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?

I was born with my grandmother’s name. We both were. Knowing they were having twin girls, my parents decided the first baby to be born would be Barbara, and the second, Jenna. Alphabetical order. Neat and clean. Very my parents.

Looking back now, what probably saved her, and us, was that my mom is preternaturally calm. Even in moments of panic. The night before my wedding, just as we had done countless nights before, Barbara had slept next to me in my bed. I stretched and turned to nudge her as my mom burst into the room: “Girls…wake up! Today is the day! Out of bed! Time for breakfast,” she said. Then, without any drop in enthusiasm, she added, “There was a slight hiccup, but all is well. We have taken care of it!” “What hiccup?” I asked, waking up fully. “Oh, well, a little tornado came right through the ranch overnight. It knocked over the tent, but everything is completely fine.” Only my mother could deliver the news of a tornado as if she were telling us that she had run out of toast, so we’d have to have cereal for breakfast. Opening her eyes, Barbara laughed and asked: “Mom, are you on something to relax you?” And the truth is, she wasn’t. She is just remarkably even-tempered and able to manage everything. Strong and gentle at the same time.

“I promise. There are very, very few things worth worrying about.” And she was right. Now, I wonder if her advice was because she had already worried about heartbreaking things and knew what it was to feel overwhelming pain. She saw our anxieties for what they were: childlike.

Sometimes friendship is about opening your eyes to new places; sometimes it’s about making sure that you don’t see too much.

Throughout the recount and for years after, I became a turtle of sorts, a hard shell of self-protection over vulnerable love.

One time, as we were traveling down a major street in Washington, I was looking out the window and all of a sudden I spotted a high school friend, Blair. He was standing with the other protesters holding a sign against the war. I wasn’t surprised to see him there; although we had never talked politics in high school, I had always known his views. But suddenly, as I saw him, he saw my dad and me. Simultaneously, Blair lowered his sign and started smiling and waving as my dad and I smiled and waved back, mouthing “Hi, Blair.” It was exactly like running into an old friend, which is in fact what happened. It is a reminder that in any debate there are humans on all sides.

“You see, what happened to me was alcohol was becoming a love. It was beginning to crowd out my affections for the most important love if you’re a dad, and that’s loving your little girls. And so, fatherhood meant sobriety from 1986 on.” I sat on a formal stage inside the New York Hilton, crying in front of strangers, because I realized that this was not a choice my dad had made once; it was a choice he made again and again, day after day. He was talking in a way I had never heard him talk before and revealing himself to me in a totally different way. In that moment, it didn’t matter that we were in public. It was just me and my dad.

I think, too, of another walk, one Barbara and I took with him on a brilliantly sunny day in Maine when we were both twenty-three and out of college. The night before, we had celebrated the wedding of one of our cousins, where the guests, including us, grew raucous with hours of open bar and champagne. My dad called us the next morning and asked us to go on a walk, something that had become far more rare now that he was in the White House. Above the sound of the waves and the ocean wind, my dad talked to us about alcoholism. He talked about himself, saying that when he was drinking, he didn’t like the person he was becoming. He said that overdrinking ran in our family, and was something that Barbara and I needed to watch out for. I’m sure there are other dads who have spoken like this with their daughters, but I’m sure, too, that many have never had these conversations. I remember being a bit irritated listening that afternoon, nursing a headache and a case of fuzzy mouth. But now I see it as a brave and responsible conversation, one that he could have easily avoided, but didn’t. And I think some of the choices I’ve made in my twenties and thirties stem in part from what my dad said to us on that sunny day.

Waiting on my phone was a text from my dad: I hear the twitter world is buzzing because of something you said Here are some thoughts It is no big deal Your family loves you which is a lot more important than one slip I made a lot of slips and overall they did not matter The world is full of people who want to take someone down but there are many more people who think you are great So let it go. Be your charming natural self All will be well Love you dad

Reminder to myself: Always listen to my dad.

I think, truth be told, my dad was relieved to have me off his hands. He ended his talk with Henry saying, “We love Jenna, but you know she can be a pain in the ass.” By the way, Dad, if you are reading this, I don’t really appreciate it even all these years later.

