Tag: Twin Sisters

Avoiding debt

A brown parcel arrived recently in the post. My sister’s address on the back. My heart thumped as I opened my small parcel. What could she send me? We scarcely speak these days, and our only real exchange happened a few weeks ago when we were in Healesville on a family reunion. 

We walked together for the family dinner as she did not want to use her car. A hire car, she was reluctant to leave in the unfamiliar streets of Healesville. 

When she came out of her hotel room in readiness for our jaunt into town I saw she was carrying a large black hold all, a type of mini suitcase.

‘That’s too big to carry,’ I said and she lamented forgetting to bring a smaller bag other than her overnight travel case in which to carry her wallet, phone and necessities. 

I dived back into my room and offered her the use of a bag I’d picked up from St Vinnies, the Opp shop near where I live. The type of bag you find in supermarkets everywhere, though they tend to be green at Safeway or Coles. This one was pink. Intended for multiple uses to spare the planet. A more sensible option than her black overnighter, I suggested. And she agreed.

It was slow going this twenty-minute walk. Largely because my sister struggles with ankles that swell on too much exertion. But she was determined to get there. 

On our way to the restaurant we shared more words than we have spoken together over the past forty years. She told me about her ex-husband with whom she continues to be friends. About his daughter, who is currently in Israel, the daughter of a Jewish mother. 

She told me this story in the context of her wish to travel abroad, to Poland, she said because she had always been interested in this country following the Second World War.

I well remember her childhood fixation on tales of female resistance fighters and women who tricked the Nazis during this time. She laughed lightly when I talked about my dislike of travel urging me to reconsider.

Later after the dinner when my family were seated in another sister’s hotel room trying to converse with one another, a year since our last shared time. We made the mistake of entering the tough territory of politics and at one point, with everyone overheated, I stood and used my hand and voice gesturing to lower the temperature.

At which stage my sister of the black overnighter and pink St Vinnies bag stood from her position at the side of the bed and thrust her hands towards my out-turned hands. 

‘So, what do you want to talk about? The earth? Climate change?’

Where the conversation went after this I can’t remember. It seemed to settle. My husband left the gathering for bed, fed up with what he called the brawling, and I said nothing more to this sister.

Even in the morning when we shared breakfast as a group, apart from a peremptory hug of farewell, we did not speak.

Several days later this parcel arrives. $3.40 in postage, more than the value of the bag, but at least I have my sister’s address now and so it leaves me with the thought to write her a letter.

A response to her gesture, which puzzles me for its weirdness.

Many years ago, when she was still married to the man who now has a Jewish wife with a daughter in Israel, we were closer. And this husband one day sent a parcel to my husband which contained frayed underpants full of holes. It was intended as a joke though I never quite understood. Something to do with the hardship of joining a family like ours.

 I’m as mystified by my sister sending her parcel to me now as I am by my ex in-law sending his holey underpants.

Why is it so hard to talk to family with whom we were once close, as close any soul can get? Two sisters, twenty one months apart, and now as far apart as the two sisters in the book called Twin Sisters, a book about two women who were separated at 18 months when their parents died.

The one raised by family in Germany the other in the Netherlands. These two women endure very different lives during that Second World War. Which speaks to the point, our circumstances define us almost more so than our genetic make-up. 

When they reached their seventies, the two women came upon one another by chance while spending time in a health spa in Switzerland. They can scarcely recognise each other and there is tension between them until each takes it in turn to tell her story to the other.

The one raised in Germany on impoverished farms, abused repeatedly by her adoptive father and layer by her partner, the other raised in the Netherlands.

There is one point when the Dutch step-father behaves badly, too, but not in the form of abusing his child. Instead, he hoards food in his study, when people must restrict the amount anyone can eat.

One day this Dutch sister catches him tucking into pork sausage or some such while the rest of the family are starving.

It’s left to the reader to decide who has the worst experience of the two sisters. Not that it’s fair to compare. 

Clearly, the woman who stayed in Germany fared the worst and her body tells us as much. She is frail and unwell and towards the end of the book she dies leaving the sister who only just then has reconnected to grieve alone.

It’s a sad and sobering story. One that stays with me whenever I think of my sister and me, even though we were raised together in the same family. She trailed behind me at school, only a year behind, despite our nearly two years difference. Perhaps this made it harder for her. She was young to begin school. I was age appropriate.

In my memory, she was more beautiful than me, taking after our mother with her dark wavy hair. While I look like our father, his long Germanic face, his sandy coloured hair, his horse like jaw. 

I spent my childhood feeling ugly alongside this younger sister. I cannot say how she felt alongside me, but we both carry wounds distinct from one another. Her parcel a communication to me, at least this is how I read it, that she wants nothing from me. She will not be in debt to me, even to the tune of a $1.99 Vinnies tote bag.  

That fine line between optimism and denial.

Before he died, the story goes, my father told my mother he need not leave her much. She would find herself someone else to care for her soon enough. And so she did. My mother remarried within little more than a year after my father’s death.

