I have been looking for my sister most of my adult life. We're just 22 months apart and both of us were raised as onlies, with much older siblings. Her sister is 12 years her senior - mine are 7 and 9 and did not grow up in my house. Damn lonely childhoods for us both.
I watched a movie tonight called "People Like Us". Rotten Tomatoes said it was corny and contrived. Obviously written by people who haven't been in this kind of situation and don't know anyone who has. Otherwise they would understand the instinct to watch without being revealed, to understand without being exposed. I remember the first real glimpse I got of my sister. My stomach flipped over. 31 years of looking and there she was. There she was. And she looks so much like my mother, the person I probably love more than anyone else in the whole world. I wished I could have just watched her for a while. Before all my emotions and my sense of responsibility to my mother's emotional state overwhelmed me. This movie - it might not have been Shakespeare but it was written from the heart from someone who has been there. And I got it. It's a very big world of for some of us, there's not many places where we belong. Blood relationships can be a unique kind of safety. The proverbial shelter in the storm.
31 years I had a huge hole in my life. While other people talked about their fights, their jokes and their memories, I had an empty place where my sister should have been. Now that place is healed over, but there's a scar there I keep fingering, an impulse I have to touch what used to hurt so much. I don't know where this relationship will lead. I am squarely in the middle of my anticipated life expectancy. So if I have another 45 years, what will they be like and where will she fit?
There was always one big question in my life. Where was she? Now that one is answered, but it's replaced with others.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment