Faux Twins

As usual, I loved the readings from Red this week. I love the way these girls let us peek into their lives for a moment.

I really loved both writings by the twins, Hannah and Sarah. While I do not have a twin sister (I always thought it would be great to have one though), I do think I understand some of what they say about their bond. Lindsey has been my best friend since 6th grade. The second I met her we had things to talk about and we haven’t run out of things yet. While Lindsey and I are not exactly alike, in high school we became something of a “package deal” like Hannah mentions in The Two of Us (Red 45). If one of us was doing something, the other had to be there, period. We even used to tell people that we shared a brain. Just like the twins, Lindsey and I can tell each other anything. I totally agree with Hannah when she says “Why go through something alone when there’s someone you can trust to be with you?” because that is exactly how I feel about Lindsey. Sometime I think that even though we aren’t really sisters, and we aren’t twins on the outside, we are definitely twins on the inside!

I can relate very much to the stories about, dun dun dun…boys. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I started developing crushes as early as kindergarten. When boys still thought girls were gross, I was chasing them around the playground trying to kiss them! All the way up through high school, I would like a boy, be to shy to tell him, act weird around him, find out he was dating someone else, and be crushed. I like how in The Match, Jocelyn says “whoever thought up the word crush didn’t call it that arbitrarily. Crushes hurt.” It’s so true.

When reading the essay TLC, I actually got a little mad! It upset me to read that because Annie decided to speak up about physical abuse from her father, she was treated like a criminal. It made me angry that her mother was ready to give up her parental rights and that her family members told her that she had “messed up big this time”. Annie felt as though she needed to be forgiven, and that the situation was all her fault. From what I understood though, it was her father that was the one who needed to be forgiven. It seems as though Annie thinks that because she was “a liar” or because she was mean to her siblings, that she almost deserved the physical abuse by her father. I feel like I can understand where Annie is coming from when she says “I had never been arrested, I had never been in a cop car or handcuffed” but that she felt as though she was “a delinquent like the rest of them” (Red 69). I have always been the sibling that would talk back and be disrespectful to my parents. I did great in school; I never got into any kind of trouble with the law, and was always very respectful to authority figures. But with my family, I had a short fuse, as did my dad. We would get into screaming yelling fights that would on occasion lead to something physical. I remember one time when my dad and I were inches away from each other’s faces, and he picked me up by my shoulders and shoved me into a door. He has never flat out hit me, but there were definitely times when his anger got out of hand. After the fights sometimes my mom would come into my room and we would talk and she would say things like “You know how he is” or “you just know how to push his buttons”. I always felt as though I deserved it for being a brat. I had made him angry so this was my punishment. I now realize that no one deserves to be hurt, no matter how bratty they may be acting. I think my family realized this too because when I was about 16 my mother signed the whole family up for counseling, an idea that originally, my sister, dad and I hated! But it didn’t take long before we were all getting along better. Yes, we still had arguments but we learned how to better communicate with out screaming, yelling or getting physical.