Sisters First

by Jenna Bush Hager

  I opened pastel-paper-wrapped boxes filled with baby onesies and bottle warmers. I looked at the packaging, wondering, How does a bottle warmer even work? Why does the baby even need warm milk? Then came the bigger questions: What type of mother will I be? Can I do this? Can I really protect this little person?

  The pile of discarded wrapping paper grew and we began to play a game: Each gift-giver made a prediction about the baby’s gender (we had decided to be surprised) and the name.

  “Boy! Harold Hager!” came one guess. I opened a set of yellow and white burp cloths.

  “Boy! Rodrigo Hager,” another friend chimed in.

  I felt a shift in my stomach…it hurt. My friends sitting across from me on a matching pink-patterned couch laughed; the tight yellow dress showed everything. They could see what I felt.

  “What was that?” someone asked. “Jenna, your water may break right here!”

  I gave a halfhearted laugh and then tried to discreetly wipe a few small beads of sweat from my upper lip and pull down my hem again, before I opened a long rectangular box. Inside was a tiny turquoise-and-white polka-dot guitar. I loved it; I imagined a toddler strumming chords, singing nursery rhymes, creating songs, his or her voice a new sound track for our lives.

  “I love that miniature guitar!” My sister said exactly what I thought, and not for the first time. “Pass it to me!”

  Barbara tried to find the chords to the only song she remembered how to play, a Stone Temple Pilots piece she learned in seventh grade when she took guitar lessons twice a week. This was during the phase when she pierced her own belly button while listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Tangerine” on repeat.

  “Here it is…C…D,” she said, laughing as the tiny guitar sounded the chords we had last heard in middle school. And I started to laugh, to really laugh.

  Right when Barbara was getting to the chorus, I felt it: Out of my short dress came an explosion of water, like a tidal wave. It poured out through the dress, onto the chair, and all over the floor. The doctors had told me that my baby was breech—her head was up near my heart, which meant there was nothing to hold back the water except for her two tiny feet. So this definitely wasn’t your typical water-breaking-at-a-baby-shower moment.

  The next few minutes were an out-of-body experience, the way at moments of maximum panic your life might take on the quality of an old film, where you feel as if you are watching it all unfurl frame by frame. I watched my friends’ mouths open in total shock; some burst into laughter, some screamed, jumping up and backing away as if in fear of being poisoned by my embryonic fluid. Another pregnant woman stared at me, horrified. Then tears started streaming down her face and she bolted into the powder room to avoid watching. The only male present—the caterer—threw a paper towel roll at me and abruptly walked out of the apartment, trays of artfully arranged hors d’oeuvres left behind, never to be eaten.

  I started to laugh hysterically and then I cried.

  “What do I do now?” I said, to everyone and no one.

  Part of the joyful, nervous tears were because I had never fully believed that I would make it to this moment. The women in my mom’s family are strong, but all the way back to my great-grandmother, the one thing that has proven very difficult for them was having children. Both my mother and my grandmother are only children, but not by choice. My great-grandmother, who could mix her own mortar and lay her own brick, buried at least two babies in the hot El Paso, Texas, ground, both of whom were “born too soon.” My grandmother laid three children to rest after my mom, two boys and another little girl. One, named John Edward Welch, struggled for two days in Midland, Texas’s primitive Western Clinic, wrapped in blankets and fed with an eyedropper.

  My mom’s earliest memory as a toddler is of being held up to the thick observation glass in her father’s strong arms so she could see her brother, swaddled between life and death. After his two days on earth, he was called a “late miscarriage” and buried in a tiny coffin in an unmarked grave. Newnie Ellis, Midland’s undertaker, placed him in the part of the cemetery reserved for the babies who had come ever so briefly into the world. A girl, Sarah Elizabeth, would join him some five years later, and then another premature boy whom they must have found too difficult to name.

  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. At barely seven months along she almost lost us to preeclampsia, a condition of dangerously high blood pressure during pregnancy, which can lead to kidney failure and even death for the mother. She was flown out of Midland and put on bed rest for three weeks at Baylor Hospital in Dallas before we were born by Cesarean section. As we grew, she kept our cribs and baby furniture for years, still hoping. “My heart,” she wrote, “was deep enough for more.”

  Growing up, Barbara and I always knew how very much we were wanted, that we had been the answer to our parents’ prayers.

  This baby wasn’t my first baby either. There had been another one before. Henry and I hadn’t even really been trying. I was working a lot. I had flown out to California to interview the actor Jake Gyllenhaal and I felt sick. Really sick. I called Henry at 4 a.m. and he told me to take a pregnancy test. So I did. I walked down to a drugstore near the hotel. I was nervous even going into the store to buy a pregnancy test; I didn’t want anyone to recognize me and see what I was buying. I tried to camouflage it amid a water bottle, a pack of gum, and a tube of mascara. Back in the hotel bathroom, I laid the stick out on the counter and waited; the mark was positive. I was thrilled; it felt unbelievable because I knew how hard it had been for the women who came before me. I did the math and realized that I was almost eight weeks—two months—along.

