Sisters First

by Jenna Bush Hager

  Jenna and I have one of our own. Our name for each other is “Sissy.” One name, two sisters, our shorthand whether we are separated by a room or by an ocean. A word to which we both instinctively answer and turn. Because, after everything, we are sisters first.

  Little Girl, Big Name

  BARBARA

  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. I arrived first so I was named Barbara Bush. This was before Barbara Bush was first lady of the United States. Before Barbara Bush (who we call “Ganny”) was truly famous. But even after she became famous, I didn’t realize it. I was in the first grade. What is famous when you’re six, after all? 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.

  I was so immersed in my particular self-generated lore that I started wondering when my friends’ grandfathers’ inaugurations would be. Would their parades also be bitterly cold and full of loud horns and marching bands and brightly colored uniforms? When Ganny came to visit Preston Hollow Elementary School to show off our new puppy Spot, daughter of her famous dog Millie, I was far more impressed to see the sixth graders who came out of their classrooms to line the hallways than I was by the concept of a first lady’s visit.

  My parents’ single-minded determination to de-emphasize that there was anything unduly special about being a Bush meant that I didn’t understand why my name might make me different. I already lived in a sea of Georges, where multiple generations would easily turn around the moment the word was uttered. My father had his father’s name, and my older cousin, George P. Bush, was also, obviously enough, a George. (In recent years across Africa, I have even met a cohort of young “George Bushes,” including George Bush Mudariki, kids who are alive due to the medications delivered by PEPFAR, the AIDS relief program my dad started, and who were named in his honor. There are many ways to be a namesake.) 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.

  But when you have the same name as the first lady of the United States, there are times when “the name talk” would have been helpful. As an eight-year-old, I would offer to order pizza for our family, relishing my mature and responsible position.

  “I’d like to order a pizza.”

  “Great, your name?”

  “Barbara Bush.”

  “This isn’t funny.”

  Aggressive click.

  What…? I was constantly hung up on, whether I was ordering pizza from Domino’s, school supplies from a catalog, Girl Scout cookies, or books from the shiny Scholastic flyers we brought home from school. No one believed that First Lady Barbara Bush wanted to order Miss Nelson Is Missing. Little girl, big name.

  After each such episode, I felt ashamed—ashamed of some behavior I didn’t understand. I was clearly in trouble, but I had no idea what I had done wrong. So I told no one. Instead, I would meekly go off to get someone else to place my order, further cementing the myth of my own shyness. It never occurred to me to simply give a different name.

  Then came high school. At Austin High, the first moment of the first day of school started with homeroom. I’d walk in, nervously wondering who I’d see. Inevitably, roll would be called, and, the “Bs” came quickly. “Barbara Bush?” Quietly: “Here.” Boys in the back would then snicker loudly, “Oh, snap! Barbara Bush!” Snap, indeed.

  The irony was that I didn’t really know the iconic Barbara Bush back then. Outside of the year we lived in DC when we were in kindergarten, whenever we saw Ganny, it was with a crowd of other relatives. I was one of ten or twenty, somewhere in the middle of the long line of cousins from five families. One summer, as a little girl, I even learned needlepoint so that Ganny and I might have something uniquely in common, something that we could do together. Neither Jenna nor I spent any real individual time with her until we turned sixteen; we were adults before we got to know the nuances of her personality, to see her as more than the white-haired woman in pearls who shooed us out to play and made us hang up our wet towels when we tramped back home.

  And, perhaps, as she grew older, she became more accessible and playful as well. Sixty-year-old Barbara Bush might not have worn two different-colored sneakers, but by age eighty, she loved to pair a pink shoe with a red one from her closetful of colorful Keds.

  Today, babies who were born when my grandfather became president are themselves close to turning thirty, but the passage of time has not necessarily made it any easier to be Barbara Bush. Not too long ago, I showed up to give a speech on global health, and many of the attendees expected my grandmother to walk out onstage, not her thirty-something-year-old granddaughter, Barbara Bush 2.0.

  Even now, when I show my ID at security to enter a building in New York City, I’m almost always met with a reaction. The guard will look at it, look up at me and smile, and 3, 2, 1…“I’ll bet that name’s caused you a lot of trouble.” You can say that fifty more times.

  And of course, there is the minefield of interfamily communication, like the time when my cousin Wendy sent an e-mail to me, cousin Barbara Bush, asking for advice about bikini waxing and electrolysis, starting with the classic line, “Yo, how are ya?” But when she typed the name into the box, Ganny’s address populated. Unknowingly, Wendy hit Send. Ganny didn’t bat an eye. She wrote back, advising Wendy to stay far away from harsh products like Nair, and closed the e-mail by saying she was looking forward to seeing her in Maine. Wendy was (and still is) mortified.

  For years, I dealt with the famous strings attached to my name per my formidable grandmother. It was when my father became president that it got tricky yet again. I coined some new last names for myself for specific instances. Dinner reservations were under Barbara McBabson. Or Barbara Catswith (because I love cats). Introductions to new people were met with ad hoc aliases to fend off the inevitable deluge of questions. I wasn’t always so eloquent in the moment…“I’m Barbara. Uh, Barbara Barbara.”