So it is at age thirty-five that I am at last ready to write my own mythology of love. It is not based on legends of white dresses and rings and bouquets; it is rather the comfort of what is shared with another soul. It need not be any kind of romance; it is simply the bonds that we form, the way our lives interlace with one another, the unexpected ways we find to care. My first trip to Uganda, I visited a health clinic where a mother had brought her fragile, ill daughter, wearing a lavender dress and looking like an angel. I spent less than an hour in that clinic, but those thirty to forty minutes changed my life and my life’s direction. 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. 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.

A woman I would have run from ten years ago if I had seen her on the steps of the White House is one of my best friends. I cannot think of a better lesson of how life can take unexpected turns.

Every morning over coffee, I would write in my journal: “Today is the day!” But I kept putting it off, uncertain about how Ana would react; wondering if I could ever just be Jenna, her friend, again. When I finally did tell her who I was and who my family was, her face lit up and she laughed. I had worried for no reason. She didn’t care at all. Because she already knew me, and she knew I cared about her. Our friendship was what defined us, not my name. She saw all of me, all of my sides, not just one.

Many of my colleagues say that their biggest fear is leaving an interview without having asked the tough questions. My biggest fear is that I won’t represent the person I’m interviewing accurately, that I won’t show who they really are. I never want them to come across as one-dimensional. That’s true for me as well. Whether I am in front of the camera or away from it, I am the same person, living an unscripted life.

Perhaps to most people there is an expectation that policies and opinions will be passed down in political families like eye color and height, encoded in our shared DNA. Or that party loyalty is interwoven or even synonymous with family loyalty. While that may be true for some families, it isn’t true for ours. Our dinner table never resembled a Model UN conference or a game of Risk; we don’t analyze obscure congressional races. On the contrary, we are a freewheeling, not always polite, ask questions, and explain your point of view type of family. We are a bunch who can’t quite be pigeonholed, probably in the same vein that any famous actor’s family can’t be painted as dramatizing Shakespeare at every gathering. We adhere to the “time and place model,” which lots of times means apolitical conversations. My dad can, and has, sat down to a meal with a restorer of antique barns and spent the entire time asking him about the preservation process. We talk books, sports, movies, and health care in Rwanda, not to mention relationships and the more mundane details of what is going on in our lives.

In that way, our dinner table is a lot like tens of thousands of others: toggling between interesting and insular.

It was white on black, with a red Texas flag, and informed us, “Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot.” Well, that idiot was our dad. For a second, the words stung, but then we looked at each other and burst into unstoppable laughter. While it was awful to us, it was also funny—bravo to that joke writer. Now this line comes up regularly when we want to rib our former-leader-of-the-free-world father: “Well, somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot…”

To me, betrayal is the worst thing you can do to another person. Cross that with family and it’s incomprehensible. My parents have never felt betrayed by anything I have said or done. It wasn’t in any way an act of bravery—I was following the basic guidance my parents had given me: Raise your voice when something is important to you. I was being a good daughter, politics aside.

Dad is motivated by the concept that “to whom much is given, much is expected.” It was because of him that I was given a voice, even if I was using my voice to speak out on an issue upon which we differed in opinion. For him, it meant he had done his job as a father.

I’d like to think that may be my ultimate family DNA: Be true to your heart.

If you love someone, sharing different political views shouldn’t be seen as a personal betrayal. Rather, it’s a chance to hear and consider your loved one’s point of view, while still maintaining your own beliefs. Do not fear doing what you believe is the right thing regardless of who is listening in the wings (or even the West Wing, in my case).

On one visit when my dad put his feet up on her coffee table, she told him, “I don’t care if you are the president of the United States, take your feet off my coffee table.” And my dad did.

If one of us says something smart, her favorite reply is, “Well, that’s using your head for something other than a hat rack!”

Her love of animals is the stuff of family legend. She particularly loves her latest dog, Mini, who has bitten almost everyone in the family. So great is her loyalty to her four-legged companion that if someone tries to pet Mini and Mini bites, she will almost always defend Mini.

I never thought I would launch an organization; that was something other people did. In fact, it was my slightly bossy twin, Jenna, who first insisted I do so.

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.

And of course the most sincere appreciation to our parents and grandparents. You taught us what it means to love, how to love each other, and always allowed us to be ourselves.