Sisters First

by Jenna Bush Hager

  Finally, around 3 p.m., he walked over to my dad’s cabin, rehearsing the speech he had prepared. He and my dad sat outside on the deck, the mountains in the distance. Henry is a steady, slow talker, and he had his opening statement and his supporting points all laid out. He nervously began, “Sir, I want to marry your daughter. I love her and these are the reasons that I know I could take care of her—” My impatient dad interrupted right away: “Nope, I don’t need the reasons. Let’s get Laura out here.” He started yelling, “Laura, Henry’s proposing!”

  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 poor Henry never got to list all his well-thought-out reasons, because my dad didn’t need them. He knew my solid, kind, rational Henry was the perfect person for me.

  After “proposing” to Barbara and my dad, Henry didn’t ask me that weekend at Camp David. He didn’t propose to me for a month. Everyone in my family knew what was coming except me. We had planned a road trip in Maine from my grandparents’ house up to Acadia National Park, and we were going to be camping out for a week. Our final destination was Cadillac Mountain, the highest point along the North Atlantic seaboard and one of the first places in the US to see the sun each morning. Henry told me he wanted us to be on the top of Cadillac Mountain for the sunrise.

  After a few nights of camping and rigorous hiking, I was exhausted and easily irritated (a pain in the ass, perhaps?). And now Henry wanted us to wake up at 4 a.m. I texted Barbara to complain about the early wake-up. I complained so much that Barbara told my mom, “I’m not sure if he’s going to end up asking Jenna.”

  But I got up at 4 a.m., and Henry and I hiked. We reached the top of the mountain as the sun rose, and Henry proposed to me at sunrise, as the first rays appeared on the horizon.

  It was the best yes of my life. In fact, I had chosen Henry Hager years before in a cubicle, in a temporary office. I was so sure of our love, I had tried to propose to him at a Christmas party years before. So as we watched the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean, an ocean I had swum in every summer of my life, I knew I had a new definition of home: Henry.

  And if the witnesses this time heard everything we said, they never said a word. All that my Secret Service detail said afterward was “Congratulations. We are very happy for you.” Although I do think they were probably glad that we got married on the flat ground at my parents’ ranch in May, not after another summer hike up a mountain.

  Dearest dazzlingest Beast and newly born “Henry Beast,”

  Happy, happy, happiest wedding! I would like to properly welcome Henry to his “Beasthood.” How exciting to have a new bro and a married sis! Guess what this means…? A lifetime of more snuggling with arguments over who’s the ham and who’s the cheese…a lifetime of fun exploring and trips…A lifetime of Henry’s belly talking…and a lifetime of Love and Fun! Beast—you have been a wonderful, quirky, loving, and brilliant partner; and Beast, you have filled my life with millions of great memories (including those from when we were roasting in the womb). I know if ever in trouble, our twin powers can unite! And I can’t wait to have Henry as a new addition. Henry—I can assure you that the Beast will make your life more joyful and love-filled than you know! I can’t wait for all the adventures and fun you two will have! I love you cats more than tongue can tell!

  Love,

  Barbara

  The Mythology of Love

  BARBARA

  Growing up, we were steeped in a mythology of love. Our parents’ love story was the first: They grew up in Midland, played in the same park; attended, briefly, the same junior high; but never met. They lived in the same apartment complex in Houston, but never met. Our mom’s best friend married our dad’s best friend, yet still they didn’t meet (my dad had to miss the wedding). At age thirty, they were finally introduced at a barbecue in Jan and Joey O’Neill’s backyard. Their first official date was miniature golf. Three months later they were married, Midland’s “old maid” and Midland’s “most eligible young bachelor,” although they were both thirty-one. It was a lightning-strike romance. We heard the story often as kids, until we could tell it as if it were our own. Cinderella and Snow White with their Prince Charmings were one thing; our parents were a real-life fairy tale, living fated parallel lives set amid the wind-whipped mesquite and tumbleweeds of West Texas.

