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?

Both loved to use their imaginations, creating a cat family and a language of meowing that we found adorable and their grandparents found hard to understand.

They can finish each other’s sentences and each other’s dinners. They are teaching Jenna’s daughters, Mila and Poppy, the ways of sisterhood, how anything is possible if you do it together.

how could I worry about a presidential election campaign when I was worried that Barbara would wear flip-flops to Austin High School’s homecoming celebration where I knew she would be crowned homecoming queen? She wore them anyway. Together,

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.

For my part, I was simply holding up the female line, which was why I had my Ganny’s exact same name: Barbara Pierce Bush.

He didn’t want to tell us the history of what he had seen as an American soldier helping to liberate Nordhausen, a Nazi death camp, at the end of World War II. The man who smiled and found “Happy Days” in small calamities did not want to talk to us about those days or that time. We hadn’t even known that he fought in the war. He left the details of the explanation to Grammee. He never hid his photos from us; they were there each time we looked. It was as if he had taken in the images of those suffering people and given them shelter in a solid wood cabinet deep inside the safe world of Midland.

curb. Just as he had shown me such patience on our now long-ago car ride, it was our turn to be patient.

At lunchtime, we sat on our stools as Grammee cooked and Pa drifted in and out of reality. Suddenly, he stared at us and said, “Who are you?” And before we could react, he looked over at Barbara, and said, “Oh yes, you’ve always been the prettier one.”

Tomorrow, my Jenna will stand at a beautiful altar made of the same Texas limestone that is the foundation of our home, and I will feel once more what I felt that night, many years ago: This is the life.

my father took over math tutoring. The most obvious solution was for my dad to sit with me at the kitchen table and struggle through my homework. These evenings were not pretty; each repeated a similar pattern. My dad would patiently walk me through the steps of the math problems. But I was a resistant student, and eventually he would lose his temper. I responded by breaking into frustrated sobs, slamming my book down, and leaving the table.

My dad had been un-engaged for more than a decade before she met him. And she had never met his one-time fiancée.

Today, all I have of the White House are my memories, including my first kiss with Henry, which was up on the third-floor balcony overlooking the South Lawn, the same place where President Dwight Eisenhower liked to make steaks on a tiny grill.

My agents even comforted a number of my friends’ broken hearts—who better to ask for male relationship advice than the two guys sitting in the front seat of the car with you?

When I was charged with an MIP (minor in possession), CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all noted that, according to the police, Bush and the unidentified friend “were not arrested.” (Today, my “unidentified friend” would probably be a meme on Twitter and Instagram.) The last line of every story was invariably: “Her twin sister, Barbara, attends Yale University.”

Every parent’s desire is to raise a soul who is a contributing, decent, compassionate person.

“What’s her name.” And I said, “Jenna.” Whereupon a member of the King’s court said, “That’s interesting. ‘Jenna’ in Saudi colloquialism means ‘bounties after the rain on the desert.’” I can’t think of a more fitting description. After the rains there is freshness, an energy. There is unparalleled beauty. And the greatest sight is (or there is great excitement) when the birds sing. I love you, darling.

Putin’s mother’s limp body was added to the cart. Walking home, Putin’s father saw his wife, and saw her take a shallow breath. He pleaded to keep her, to which the medic replied, “That’s just more work—we’ll have to come back for her dead body soon.” But Putin’s father prevailed. He carried his wife back to their frigid home. She survived and after the war gave birth to a second baby boy, Vladimir Putin. “And so,” said the Russian prime minister, “I have no siblings.”

There was an older high school boyfriend whom I adored. We would talk late into the night, on my own phone line. It was a secret we shared. He asked me to the prom, and I went on a special trip to Dallas with my mom to search for the perfect dress. I finally settled on a long black sequined gown that I hung expectantly in my closet. I had circled the date on my calendar. Then my boyfriend and I had a rocky week, and he disinvited me. He flew in a beautiful girl, who had already graduated from Austin High, to be his date. I stayed home. Eventually, my dad convinced me to put on the dress and play a CD, and we danced around the governor’s mansion living room, our own makeshift prom.

When I was twenty-three, I met Henry Hager. He is six foot four, so there was almost no way not to notice him when he walked into an office at my dad’s campaign headquarters in Washington, DC. I’m fortunate that he also noticed me. We survived our first hilarious dates. Pretty fast, I was smitten with him, and I hoped he was smitten with me too. I invited him to a White House Christmas party. At one point when we were dancing, most likely caught up in the festive spirit, he whispered, “I love you.” He blushed; instead of playing it cool, he had inadvertently let the words slip. But I took those three words and ran with them. I said, “I know! Let’s get married!” At which point, Henry turned bright red. We had been dating for three months.