  According to current baby dictionaries, the name Barbara is going the way of the dinosaur, on a sharp decline toward extinction (except for Eastern Europe—go, Eastern Europe!). Barbaras under the age of forty are a rare breed, overshadowed by the Barbara powerhouses of older generations: Barbra Streisand, Barbara Walters, and, of course, Barbara Bush.

  When you’re one of the last remaining Barbaras, you have a role to play, bearing the name proudly and unabashedly—and I hold my head up slightly higher because “we” are at the end of the line. Except that in many ways, I’m not much like those famous Barbaras. In temperament, I’m far more like Jenna Welch, my other grandmother, the gentler, self-taught naturalist of Midland, Texas, than I am like my fiercely outspoken Ganny. It is Jenna Bush Hager who most closely resembles the original Barbara Pierce Bush.

  But I do love my name. As a girl, I was told it meant “beautiful stranger.” I’ll take it. In that regard, my parents made a good choice: I do appreciate the beauty in others, and every close friend of mine, from all over the world, began as a stranger, just as I began as a stranger to them—even if at the beginning, they recognized my name.

  Accidentally Famous

  JENNA

  Our lives were not dysfunctional, but they were at times strange. We were photographed from the moment we were born, not cute family snapshots, but photos taken by real photographers with camera bags and telephoto lenses. Less than an hour after we were born by Cesarean section, my mother, swollen with edema from her failing kidneys and preeclampsia, was being wheeled back from the operating room and a photographer jumped out from behind a wall in the Baylor Hospital maternity ward. He started taking pictures of her
exhausted, bloated face, and she was so stunned that she tried to smile. Fortunately, it was the photo of my smiling father, balancing two swaddled bundles in his arms, that flashed across the country on the wire services with a headline about Vice President Bush’s new twin grandbabies. We were “accidentally famous” from the moment we were born.

  Photo Courtesy of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum

  Our first baby photo, which went out on the wire services, with the caption, “The Vice-President’s newest twin granddaughters.”

  When our dad’s parents came to visit us in Midland, Texas, it was not for Father’s Day or Thanksgiving, but for public events like campaign rallies. In 1984, when we were not yet three, we were given “grown-up” seats on a stage and decked out in matching blue polka-dot dresses with white collars and white pinafores. Barbara sat in her seat, but I ended up down on the stage floor, scooting around under my grandmother’s watchful eye. At one point, I lifted up my dress right as my grandfather was speaking, and the cameras went wild. I don’t remember any of it, but I know it happened—the afternoon superimposed into my childhood memory album—because photographers captured it all.

  We wore our fancy clothes to events like the White House Easter Egg Roll, where we stood with our grandparents and a massive rabbit in a gingham dress on the perfectly clipped green White House South Lawn. When we had playtime with our cousins, it was captured by TV cameras for live television as we ran around on a brightly lit stage after a balloon drop at a Republican National Convention.

  But there were also times when being famous, even accidentally, hurt. I first heard the word “wimp” on the playground during recess when I was a kindergartner at an elementary school in Washington, DC. I knew from the sound of it that I did not want to be a wimp at any cost. When a sixth grader said to me, “I bet you can’t do an apple flip off the monkey bars,” I climbed right to the top. I didn’t know what an apple flip was; the only gymnastics move I could do was a somersault, on the ground. But I wanted to be the courageous girl who could stand on the top of the monkey bars and dive off, so I did. I don’t recall anything about my brief moments of flight, only that I crashed to the hard ground beneath and broke my jaw. Barbara says that all she remembers was seeing my teal-and-white-striped T-shirt with a bloody handprint on the front.

  I didn’t realize that the word “wimp” existed beyond the school playground until I stood in the supermarket checkout line with my mother in Washington, DC. I saw a Newsweek magazine with Gampy on the front cover and the word “wimp” next to his face. I was confused. My grandfather, who babysat us, who kept in continual touch with his children and grandchildren, first through letters and later via e-mail, who had fought in World War II, was anything but a wimp. Staring at that cover, I felt embarrassed. I wanted to turn over the magazine, to look away. Because on some level I realized that if my mom and I could see it in the supermarket checkout line, so could everyone else. I asked my mom why Gampy’s photo was next to the word “wimp,” and she gave me whatever reassuring answer she could. The next time I saw Gampy, I was ashamed to associate him with the magazine. Even if the public figures in my family—Gampy and Ganny, and later my dad and my mom—were going to appear on the pages of magazines, as an elementary schooler it never occurred to me that I would be anything but anonymous. Sometimes I managed to remain out of the public spotlight in spite of myself.