  Our family mythologies stretched even further back. Harold Welch and Jenna Hawkins were set up on a blind date in El Paso, Texas, where they paid six cents to walk across the footbridge to go dancing at the Tivoli nightclub in Juarez, Mexico. The next day, the local paper reported: “Last night, Jenna Hawkins was seen dancing with a handsome stranger.” They were married in the chapel at Fort Bliss right before Pa left for war. Ganny and Gampy’s was also a wartime wedding. But what I didn’t know until I was grown was that they also were each other’s first kiss. On a visit to Maine, over dinner surrounded by aunts, uncles, and cousins, I asked my grandfather if he remembered meeting Ganny for the first time. Of course he did. He was at a holiday dance, looked across the room, and saw a girl wearing a striped skirt. She was absolutely the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, so he asked a friend who she was. “Oh,” came the answer, “that’s Barbara Pierce.” As Gampy tells it, Barbara had gone to the dance with some guy nicknamed “Liver Lips.” To this day none of us know Liver Lips’s real name, because 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.

  My grandmother becomes softer and gentler around her husband of more than seven decades. In the last few years, she has willed him back from the brink of death in the intensive care unit several times. His obituary had been written, but Ganny wouldn’t let him die. She even chuckled when she heard that Gampy’s dear friend Jim Baker smuggled in a thermos of dry martinis and a pack of pork rinds. In her eyes, George H. W. Bush can do no wrong. And she can do no wrong in his. At ninety-two and ninety-three, they sleep holding hands.

  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.

  Like many women, when I was younger, I assumed I would get married. In high school, on the long bus rides across stretches of flat Texas highway to play in soccer games, my friends and I would huddle together, knee-to-knee in our seats, our shin guards and cleats clacking, as we listened to a Sony discman play Dire Straits’s “Romeo and Juliet” on repeat, laughing as we asked out loud, “I wonder what our husbands are doing right now.”

  With my own high school loves, I’d reread every text I received on my tiny brick-shaped Nokia phone. There were very few texts because it was brand-new technology in 1998, a time when the fact that we had caller ID on our landline was cutting-edge. I’d analyze each word, wondering if a question about homework was somehow indicative of a deeper bond, not yet recognizing that I would one day move beyond the ups and downs of teenage infatuation.

  Or perhaps it took my own growing up to understand that love looks many ways and takes many forms.

  Fairy tales are all about the beginnings, with five words tacked on: “They lived happily ever after.” There is nothing about the middle, where in the case of Ganny and Gampy, your beloved daughter dies; and nothing about the ending, about the one who is left behind to carry on. The last Christmas Grammee was strong enough to travel, she joined us at my parents’ Crawford ranch, staying in Jenna’s room, next to mine. At night I slept with my door open, listening in case Grammee needed anything. In the dark, I woke to her quietly and frantically calling my grandfather’s
name—“Harold, Harold.” I found her standing next to the bed, her unsteady feet holding up her tiny, silk-pajamaed birdlike frame. She gazed at me uncomprehendingly, and asked, “Where’s Harold?” I didn’t have the heart to tell her he was dead, instead hoping that for just a second, she could believe he was only down the hall, returning soon. So that’s what I said. As I tucked her back into bed, she said, “My feet are cold. When I sleep, I press my feet against Harold so he can keep them warm.” By then, Pa had been gone for fifteen years, and yet in the dark, cold night she was still just a touch away from his presence, from snuggling her feet against the warmth of his legs.

  Or perhaps it is that there are so many ways to love.

  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.

  My dad was the first person I called after that breakup. I don’t know why—I never shared much about my relationships with him. I’m private like my mother. But through it all, struggling to hold the belief that someone could be wonderful, while also understanding you shouldn’t build the rest of your life with them, I relied on my dad. And daily, he would call or text. Just to check in, just to share the burden with me. 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.

  I picked up the pieces, but he never stopped texting every morning. Every night, I read a meditation—a short modern-day interpretation of a Christian Bible verse, meant as a form of silent prayer—before I doze off. And every morning he rereads the same meditation from the same book, texting me the verse, which he has illustrated by emojis. I text back my own emoji picture. It is short. And it is daily, 5:30 a.m. Texas time, 6:30 a.m. New York time, waiting there for me when I open my eyes. It is so simple, and yet it is everything.

  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.

  E-mail from Jenna to Barbara

  Sister cat! Meow!

  Happy Valentine’s Day (early)—remember the early bird gets the worm. But it is you—the sister cat—who gets the prestigious first sister prize of the Americas! Congrats!

  You received (and were nominated) for this award that will keep your peers’ eyes filled with an awe-inducing jealous stare because you have succeeded in completing all 20,003 of the requirements! Yippee!

