but wonder how many other people riding the subway felt the same, how many others were wandering the city with broken hearts.

I look into the faces of the people I see: family, friends, colleagues, strangers, and I know that we are all, each of us, born to be someone’s love story.

Dad is motivated by the concept that “to whom much is given, much is expected.”

On birthdays in her family, rather than being showered with presents and treated as someone special, you were asked to make the case of why, in the previous year, you had lived the best year that you could. You did get a cake, but first you had to share what you had done for other people and how you had contributed. I was struck by the profound idea, even for little kids: the concept that you needed to make a case that you were living life in a way that was worth it, in a way that was giving to others. You are here for a reason, and you should be grateful for every year, and be ready to do the most with the next one.

You have each other, I thought to myself. You can walk through this wild and wonderful life together. You will fight, yes. And you will adapt to each other’s quirks, but you will do it together. You will make your sister feel like she is enough. And for me, your mama, well, that is enough. More than enough. That is everything.