Because we're Siren + Serene

This is something my sister made, a portrait of the two of us in 2010. We came up with the duo nickname “Siren Serene." She being the exciting siren, and I the soothing, serene one- and we’d say it in a loud, enthusiastic way.
“Siren seRENE!”
Emphasis on the calmer name, ironically. Like a DJ making a shout-out from his or her turntable. Very weird, very silly, very us.

Mind you, I’m not always that serene. I don’t always keep my temper or hold my tongue and she is not always a vixen, wild child with “Sabrosa” as her alter-ego or her “daughter” as she puts it. She is quite capable of serenity, of exuding quiet, sound reason and maintaining her composure. But for our general dynamic, we came up with this and it fits. We like the double “S” and how similar those words sound, look, and are spelled- even in Spanish - Sirena Serena.

Today and for the first time really, in a permanent way, as opposed to a vacation or “away at college” way, she is leaving New York and flying out to Florida to live with her girlfriend Sahsha and to begin her new life- so of course I'm now compelled to take stock here and unpack the ol’ sisterly memories…

They’re swirling in my head all over the place and it’s hard to harness this into a lucid, linear prose- I was almost going to make this a poem. But the prose is creeping its way in, I guess my desire to be coherent and cut and dry is taking over.

When Mom told me she was pregnant with her in 1990, I wasn’t happy about it. I was 13 and already used to the idea of being an only child after I stopped wishing for a sibling at 11. At 11 my first baby cousin was born and he lived upstairs from us. In the following 2 years, 2 more baby cousins were born, living upstairs and downstairs from us. This I later learned, caused my mom to have baby fever and “tricked” my dad into having another one. She consoled him after a devastating Celtic game when they lost___.
When she told me she was pregnant, I felt as though this was a terribly careless accident on their part, just like I was. But maybe that concerned expression on her face was her worrying about how I was going to take it. Initially I dreaded at how our world was gonna change from hereon in. But with time, I got over all that and started to embrace this new blessing as I told my friends in junior high and they shared my excitement, asking me what names I’d like.

Mom and I named her Christine. Since Dad chose my name back in ‘77 he stepped aside from this process the second time around. But he still told us to nix “Christina” because it would get swallowed up with our last name which begins with an “A”. I liked “Dolores” but my mother didn’t want a name that’s associated with “pain and suffering”, what "dolores" literally translates to. The name Christine or Christina is after a relative dear to my mother who died young.

Christine always felt her name was too plain and never really liked it. That is, until we saw the 1983 John Carpenter movie of the same name. She was 20 at the time and that’s how old the car in the film happens to be- a 1958 Plymouth Fury brought back to hellish life in 1978. We didn’t even think it was going to be good. We put it on as a joke, to hate-watch, or make fun of it- but we raved over “Christine”, and that’s when she began to really own and flaunt her name at last.

When she was a baby I remember looking at her crawl on our parent's bed and thinking cool, another Puerto Rican-Dominican girl in the family, I won’t be the only one! When taking her out in her stroller, people would think I was another teenage mom and that she was my son- because she didn’t always like having barrettes and hair thingies in her short, curly hair.
“What a cute little boy!” they would tell me.

There were times I wasn’t exactly thrilled with all this, especially that time when I was on my way to take my public speaking final and I had to pick her up from school instead because she didn't feel well. I was almost at the corner of my block when Mamina called out after me from her 3rd story window-

"¡Tennille! ¡Ve y busca Christine de la escuela, la enfermera llamó! ¡Apúrate!"

There were times when we fought- verbally, physically, and affected each other emotionally, mentally, you name it.  There’s the fact that I allowed her to grow up too fast, to hang out with my friends, watching ‘my’ movies, and letting her stay home from school a little bit too much for her own good. Mom’s death hit us each in our own ways. It had me scramble to become more maternal than I ever would have been, scramble being the keyword here. Mom’s death is the major void that we bond over with as well. We agreed that because of this that we became closer than we probably originally would have been.

Continuing my childhood tradition of making up song and movie parodies with my cousins Yvonne and Jacqui when I visited them in Connecticut, I automatically passed that on to Christine. We came up with "Dominican Idiot"- a Green Day "American Idiot" album parody song for song, line for line that started out as a good natured or not-so good natured poke at our alienation with our own Dominican family/culture that unintentionally turned out to be sad and serious towards the end, "Jesus Christ, Superstars!", possibly our best one- again song for song, line for line, "The Twilight Hood"- kind of dumb but so fun to make, and a "Valley of the Dolls" trailer parody which she managed to post on YouTube
Here are some of the bloopers

We constantly inspired and entertained each other with our own brilliance and outrageous ‘stupidity’ for lack a better word. Sometimes with a tape recorder, sometimes a digital camcorder, sometimes a webcam, sometimes just pen and paper.