  When I was seven and staying at my grandparents’ house in Maine, my older cousins convinced me that maxi-pads were used for underarm sweat. After I stuck them to my armpits, those same cousins dared me to walk downstairs to say hi to all the grown-ups gathered in the living room. But it was not just the usual family and close friends. Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader of China, was visiting Gampy, along with his aides and an unusually large contingent of international photographers, ready to snap away. Luckily for me, as I made my grand entrance, the cameramen must have realized there are some photos that are just too awful to take.

  By the time my dad was in the White House, my luck with anonymity was gone. In retrospect, where it hurt the most was in the classroom, my classroom. At the start of 2005, after my dad won reelection, I began working as a teacher at the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Charter School in Washington, DC. At school, I was “Miss Jenna,” no last name. I began my day in the multipurpose room where teachers graded papers and the kids ate breakfast, rewarmed pancakes or cereal. The staff put out newspapers around the room to encourage the kids to read.

  I had a student, Yvonne, who was smart and observant. On a Monday morning after the inauguration, she came up to me with one of those newspapers and pointed to a photo of Henry Hager, now my husband, and me dancing at one of the balls. The angle of the photo made it look like an over-the-top, sexy dance, and although I was holding a Diet Coke in my hand, in the photo it looked like it was an alcoholic beverage. Yvonne said, “What are you doing in this picture?” as if she were asking me for confirmation.

  Up until a minute before, I had been standing in a room that smelled vaguely of syrup, thinking about my lesson plan and ways to get to know the kids and for them to get to know me. Then my cover was blown.

  I understood Yvonne’s curiosity, though. When I was her age, I had a deep fascination with the printed page, particularly with magazines, and for years, I, too, believed the stories told by the glossy pictures and the beguiling words. It was only as a young adult that I came to really understand what it can be like for those standing on the other side.

  Before there was the term “fake news,” there was, well, fake news—snippets of outrageous stories that made the press or ended up on the Internet. I read stories in the tabloids that I was dating men I had never met; some people sold the made-up stories for money. My Wikipedia page was changed every month to report that I was pregnant when I wasn’t—my mom blamed my love of bohemian tops. I saw press reports that Barbara and I had run naked through a hotel in Mendoza, Argentina, when we have never set foot in the city. When I flashed the symbol of “hook ’em horns” for University of Texas during my dad’s inauguration, a Danish paper showed the photo and reported that I was a devil worshipper. I’ve learned to never google myself.

  At this point of my life, though, I have become fair game for all kinds of tabloid fodder. Indeed, you could argue that everything that happens to me in print, online, and on film is entirely my doing, because I’m the one who chose a job in television.

  Home Port

  BARBARA

  Growing up, we were at times a nomadic family, packing up boxes and pulling up stakes every few years. We left Midland, Texas, in 1987 for eighteen months in Washington, DC; then to Dallas; then off to Austin; then back to Washington. The longest we lived in one city was in a public building, the grand, white-porticoed Texas governor’s mansion, our family tucked away in an upstairs “apartment” surrounded by “official rooms.” Many afternoons, we were reschooled on the basics of Texas history, eavesdropping as tour guides and tourists wandered the floor below.

  Though I’m proudly Texan (that’s how we do, y’all), I haven’t lived there in years. My apartment in New York is purposely spare, with few possessions. As a professional wanderer, I’ve never wanted to accumulate many things. I take great pride in being a minimalist—never checking luggage, no matter how long the trip. The only constant place in my life for thirty-five years has been the tip of a point, Walker’s Point, in southeastern Maine.

  Every summer, my sister and I would count down the days until we’d head to Maine. Our huge family—thirteen cousins in the early 1990s plus our aunts and uncles—would decamp to Kennebunkport for weeks at a time. The Point was always centered around our grandparents, especially our gentle grandfather. He’d use the sea and family to relax away from the politics in Washington, DC. In an era before e-mail or cell phones, we had almost no contact with our cousins during the school year, but that only made the anticipation of seeing them again the next summer all the more thrilling. What would their lives be like n
ow? Their interests? Would George P. still be into The Karate Kid? Would Wendy and Noelle, who were five years older than us, still be slightly out of reach?

  Our days were spent entirely outside, chasing our cousins in the yard; playing hide-and-seek in the fragrant, prickly raspberry bushes; or down by the water, playing pirate on the jagged ocean rocks, jumping off the dock into the bitterly cold Maine bay, competing for who could stay in longest. We’d linger well past sunset, whiling our days away until our parents called us in for dinner or bed—each of us reluctantly emerging from Ganny’s garden, or the rocky beach, a perfectly tired crew of freckled, pink-skin-splotched, grass-stained cousins. Lunches were picnics, turkey sandwiches eaten on beach towels, the bread and meat crunchy with salt and sand.

  At night, we’d sit at the “kids’ table.” My uncle Jeb’s oldest son, the mature and well-behaved George P., was the only cousin allowed to join the “grown-up table,” sitting among the group that included the prime minister of Canada or other foreign dignitaries discussing foreign affairs; or Hollywood producers, who in later years we’d find interesting, but at the time bore no relevance to our next day’s adventure.