Tag Archive

My sisters are 5 and 10 years younger than I am and have me pretty much beat on the life milestones. Respectively: married homeowner with her second baby on the way; accomplished animal-caretaker well on her way to fledging as a veterinarian a solid year before I can call myself an audiologist. Both gorgeously brown-eyed to my blues and both fathoms better at so many of the details of being a stylish, elegant grownup (clothes, makeup, hair) than I manage to be on a daily basis.

Evenly spaced throughout the 11 years separating our oldest sibling from the youngest sister, we sisters were surrounded by brothers yet did not form the strong bonds that the 4 of them did during our growing-up years. Probably something to do with working things out with punches vs. words…bruises heal quicker on skin than on egos. Over the past few years we’ve corrected that course, becoming closer by choice than we ever were while living under the same roof.

My sisters and I shared a room until I was in high school – I don’t remember exactly how that configuration worked out. It probably changed more than once. There definitely were bunk beds involved, along with plenty of squabbles, hair-pulling, and a much-bemoaned lack of privacy. Many of the details are lost to the vagaries of time and faulty memory but the gist is my not being the most, shall we say, nurturing? older sister. It seemed to me that my little sisters, and more generally the weirdness of my family, were obstacles that stood between me and being cool. Which of course was all I truly wished to be.

But somehow that fierce longing to break away and establish myself as an unassailably cool individual has been tempered into an abiding knowledge that my family is the origin of any sense of belonging I’ve ever felt. That somehow has a lot to do with my sisters, with how we’ve come to influence and complement and (dare I say) nurture each other, despite our fraught early years. My sisters and I are making very different lives for ourselves, out of a wealth of shared experience that draws us back together every time we choose homemade over storebought, paper over plastic, the interesting difficult long path over the predictable easy short one. Whenever I spend time in their lives I come back to my own better off for it, and I hope that’s a two-way street.