Love, Lies and Loyalty
Twins Divided by Gender
My twin brother and I were born in the spring of 1994.
My room was painted bubblegum pink while my brother’s was cotton-candy blue. We were born together via cesarean section only 60 seconds apart but distinctly separated by our genders throughout our childhoods.
“Little girls don’t do that!” my father often said. My parents agreed we would have a B’nai Mitzvah. The Kiruv Orthodox rabbi who met my father for coffee in a Starbucks one afternoon made sure to tell my parents my brother would “go first.”
In the years before we hit puberty, I remember hearing my brother boast to his friends about how great an athlete I was. He even told them I was the best football player he’d ever seen. And we used to play dress-up together. Once I dressed him up in a sparkly Cinderella tutu-style dress. Someone took a photo, though I’m not sure who. At 16 I found the photo in an album and brought it into my high school to show my friends during lunch. My brother realized, grabbed the photo, and pulled a lighter out. In front of everyone he burned it.
It would be years before our relationship would recover. Some days I think it never did. I felt the distance between us when I suffered from birth trauma and postpartum depression. My brother openly called me a “wimp.” I still wish I never found that photo.
Sara S. Barenfeld is a doctoral student in the English department at Stony Brook University where they are also a recipient of the Dr. W. Burghardt Turner Fellowship.
An Only Child and Her Siblings
I’m an only child. Which of course means that, as a kid, my mother, father and Cabbage Patch Dolls were my playmates. Dad and I would fight over that last piece of brisket and he never, ever let me win at Nok Hockey. I was the lucky one who could bring a friend on vacation and Jennifer got to enjoy the mermaids at Weeki Wachee with my parents and me.
It also means that I had to seek out my own sisterhood in a place where language can’t quite meet us. A beautiful collection of relationships that don’t have names. What do I call the one from my Bat Mitzvah who sends me Instagram stories about the cross-section of neurodivergence and giftedness? How do I explain a not-romantic-more-than-friend but not-family-but-an-always person? “Besties” seems ridiculous for the women who have known me since college, taught me to dye my hair and pluck my eyebrows even though I forsake those practices these days. And the woman whose activism I admire, whose secrets I share? What do I call her? My fellow mom who coaches my kiddo while I hold hers? The neighbor who literally gifted me her pants, the cousin who has always been my friend.
And the men, one who carried Daddy’s coffin, the other in the trenches of complicated health alongside me.
“Only” could’ve meant I am alone, but, instead, I find myself filled with joy and gratitude for the family I have found along the way.
Brandi Larsen is the co-writer of Uncultured: A Memoir, and is working on her debut novel, a book about Jewish sisterhood and belonging.
My Twin Lived for One Day
After having three boys, my mother desperately wanted a girl and felt that this pregnancy, at age 38, was her last chance. It was 1960. There were no sonograms and my mom had no idea she was pregnant with twins. My twin brother and I were born two months premature—breech babies who had to be turned around in the birth canal.
My mom told me that when she learned she was having twins, her labor pains disappeared. But then came the downfall: My twin brother lived for one day. His lungs were not developed enough. Mine weren’t either, but I was still fighting for my life in an incubator.
Neither the doctors nor my father told my mother my twin had died. He and the rabbi buried my brother the next day—according to Jewish ritual. They spoke to my devastated mom after the burial. The rabbi declared, “You have a baby girl and three boys at home,” as if her grief didn’t count somehow. On the death certificate, my twin was given the name “Israel,” an ode to the then relatively new Jewish state.
A psychic told me once that my twin and I were kindred spirits who chose the same parents, but he then abandoned me.
That has always made me wonder about the theme of abandonment in my life. My dad died nine years later.
Marilyn Mayo is a native New Yorker who loves reading, writing, traveling and taking photos wherever life leads her.
Half-Siblings with Whole Love
I can feel people looking at us in the supermarket checkout line, a haphazard, sun-drenched gaggle of kids with messy hair that ranges from blond to black. They’re trying to figure out whether we might be a small group from a local summer camp, or maybe something more dangerous. A ménage overflowing with cross-border love.
We’re loud and happy in the air-conditioned store. The youngest is the fairest—bright blond hair, big blue eyes. He’s rosy from the sun. You can already tell he’s going to be tall and broad-shouldered.
The next kids have turned a deep brown, their black hair curled tight from the humidity. They’re shorter, a bit stocky.
I’m the oldest, a copy of my mother but less brave, more of your classic Jewish worrier. A nail bitter.
