The more they stay the same.

I've written before about my two host brothers from when I spent a year of high school living in France, but I don't think I've ever mentioned my host sister, Angéla, who is exactly my age (well, two months younger). But I've been thinking about her recently, because events in our lives seem to be coinciding, and also she won't be able to be at our wedding (although her parents and one of her brothers will be).

My French host family is or at least was somewhat dysfunctional, and I had some serious adjustment issues when I first got there. It was very complicated, but the gist of it was that the parents were having issues with Angéla, who was dating an older guy, struggling a bit in school, and generally just had an attitude that her parents didn't appreciate. All normal teenager stuff, really, but the family totally exacerbated it.

For example: They constantly harped on her about little negative things, like the fact that they thought she needed to lose ten pounds, or that she was irresponsible for not cleaning up the kitchen as soon as she got done cooking, or that it was rude of her to disappear into her bedroom the second she got home from school.

For example: She was given a ton of responsibility, including doing quite a bit of the cooking, taking care of her youngest brother (who was two years old at the time), cleaning the house, and babysitting frequently to earn money. Not that she was singlehandedly in charge of the household, not by a long shot, but her home responsibilities blew the chores that I was used to doing out of the water.

For example: Two weeks after I arrived in France, my host mother took me shopping, and while we were strolling through the mall, she casually mentioned to me that she had wanted to host an exchange student to replace Angéla as her daughter in her heart.

Yeah, that last example is worse than the first two, isn't it? I seriously thought that I had misunderstood. I had only been in the country for two weeks, and my French wasn't very good yet, and I just sort of told myself that I must have heard her wrong. I smiled weakly and nodded, and attempted to change the subject, and tried to pretend it had never happened, because for all I knew, it hadn't.

But Angéla hated me. She was rude to me and always acted grumpy around me. She said mean things to me and about me, completely ignored me when we were at school together, and complained about me and criticized me constantly. She often laughed when I made grammatical errors in French, and I could never understand why she was so nasty to me.

But then, after I had been living there for about five months, Angéla knocked on my door one evening and said she had a request to make. Apparently, her mother had, in a fit of anger, told Angéla the same thing she had told me--that she considered me a replacement for Angéla, the better daughter. Like I said, dysfunctional, right? I can't imagine ever thinking such a thing about my own child, much less saying it out loud to the kid.

Now, in retrospect, it's so clear to me why Angéla hated me so much--and honestly, even though it wasn't my fault that her mother had said those things to her, it's pretty clear that her negative feelings about me were justified. But at the time I was 17, and I didn't have much perspective about the whole thing, and I was frustrated and confused. So when Angéla asked me to stop getting good grades at school and being helpful around the house, because it was making her look bad by comparison, I just told her I couldn't do it.

And I couldn't, not really. No matter how warped their reasons were, this family had invited me into their home and truly incorporated me into their family, and I couldn't just remove myself from family life and stop participating. And I was a senior in high school, and colleges would see my grades--I couldn't just stop doing my schoolwork. But I could have been nicer about the whole thing.

The next month was spring break, and my host parents and brothers went on a road trip to visit family up north. Angéla and I were left alone for the week and given the task of stripping the wallpaper from the kitchen walls in preparation for the remodel that the family was going to start upon their return.

We didn't talk for two days. We turned on the radio and listened to French pop music in silence as we stripped the wallpaper. At mealtimes, she cooked something simple for us to eat and I did the dishes afterward. After meals, we each went to our own bedrooms, where she did god knows what and I wrote incredible amounts of letters to my friends back home.

I honestly don't remember what shifted, but I'm pretty sure she was the one to make the first friendly overture. I was just too exhausted from it all at that point, and had given up on her ever being nice to me. I can't imagine myself attempting a truce at that point. But one of us broke the ice, and by the end of the week we were chatting and hanging out, even when we didn't have to. When her parents returned, they were blown away by the difference, and my host mother informed me that leaving the two of us alone for a week had been a part of her diabolical master plan to get us to be friends.

Of course, my host mother loved to say stuff like that, so who knows if it was true, but it definitely worked. By the end of the year, Angéla and I were good friends, actually choosing to spend time together and confiding in each other about what was going on in our lives. She supported me through my breakup with my boyfriend back home and I supported her through her breakup with her older man. We played cards for hours on end. We cried when we had to say goodbye. We kept in touch. We still keep in touch.

Even though we didn't meet until we were 17, I feel like we grew up together. Which is why that I think it's awesome that she got PACSed (a form of French civil union) the same year that I'm getting married. She didn't have a wedding, and won't have one for a couple more years when they officially get married, but she loves to discuss that stuff, and we are both incredibly disappointed that she can't make it to mine. But she's in her last year of nursing school, and our wedding is in the middle of her final exams, her last hurdle before she becomes a nurse.

And she will be so good at it. I am so happy for her. Her absence is one that I will really feel on our wedding day, but I'm so glad it turned out that way, that we are close enough to miss each other when we are apart. And I fully intend to be at her wedding when it finally happens. And even though her wedding won't be in 2008, I will still consider this the year of marriage for both of us. And I'm so glad that that will be just one more bond that we share.