One early memory I have that I’m pretty fond of is me blasting some music in my room one night and encouraging her to dance- clapping, cheering her on, lending her my maracas... her twirling in a ruffle dress that Mamina made, and I just wanted to celebrate her essence that night, her “girl power” which is what she liked as a kid- Spice Girls’ and their girl power. She was 6 when the movie ‘Spice World’ came out and she liked Baby spice the most. I felt meh about them in my post adolescence but saw the appeal and how much it meant to her and girls her age, the generation after mine.

The show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” also came on my radar and I liked it enough but really sensed the opportunity for Christine to get into it, so we tuned in almost every Tuesday night. Remember those baby cousins I mentioned who lived up and downstairs from us? Well, being that Christine was the youngest of the 4, she became their easy target. I think watching Buffy every week served as an empowering tool, little by little, slowly but surely. Our dad was too mellow to aggressively come to our defense, a little too “live and let live” for our taste sometimes. So aside from me, who was too busy being angsty, not always around, going through my own anxieties and depression, she had Buffy. Even if it was just a TV celluloid on the WB, even if she was a thin, white, blonde, middle upper class girl we couldn’t relate to much, flipping around, possessing over-the-top, unattainable, superhuman strength, she was there- for her- every week. And when the show reached the season where Buffy goes away to college and the camera did a slow, zoom out shot of her new, overwhelming campus in one episode, dreams of ‘dorm life’ hit me- they hit me for her, it was too late for me.

“Yo, Chris!” I yelled when I saw that shot.

“That's the kind of school I want you to try to get into later! Not commuting somewhere around here and coming back home every day like I do!” she crinkled her nose and shook her head in disapproval at this.

“Strive for a really great school, we’ll worry about the money later… but aim for this, go and be an independent, young adult... you can...you can have all that!” The idea excited her too, my enthusiasm and the picture I was painting was infectious. Christine not only went away to college, but got accepted to her first choice, Vassar, one that she applied for early.

“Yo, I heard you got into a good-ass school!” one of our cousins exclaimed when he found out, genuinely impressed.

When they called her name at graduation four years later, I absolutely cheered and cried with joy and tightly hugged our Titi Janis for a long time.

To throw our age gap out there again, as of this year, I am 40 and she is 26. She couldn’t wait to grow up and “catch up to me” so that we could be grown ups together, not taking into account that when she got older, I’d be older too. Not cool old anymore, just aging, old-old. She told me of this realization one night in my living room when my kids were asleep, and we kind of laughed about it.

“Tennille. You used to be cool.” she’d mockingly say when I started having kids and getting excited about little baby things, having favorite characters on baby shows and thinking about lyrics to children’s songs a little too much, or getting excited about a new baby product that would make my life easier. When I grew more and more ignorant of the new, cool things and people trending in our pop culture.

She jokingly threw the term “pregnancy brain” at me until it started to get to me and I asked her to please stop.

“You’re literally insulting me (my intelligence) for having a baby and becoming a mother” I pointed out.

Not just her, but anyone who uses that term a lot to justify a person spacing out, flaking out, or forgetting something. Even though the concept is scientifically legit, sometimes I’m just not that smart on something on my own, having nothing to do with being a mom, or I’ll forget things just like I used to do before I became a mom. She totally agreed, understood, and stopped using the term.

When she was a teenager (and tougher now that we moved to Brooklyn, not hesitating to push back at the cousins who picked on her as a child in Queens), I sometimes wondered how someone so headstrong would fare in a romantic relationship, being someone’s girlfriend, having a boyfriend. When she came out to me as bi at 17 or 18, I understood things, her, way more. And she’s schooled me a lot over the years with queer culture, identity, disability rights, discrimination, internalized racism, benevolent sexism... she’s a millennial with a Tumblr SJW sensibility and say what you want to about that, but overall, all in all, I’m calling that a compliment.

“You raised me,” she once pointed out through texting when she was away in college and I was freaking out over motherhood, arguments with Joe, and my attacking self-doubt.

“And look at how well I turned out!” she wrote, trying to console me.

Yeah I thought to myself, but you’re also “damaged” (as she puts it), and anxiety-ridden just like I am.

Granted. All that’s true, in a way/shape/form. BUT she’s also been able to maintain strong, healthy friendships, holds down jobs well, is ambitious, hard-working, respectful, mad creative and talented… and has a heart like no other.

When I was 15 and had to stay at the psychiatric adolescent unit in Holliswood, I was able to have my family come over at one point and take me out to lunch. She was 2. And the look on her little baby face when we all said hello, not quite grasping the situation but feeling some kind of way about it, I looked at her, hugged her and thought to myself, what I am doing trying to off myself when she’s around?

I don’t quite know how to end this yet- which sucks because I want to post this before today is done! Just know that we are so many things to each other and now we’re going to live almost 2,000 miles apart, something we’ve never done before- definitely a new and exciting chapter is unfolding- and we celebrate that…

So in the spirit of our spoof-y nature, allow me to post this hilarious video made a couple years ago about the Kardashians, probably the funniest one I’ve seen about them so far and to please pay attention to minute 7:42 when “Khloe” gets redundant about the love she has for her sister Kim- because anytime we hear that, we laugh… “because we’re sisters”- because we’re Siren and Serene...