Mom has had four kids from three very different men. Some she married, some she didn’t. I’m her co-parent much of the time, the deputy. We don’t yet understand all of her mistakes, but we know one thing: we’ve been raised with love that makes us bristle at the words “half-sister, half-brother.” This is a whole love, where fathers make for good stories but not divisions.
Mom used her label maker to print all of our different last names and stuck them to the front door with clear packing tape. The mail gets pushed through the slot on our scuffed door and gets where it belongs.
Theta Pavis is a poet and editor who lives in Jersey City, NJ. Her chapbook The Red Strobe was published this year.
Siblings Bound by Jewish Values & Activism
When I was born, I was adopted from Bogota, Colombia, into a Jewish American family. My sister Julia, then seven, wrote a short story in our local paper about how excited she was to love and care for me.
Forty-four years later, I still feel that love. Julia has been my silly confidant, my empathic mentor, my model of a strong Jewish woman.
Her values and commitment to family and community weren’t a theory, they were action. When I was nine, she worked with our synagogue to welcome Guatemalan refugees. When I was 14, she came out to me as queer, and taught me something about courage and love. At 15, I watched her build Jewish-Arab peace initiatives. In my 20s, she was leading a Jewish youth leadership organization. When I was 32, she flew across the country to meet my newborn child the day they were born. At 42, she was a safe haven for me to come to when I found my biological mother in Colombia— gently holding both my grief and joy.
It’s no wonder we both work in racial equity now. Our bond—forged through adoption, identity, and activism—keeps bringing us back to justice, to healing, to each other. Because of her I know Tzedek as a daily, relational practice. As a Jewish adoptee of color who often sought belonging and purpose in Jewish community, our relationship and its teachings have meant everything to me.
And because of her I know I was never alone.
David McCarty-Caplan is a researcher, writer, and consultant whose work is shaped by being born in Bogotá, Colombia and adopted into a Jewish family in the U.S.
A Hospitalized Brother Takes Care of His Big Sister
In the hospital room, Zac gestures to me and tells the nurse, “My sister needs a chair that turns into a bed.”
We are here for the night after yet another procedure for an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) in Zac’s spinal cord that no one knew existed until it suddenly burst when he was 16 years old.
Over three decades before, in 1990, Lilith published an article, “Finding Homes For Jewish Babies,” about the dearth of adoptive families for Jewish children with Down Syndrome.
When I arrived home after school three years later, at age seven, a brown- haired stranger was in my family’s living room with a blanket-wrapped bundle.
“This is a social worker. She’s here so I can meet this baby,” my mother explained.
Looking again at the bundle I saw a small face with creamy white skin, a broad forehead, and angled hazel eyes.
The baby moved in with my family two months later. “Zachary—Zac for short,” my mother beamed at my older brother and me. “Your new brother!” Zac fixed his gaze on me: true love in an instant.
“It’s important,” Zac, now 32 years old, tells the nurse about the chair-that-turns-into-a-bed.
He has endured countless “hospital sleeps”—being put under anesthesia to be cut, pierced, and penetrated to manage the effects of paraplegia caused by the AVM, but it’s my comfort he’s concerned with.
“I don’t know how your family does it,” people often effuse.
“Care goes both ways,” I say.
Ma’ayan Simon is a Disability Studies scholar and writer working on a memoir about growing up with disabled foster and adoptive siblings and experiencing chronic pain.
One Sibling’s Transition, Another’s Roadblock
We’re in the car and my older sister is driving. I’m trying to make a case for Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events as a morally healthier option to read aloud to her kids than Harry Potter. My sister is getting tense: she loves HP, a series that used to bond us and make our nine years gap vanish.
When I started transitioning socially, she and I had a short and heartbreaking fall out. With time, things got better. She did her research, worked on her beliefs and reached out to me in healing ways.
But one thing she still feels defensive about is Harry Potter. I won’t convince her about the antisemitism at play there yet, but I do need her to give up on protecting JK Rowling.
My siblings and I seem to be deeply connected through pain. Not only do we somatize similarly—a chalazion in times of high stress seems to be our lot, and sudden separations bring us hair loss, which I’ve recently learned, at a small all-Jewish gathering in Paris, is a common Jewish thing*.
But more bizarrely, a couple of times that I’ve experienced a sudden, mysterious pain, my sister had broken a bone, and my brother also had a bruise where I ached. Since we don’t emotionally mesh when we fight, I keep my ground firm as we drive and keep arguing.
If our ailments are linked, shouldn’t my sister be hurt by transphobic statements, as I am?
A.L.S Erikson Weisbrod has had many names, several genders, and more than a handful of passions. His translation work is forthcoming in Tripwire, and you can find more of his work in the Columbia Journal, as well as elsewhere.
