Christine

Christine is my surprise.

When I wrote about Jenny I wrote that Jennifer is the same person now as she was the day she was born. The same can be said of Christine. And while they are twins and very close, they are completely different.

Anne named Christine after herself, simply transposing her first and middle name. Christine Anne was born gentle. She has enormous eyes and from the time she was born she looked at you with a sweet "is it my turn?" expression, as though she would just wait until everyone else was taken care of before her need was met.

Christine was born a couple of minutes before Jennifer but she was the weaker one. As a preemie, she weighed only a little over 3 pounds and her lungs were not fully developed. There was a fairly strong chance that she wouldn't make it and I remember Anne asking me if I thought she and Bob should risk the steroids or whatever it was the doctors suggested giving her for maybe a better chance. I didn't want any part of the responsibility of that decision, but they chose the somewhat risky treatment and it turned out well. She survived.

She has always seen the world differently than others. She stood a little outside the group and watched, as through a window, and it caused me concern as she grew older because I worried that she was lonely. And she was, to some degree. But her gentleness wouldn't allow for much self pity. One of my favorite stories about her was when she was in kindergarten and all the children in her class no longer liked Barney the Purple Dinosaur but Christine professed to still be a fan. One day I asked her why, when she didn't even watch him on TV anymore, did she still tell everyone she liked him, opening herself to playground ridicule. She answered "If I don't like him, he'll have nobody." That is Christine. To this day, that is Christine.

She found great pleasure in simple things, she saw things easily. And when she was young, everything she loved carried equal weight. Her perspective was sort of "yes" or "no". It was often funny. In an attempt to deal preemptively with what I feared would be trouble manifested later in life for having lost their mother as babies, I had the girls see a childrens' counselor when they were of school age. In the course of them seeing her, the counselor asked each of them to draw a picture of what they loved the most. Amanda and Jennifer drew pictures of Bob and me, the dog, their teachers. Christine drew candy.

Christine lost everything as a child. But especially shoes. I remember once I bought her a pair of expensive running shoes she wanted. She ran outside wearing them to show her friend next door. About an hour later, she came home barefoot and we never saw the shoes again. Once when she was in the 2nd grade, Bob was out of town and I had to get them out the door on time for school so that I could make a plane for a sales meeting in Florida. Trying to get them dressed, I went into her closet and she had ZERO pair of shoes in it. She had lost them all. Of course, I lost my mind. I don't remember what she finally had on her feet when she left, but I missed my plane and dropped in on my pastor for counseling to calm down. She has grown out of that.

She also kept the messiest room of any kid I know. She has not grown out of that.

Christine's most marked physical characteristic is her smile. There is joy in it. Her friends made her a button that said: "I can't see when I smile". Once I was in a show with the actress Betty Garrett. Christine was about 3. One afternoon Bob brought her to my rehearsal and when Christine saw me, she broke into her famous smile. Betty said "Oh my goodness! Her smile lights up the whole room!" (It still does!)

She has always been very quiet. She doesn't say much - to the point where it was cause for some concern when she was young. When she was seven, I had her tested to determine if there was a problem. I prepared for bad news. What came back though was that she was completely off the charts, testing "post high school" in some areas of comprehension but her verbal skills were a year behind grade level. And this made school challenging for her. But she eventually overcame it. Still, it made her difficult to know in many ways. She didn't articulate feelings or observations and a direct question would often yield the eternally frustrating answer "I don't know." Yet you always knew somehow that something was brewing.

So now, and I mean within the last year, she has selectively shared her thoughts, feelings and opinions and I am always completely caught off guard. My lack of understanding of her over the years has led me to make some clearly erroneous assumptions about her. Namely, that she wasn't terribly interested in anything other than social networks and her music (most of which I am not a fan of).

Last year, she received an "A" on a paper she wrote for an English class and I was furious because it was clear that she had plagiarized the entire thing. I had read her high school papers and getting her to write a coherent paper was like pulling teeth. I knew that she wasn't capable of this kind of scholarly composition. She was offended. Then just a couple of months ago, she was sitting next to me, typing on her computer (while watching TV), when I looked over and read what she was writing. I reminded her that she could not copy from the text book sitting next to her. "I'm not" she replied. I looked at the book. Indeed, she was not copying. These were her well founded, well organized, well articulated thoughts on paper. This realization made me feel completely lost for a moment. Who was this girl I was sitting next to?

Recently, in a conversation about a family issue, she offered an insightful, thoughtful point of view. In the midst of her sharing her feelings, I was taken for a while from the stress of the issue itself and was absorbed by the woman she had become. It had all happened without me noticing. It was as though she had spent a very long time in a cocoon or something and I had just believed over time that that was where she lived. But she emerged sometime when I didn't notice into this very special person. And while once her mind seemed to jump from random thing to random thing, she seems to me now to be the most rational of all of us.

And still, she she stands sometimes and watches the world, as through a window, with a look in her beautiful eyes as if to humbly say "is it my turn?" But there is gentleness in it And joy.

Lovely, lovely girl. She warms my heart.