  I flew back to New York feeling as if I had a powerful secret inside me. Yet I was nervous, overwhelmingly nervous, with a sudden sense that this was too good to be true. I called my doctor. She was out of town, but she offered to drive in. I felt badly and said, “Well, no, don’t do that. It’s just that I’ve never done this before. I don’t know anything. I don’t know what I’m supposed to eat or what I’m supposed to do.”

  Still, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. She must have heard my hesitation because she said that she needed to come in to run an errand and could easily stop by her office to do an ultrasound. I felt a small wave of relief. I thanked her, adding that I was traveling a lot for work, and “it would really be great to see the baby.”

  Henry was out of town in Norfolk, Virginia, so I went to the appointment by myself. I had told him that he didn’t need to be there because it was just the first sonogram. I hadn’t told anyone else, except a good friend from work, and even then, all I revealed was the very noncommittal “I might be pregnant.”

  I took a cab to the doctor’s office. They did some blood work, and then I went into the exam room. The doctor, a lovely woman with a friendly face, walked in. She’s Indian American, and in a comforting bit of symmetry, it was a female Indian American doctor who did the first sonogram of Barbara and me. The doctor smiled; she said that according to the blood test, “You’re pregnant.”

  I thought, Oh, thank goodness. I was so relieved. She put some cool gel on my stomach and began running the ultrasound probe over my abdomen, where the baby was supposed to be. But there was nothing there. She kept circling the probe, and she asked, “You haven’t had any fertility drugs, have you?” And I said no.

  She said okay, but it was one of those slightly clipped “okays” that really mean nothing is okay. Slowly, she slid the probe in another direction. 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. “You have an angel on your shoulder,” she said to me.

  It was crushing. I called Henry and told him to rush to the airport and back home. The next thing I knew, I was lying on a gurney with an IV in my arm being wheeled into surgery and feeling totally alone.

  After I got home, I was still having a bad reaction to the anesthesia and felt horrible. I was up all night. And I cried. I cried for this loss. I lay in that bed thinking about my grandmother and my great-grandmother. I thought, How could they have done this? How could they have survived this time after time?

  Barbara grabbed my hand. “It will be okay,” she said calmly. She had no idea whether it would be or not; neither one of us had ever given birth, but I saw the steadiness in her eyes and I believed her. She and an older cousin and another friend who both already had children and had been through this several times sprang into action.

  “Call the Uber!”

  “Call HENRY! Ask him to grab the overnight bag. NOW!”

  “Someone pack up the donuts! They might get hungry at the hospital.”

  Barbara led me to the shower, away from the laughter and chaos of the living room, still adorned with bouquets of light-colored balloons.

  While I was showering, Barbara called Henry. He was at a local rooftop restaurant, celebrating over beers with the boyfriends and husbands of the women at the shower. As Barbara spoke, all he heard in the background were the sounds of women talking and their laughter.

  “Henry!” Barbara exclaimed. “We have to get to the hospital. Now. Jenna’s water broke. It’s time. Go home now, and throw some things into a bag: toothbrush—”

  “Oh come on!” he said back. “We were at the doctor yesterday. She said it would be weeks. This isn’t funny. You and Jenna have to stop with the practical jokes. This one isn’t funny.” And he hung up.

  Years of April Fool’s pranks, one of my favorite days of the year, and playing endless jokes on our parents and friends, as well as on the most unsuspecting of our subjects, Henry, came floating back, biting us in the ass.

  “Henry doesn’t believe us,” Barbara told me as I stepped into the borrowed sweatpants and sweatshirt that belonged to my friend’s husband and lined my pants with a towel.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked. “Call him again.”

  The call went to voice mail. Henry wasn’t answering.

  Leaving the apartment was like leaving the scene of a crime. Many of the guests had already departed. Those who had stayed were picking up shreds of wrapping paper and placing them into a giant trash bag; someone else was mopping. The pink chair that I had been sitting in had already mercifully disappeared.

  As I got into the Uber headed to the hospital to give birth—something that I still think of as a unique, New York City thing—I felt so far from home. Where was my mother? Where was my husband? My mind was racing with scenarios, until I looked over and saw Barbara, calmly riding with me, a box of donuts balanced on her lap.

  After a friend of mine called her husband in a panic to tell him the mess that she had just witnessed, Henry finally rushed home to grab a bag. Barbara and I were capable of a lot of mischievous pranks, but he had realized that if someone else was claiming that my water broke, she must be telling the truth.

  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.

  I still feel like the circle of women who just hours earlier had been so sure that Mila was a boy made her decide to stand up and announce herself: “Wait, world, here I come, and I am not a boy! I am woman; hear me roar!”

