My Own Personal O-Story

This past weekend, while I chased my daughter down the rows of our public library, I happened to catch the title of a book turned outward on one of the display shelves, Living Oprah, a memoir by Robyn Okrant. A yoga teacher and MFA student, Okrant attempts to embrace every directive given by the queen of talk for an entire year. The book catches my eye because I've recently started watching and writing about the cultural phenom, although I've only ever made it through two entire episodes. One with guest Jenna Jameson (see previous post) and one with Dr. Laura Berman, the sexpert, whose advice to makeout daily with one's husband for at least ten seconds I've both followed and dispensed. (I guess the common denominator is sex. Sorry Oprah! Good thing you are on when my daughter naps! Or perhaps this is not happenstance. The magazine is, in fact, titled O...)

Anyway, after 1202 hours, $4,781.84, near exhaustion, and a reluctant embrace of leopard print flats, Okrant realizes that her life is simultaneously better and worse for having followed Oprah's advice. She is thinner, but more stressed. Her apartment is more organized, but her marriage has been pretty taxed. What impresses me most about the book is that Okrant actually finishes the project and that more than 100,000 people visit her blog site. Despite Okrant's immersion journalism, the popularity of all things O still cannot be exactly explained. For what ever reason, that woman just permeates and captivates our consciousness.

Which made me realize, every one has an Oprah story. Here's mine:

Before becoming sisters, my stepsister Amber and I were best friends. We thought this was so remarkable that almost the instant that it happened, roughly around age eight, we were convinced we'd be on Oprah. We even went as far as staging mock interviews on the blue and white striped couch that had been moved from the living room of the house she had been growing up in to the basement of the house that had been mine.

Ever since age five when we met at the YMCA Youth Camp on a lake in mid-coast Maine where the bathrooms smelled so bad you'd rather pee your pants than be caught dead actually using them, we were inseparable. We spent as many afternoons after school together as we could, which amounted to practically every afternoon because all four of our parents worked. Yet, Amber's dad was a school teacher and could meet us both coming off the bus in front of her house.

We spent those long afternoons exploring the woods behind it, sledding down Bran's hill in the winter, or developing various schemes to earn money, mostly to purchase our then favorite red skinned hot dogs at the corner store.

Once we held a bottle drive and collected more than 100 bottles from the various neighbors. Only because we didn't actually have a cause, other than ourselves, we were forced to return the bottles. We were so embarrassed at the prospect of having to explain our misconceived notion of a fund-raiser that we rang the doorbell of the closest neighbor and ran away, leaving the four giant trash bags sitting lopsided on their porch. This was also around the time when we were becoming health conscious and learned that hot dogs contained things like lips and intestine, so we didn't really miss our lost profits at the time.

In short, we pretended we were sisters.

Then, something miraculous happened. Her parents got divorced. I remember her announcing this to a group of us as we sat on the floor, drawing the outlines of school lockers on large reams of butcher paper that would become the backdrop for one of our school plays. At that time, we were always acting out scenes from our overly romantic visions of high school that resembled not so thinly veiled allusions to Saved By the Bell (Amber was always the Kelly character to my nerdier, cause-driven Jessica.)

Then, something even more remarkable happened. My parents divorced.Shortly after, our parents moved in with each other and we were sisters.

I should remember the exact day this happened. The funny thing is, I don't. The series of our afternoons together meld in my memory and there is nothing to mark the occasion, the difference between when we played together as friends pretending to be sisters and when we actually became them.

What I remember instead is believing that we should be on Oprah as the coming true of an impossible wish, the Parent Trap incarnate. It didn't mater that my sister and I had no control over what was happening in our lives -- getting our parents alone in a room together was the furthest possible thing from our exploits – we still thought our story was worth telling to a national audience. A sort of truth is stranger than fiction and in our youth, when everything is both remarkably and horribly self-referential, we waited for the call from Oprah's producers.

Instead, we grew up.

High school was harder on our friendship than we imagined. To this day, I am still thankful that we had our sisterhood of chance to help our friendship of choice survive how awful and agonizingly hormonal we were to each other.

Now, as adults, I am happy to say, we are still best friends. Only, something again remarkable has happened, our parents are separated.

We did not choose the blending of our families, despite how badly we wished for it -- without a sense of repercussion and what divorce might actually mean to our parents, our siblings, ourselves. Our sister fantasy had more to do with us both being adopted by a rich and benevolent benefactor that would let us ride horses all day and eat copious amounts of calorie-free chocolate. The former something we actually grew up doing. (Thanks, Dad!!) The latter we still dream about. The reality is we have no influence over the current state of our parents' relationship.

When we first learned that our parents would be living in separate homes, I spent a considerable amount of time worrying about what this would do to our family. We live thousands of miles apart, almost clear on opposite sides of this continent. My husband and I had most recently started our own family and I wanted more than anything to bring my daughter into the larger one we all shared. I couldn't help but wonder what this development might do to the holidays I imagined?

In the months and weeks that went by, nothing much happened. We got together for the Thanksgiving. My stepmother did what she always does--cook an elaborate meal that tastes amazing and takes too long to prepare. My daughter played with her cousins. My sister and I even spent some time briefly developing another of our get-rich-quick schemes, this one involving trucking a boatload of hay from Maine, where the grass grows three cuttings, to Florida, where the sandy soil yields nothing for the thousands of horses that congregate there each winter season to avoid the cold of the more northern eastern seaboard states. Yet, even though she's moving from Maine to Florida, her leg is broken and I don't think our eight-month-old will take too well to a 1,500 mile road trip. We take a pass, still believing that there is always next year.

Perhaps what has happened to us in the last year is more remarkable than what happened to us as kids. We are still best friends and we are still sisters. We are still each other's first phone call when we long for someone simply to understand and commiserate in the way that only a shared history affords.
Oprah's show will end this year and still my sister and I aren't scheduled to appear on it. Perhaps now, we really should.