My mother’s second husband also failed to leave her much when he died some sixteen years later, even so the staff at the retirement village where she has lived these past ten years see my mother as one of their favourites and they look after her well.

When I asked my mother how she thought she might get on with her new carer, a woman arranged through community health and part of my mother’s ‘care package’, she said she’d be fine.

‘I like people,’ my mother said. ‘I don’t have trouble with anyone.’
‘But not Auntie Nettie,’ I said. I did not give my mother time to protest. ‘Why don’t you like Auntie Nettie?’ I asked. ‘What went wrong?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We had an argument once, about the war.’

My mother then told me the story of how one day she and Nettie fell into a discussion about the hardships of World War Two, this from the vantage point of their new lives in Australia during the 1960s.

‘It was very hard in Indonesia under the Japanese,’ my aunt told my mother.
‘It was harder in Holland,’ my mother said. ‘We were freezing and hungry. In Indonesia at least you could stay warm. There is nothing worse than being cold and hungry,’ my mother said. My aunt disagreed.

This is one of those arguments that does not bear consideration – two women fighting over who had it worse, when clearly both had it bad.

It reminds me of Tessa de Loos’ book, Twin Sisters, the story of two women born in Cologne, Germany, before the Second World War but separated as toddlers after their had mother died.

One stayed in Germany and was raised by relatives – a cruel harsh family in a land impoverished by war and hardship; the other grew up in Holland in the care of a loving Dutch family, also related as I recall.

Both women suffered, especially during the war. The book consists of a series of flashbacks to the separated twins’ experiences of growing up into young adulthood.

Each woman tells the other her story after they meet by chance in a spa retreat in Switzerland. In the beginning of the book they are by now in their seventies. The twin raised in Holland seems to me to have had the least traumatic experience, though again such comparisons are not helpful or necessarily accurate.

Resilience is not measured out in equal doses.

As dreadful as my mother’s war experience was, is it fair to compare it to that of my aunt whose father had owned a rubber plantation in Indonesia before the Japanese invasion? My aunt was interned in a prisoner war camp. I heard once that she saw her brother killed by the Japanese. He was hacked to death.

While I was growing up my aunt worked as a nurse, an efficient and well organised woman. She had six children and kept her house in good order. She married my mother’s younger brother, a generous man who tended to his family well.

My mother, on the other hand, had nine children and could not keep up with the demands of housework, nor did she have the support of a generous and loving husband.

Both women competed in some strange unspoken way, but I felt the pull of my mother’s hatred towards my aunt throughout my childhood. An otherwise seemingly loving and generous woman, my mother’s enmity towards her sister-in-law stood out like an exposed blade ready to cut at any minute.

Her mother had always said she was a ‘very happy baby’, my mother told me later after we had made yet another visit to her GP. She was looking yet again at her family photo from the late 1920s, the one she has propped on a low table beside the window. She gazes at the image and all the memories it evokes. The past has become more attractive with distance it seems.

My mother has always had a tendency to look on the bright side, even when certain events demanded a more realistic perspective.

I wonder, is this how my mother attracts people to her, her optimism ,and is this also why she fell foul of my aunt, who tends towards a more realistic outlook and pessimism. My aunt has Alzheimer’s now, and is beyond my mother’s reach.

I am amazed at my mother’s determination to stay cheerful. The doctors have been playing a balancing game with her mediation, between her heart’s need for assistance and her kidneys’ needs for flushing.

Today her heart is winning but her kidneys are falling behind.

‘It’s like this,’ the GP told my mother when she asked him to explain what all the fuss was about.
‘As you get older your kidneys, like your heart, get tired and need to work harder. The blood tests tell us that your kidneys are working too hard.’ He leaned in closer to my mother’s good ear.

‘It’s like you’re travelling towards a cliff,’ he said. ‘While you’re travelling on solid ground you feel fine. You say, “My kidneys, there’s nothing wrong with my kidneys. What’s all the fuss about?”

Your kidney’s might seem fine, though you’ve noticed feeling dry. You’re still heading towards the cliff and we don’t know exactly where the cliff is. So we need to reduce your medication to give your kidneys a fighting chance.’

This explanation seemed to satisfy my mother . I figured she had heard the doctor. Earlier she had agreed to wear her hearing aid for this most recent visit. More often than not these days my mother does not bother. Perhaps not hearing bad news aids her optimism.

When we returned to my mother’s room, at her request I tried to explain the doctor’s concerns once more and again the explanation seemed to satisfy her, but beyond her difficulties with hearing, my mother is also becoming forgetful of the short term.

‘I’ll be back on Thursday,’ I said as I took up my handbag to leave.
‘When you can,’ she said, ‘when you can. Don’t stress too much.’ She smiled, her eyes pools of liquid blue, red rimmed around the edges.

‘I’m happy,’ my mother said. ‘I’m always happy. It’s the way I am. And I can’t understand how it is that other people are not.’

For all her forgetfulness, I suspect my mother’s parting comment was yet another dig at my unhappy aunt.