  The first person to meet Mila, minus Henry and me of course, was Barbara. She held her so naturally, seemingly not worried about her fragile six-pound body. When it was time to take a picture of our new family of three, Barbara was appalled by the hospital’s fluorescent lighting and the shadows it created on my already exhausted face, so she wheeled my hospital bed to the window, where the sun was shining.

  “Let’s use some of that natural light,” she said. Henry thought we were insane. The nurses and doctors walking in must have thought the same.

  But that first picture of me holding my baby, taken by my sister, the person who was born alongside me, was perfect and perfectly warmed by the light of a new season.

  Continuing the sister photo tradition: Jenna and Henry’s first photo with Poppy, taken by Barbara with sunlight and love on lucky August 13, 2015.

  Sisters First and Last

  BARBARA

  At thirteen, waiting inside a strip mall in Austin for my orthodontist, Dr. Hooten, to tighten my braces, I discovered a Vogue magazine. It was like a secret treasure, a genie lamp smelling of traces of detachable perfume samples. Stephanie Seymour, in a famed Steven Meisel image, graced the cover in a power suit. I didn’t know this type of glamour or sophistication existed. I quietly slipped the magazine into my bag and spirited it home after Dr. Hooten tightened my “clear” braces (which, um, never looked clear but were always slightly tinted brown). I read and reread that Vogue cover to cover. I carefully cut out the best photos, covering the walls of my tiny green-and-white bedroom with images of beautiful, exotic landscapes and ’90s Calvin Klein ads of Kate Moss and Vincent Gallo. It was a stark contrast to my governor’s mansion room, a onetime sleeping porch built to escape the baking-hot Austin summers, a room that the previous governor, Ann Richards, had used as a closet.

  That Vogue was my catalyst: I decided that one day, I would leave Texas.

  New York was my first stop. In eighth grade our small Episcopal middle school offered an optional trip to New York City over Thanksgiving. It was magic. Our crowd of girls wandered outside all day long—a concept that did not exist in hot, suburban Texas—walking to museums, exploring Chinatown and Central Park, and gazing at the Christmas windows that had sprung up along Fifth Avenue. The sun set around 4:30, but that didn’t matter as the city—or at least in my memories of it—was brightly lit and sparkled at all hours. I listened to the rumble of buses and the honk of yellow cabs and the clicking of women’s heels on the sidewalk. I was mesmerized by the clipped New York speech with its run-together words, rather than slow, drawn-out vowels, and the lilt of foreign accents. Almost everyone was clothed in black. The women wore their hair not big and full, but in careless, uneven shags or pin-straight, glossy, and slicked back. At age fourteen, I wanted to move to New York as soon as possible.

  A decade later, I did in fact end up in New York, just as I had promised myself. A couple of years ago as I walked through the West Village, I passed a man on the sidewalk along Sixth Avenue. Arranged around him were used books and stacks of old magazines, with the Stephanie Seymour Vogue right on top. I stopped and flipped through the pages, remembering. He offered to give it to me, but I didn’t buy or take it. 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. While I did move away, my life did not. My sister followed me to the city. We now live four blocks apart. Just as I used to spend the night in her room, I can now spend the night in her apartment. My nieces pop over anytime to see Auntie Barbara. We are still intertwined in each other’s lives.

  As part of my work with Global Health Corps, we ask our fellows to share why they do this work, why they want to be in global health. I will never forget one Burundian fellow’s answer. Alida grew up with several brothers and sisters; many of them were the children of friends that her parents had taken in during years of bloody civil war. They treated all the children equally, regardless of whether they were related. On birthdays in her family, rather than being showered with presents and treated as someone special, you were asked to make the case of why, in the previous year, you had lived the best year that you could. You did get a cake, but first you had to share what you had done for other people and how you had c
ontributed.

  I was struck by the profound idea, even for little kids: the concept that you needed to make a case that you were living life in a way that was worth it, in a way that was giving to others. You are here for a reason, and you should be grateful for every year, and be ready to do the most with the next one.

  For my entire time on this earth, I will share my birthday, and my life meaning, with one other person: my sister. There were three hearts inside my mama’s body before we were born—her heart, my heart, and the heart I know so well: Jenna’s.

  JENNA

  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. Her successes were my successes; her heartbreaks were also mine.

  I did have a boyfriend who, while staring into my eyes, said, “I wish your eyes were like your sister’s.” I wanted to yell: “No shit! I love the color of her eyes!”

  Recently, Melinda Gates (Barbara’s ultimate girl crush) tweeted an article about Barbara. I was riding the subway and saw the tweet during a brief respite with Wi-Fi—and I wanted to yell out to all the passengers: “See, my sister is a Global Health star! Even Melinda Gates knows that she’s saving the world!”

  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.