She is so cute

For years, Barbara and I heard stories of how our dad went to Maine to visit his parents about a month after he met our mom, and as soon as he arrived, he was already on the phone, trying desperately to reach her. When he heard that she wasn’t home, he left Kennebunkport and got on a plane back to Texas because he couldn’t stand to be away from her and didn’t want her to fall in love with someone else. He proposed barely six weeks later and they were married in three months. I had heard the stories for so many years that I basically assumed I would follow the same romantic path, never mind that my parents were turning thirty-one during their romance and I was twenty-three.

“Go, and when you come back, I’ll be right here.” It had been dramatically shortened to: “Don’t go. Stay here.”

Henry said, “I’m going to tell your dad I want to marry Jenna, but I wanted to make sure it was all right with you.” This is why I adore Henry. He knows me well enough to realize that my heart is intertwined with Barbara’s. He wanted her blessing first.

the point is that George H. W. Bush asked her to dance, and Liver Lips was soon forgotten. Barbara Pierce was sixteen. They were married in 1945 when she was nineteen and he was twenty, while Gampy was back briefly on leave from flying planes in the Pacific theater in World War II.

I have heard every variation of the question: “Why aren’t you married?” My answer is always the same: “If I wanted to be married, I would be.” I’ve had wonderful partners, but there was always too much work to do, too much of the world to be seen.

He didn’t make promises of things getting better or the relationship ultimately working out, but he just shared that while my heart hurt now, it would not always feel that way. Every morning I would wake to a text from him, just saying hi, his usual “love you, baby,” and in a small way, affirming that heartbreak hurts and that is okay.

That mother’s choice to love her daughter, to make her beautiful, to hope that her life might be spared by drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, led me to my love of working around the globe to improve health care. In my work, I have been able to surround myself with caring humans, those who actively choose love for one another over division and fear. Today, they are the ones rewriting the rules and the myths of love.

Basically—you are the best, most beautiful, courageous, silly, funny, sunny fabulous sister in the whole globe.

My own mom had wanted a houseful of children, but it was not to be. She and my dad struggled to get pregnant. They had put their names in with an adoption agency and were finally approved as candidates on the day that my mom found out she was expecting Barbara and me.

That’s when she found the baby, growing inside my fallopian tube. It was, she informed me, an ectopic pregnancy. I didn’t know what the words meant. She explained that the baby was growing not in my uterus, but in the fallopian tube, which delivers the egg. And because it was so far along, I had to go straight into emergency surgery. The tube could rupture at any moment, causing life-threatening internal bleeding.

Henry arrived in the delivery room, and an hour later our darling daughter Margaret Laura (who we would come to call Mila), named after both of our mothers just as Barbara and I were, was born.

The way my life has turned out is in some ways better than any adventure I could have imagined after reading that magazine years ago.

The world has often compared Barbara and me, but our parents never did. I realize now how easy it would have been to quip: Jenna, your sister, never acts that way! Your sister doesn’t impulsively kick a soccer ball into our front window! Or why don’t you make As like your sister? And because of that, the bond we shared from before birth was solidified. I was never jealous of Barbara (although I should have been envious of her near-perfect SAT score!) and she wasn’t jealous of me.

When people stop me and inquire about my more elusive sister, they typically ask, “Is she married?” I understand their curiosity, but internally I beg them to ask about what she’s doing. I want to tell them about the work she does, about the nonprofit she started all by herself, about all that she’s accomplished. And recently I did just that. A woman at an event asked in a worried tone: “Why isn’t your sister married?” I took a deep breath and responded, “She is married. To her work, Global Health Corps. You can google it. Oh, and she has a nice boyfriend too.”

But that is what sisters do—they want what is best for each other. They always protect each other.

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.

When you write a book about your life, it can lead to some awkward conversations with your family members. The great thing about our family is we are very transparent with one another and there are few secrets among our enormous brood. But when my Ganny asked me if she could read our book on a glistening Maine day last summer, I cringed.

I am sorry Barbara had to suffer over my name. I cannot imagine what a pain it has been. She is generous. Again, I love you both, Ganny

And when she shall die Take her and cut her out in little stars And she will make the face of heaven so fine That all the world will be in love with night And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Even in her last week, after news broke that she was seeking treatment at home in Houston in the comfort of her own bed, with her family and dogs surrounding her rather than machines, I did not expect her to go.

Every day, I sat next to my Gampy in the chair my Ganny had occupied for as long as I remember. He was not sitting next to the Barbara Bush who had been his North Star for seventy-four years, but a Barbara Bush nonetheless.

“Barbara and Jenna were the answer to our prayers.”

Sisters First isn’t a typical memoir, but rather a love story we wrote to each other.