  Basically—you are the best, most beautiful, courageous, silly, funny, sunny fabulous sister in the whole globe. Thanks for inviting me and my stinky friends to Yale. You truly deserve this extremely important award! Wear this with pride! I heart you, sister.

  In Front of the Camera

  JENNA

  I used to run from the press, literally sprint in the opposite direction. When I lived in DC, on beautiful days I often drove from the elementary school where I taught to my parents’ house so I could run along the National Mall. It was my favorite way to unwind, except for one perilous passing: through the White House gates. News correspondents were often milling about on the grounds, waiting to do television stand-ups along the North Lawn. To me, it sometimes felt as if I were an animal in a safari park, trying to stay out of range of prying eyes and long lenses. When David Gregory, NBC’s six-foot-five reporter, spotted me once and waved, I dropped my head and yelled, “Run!” to a friend jogging with me.

  It turns out that my sprinting wasn’t very effective. Years later, when I joined the Today Show, one of the first things correspondent Amy Robach said was that she had been part of the White House press pool that traveled to Texas when I married Henry. As an NBC reporter, Savannah Guthrie spent part of that weekend reporting from in front of hay bales in a Crawford, Texas, parking lot. She did a story on other reporters “gobbling” up details about my wedding cake, and she even visited the Yellow Rose store to pick up a Jenna and Henry mouse pad (which, you probably won’t be shocked to learn, she no longer has). Now Savannah is not only my colleague, she is my next-door neighbor, and our daughters are dear friends. 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.

  My early experiences with reading my name in the bold print of the tabloids left me feeling exposed and vulnerable. Every time a camera shutter clicked during my freshman year of college, my stomach sank. I even dreaded the short walk across the South Lawn to the helicopter to Camp David, with all the photographers and camerapeople penned off behind the rope line, shouting questions—imagine being waylaid by an aggressive, nosy neighbor every time you step out the front door. One time when I was feeling particularly disheveled, a sweet man on the White House residence staff, Sam, saw how miserable I looked and offered to hold up a garment bag so the photographers couldn’t take pictures of me. I said yes, but then they just filmed and photographed me walking behind a garment bag, with my ankles sticking out of my sandal-clad feet. The photos looked even more ridiculous than if I had just walked across the grass.

  After the underage-drinking episode at Chuy’s, I remember someone telling me that Meredith Vieira on The View had criticized us for our indiscretion. I was hurt, thinking, Doesn’t she have kids? Doesn’t she know that people aren’t perfect? When I first went on the Today Show, I was nervous to be interviewed by her, worried that she viewed me one way—simply based on something she had said while chatting on live TV. And yet, almost a decade later, I worked with her and I adored her. I also understood far better how she could have looked at the situation and had a strong reaction; I was able to see her side, but it took me a while to get there.

  Two years after college, I moved to Latin America to work for UNICEF. For the first time since 2000, I lived a life completely away from the headlines, television screens, photos, and prying eyes. My job was to travel around the region, meet mothers and their children, and write their stories for UNICEF. I didn’t realize the satisfaction I would get from telling the stories of the people I met. What struck me, too, was how eager they were to share their lives, how grateful they were to have someone listen, be interested, and write down everything they had to say as if it truly mattered, which to me it did.

  One story that touched me deeply was that of a seventeen-year-old girl named Ana. She was so young, but she had already lived a difficult life: She was an orphan; her mom, dad, and a sist
er had all died of HIV/AIDS. Her sister first, then her mother when Ana was three, and then finally her father when she was in sixth grade. Ana had been born with HIV as well, but she had survived. When I met her, she had left the home of her abusive grandparents, had a newborn baby, and had quit high school. She lived in a small makeshift house under a scavenged tin roof with her daughter and her boyfriend. For nine months, I talked with her every day. I knew every painful, difficult detail about her life, but I was embarrassed to tell her one crucial thing about mine. In the beginning, I had wanted her to feel comfortable, so I simply introduced myself as Jenna. I never told her my last name or whose daughter I was. As she had told me her stories and her lineage, I realized I had to tell her mine.

  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.

  What I did have because of my name was a unique platform to tell Ana’s story. With her permission, I wrote it as a book. To promote the book, I did interviews with TV personalities including Diane Sawyer and Ellen DeGeneres. I was happy to talk about Ana. There were even times when television “got” me. Ellen DeGeneres had me pull a prank on my dad and call him at the White House. I also did a segment on the Today Show and by the end, I was surprised to discover that I actually enjoyed doing TV.