Little Sister

Sometimes you only know how much you love someone after you have left them behind. I was eighteen when I left home for university. I didn’t know it then, but I was never to return, except for holiday visits. My life had begun; I was on my way.

The day that Mom and Dad were to drive me to my university, I had carefully packed everything I thought I would need. The car was running. Mom and Dad were sitting behind the wheel waiting; when I suddenly remembered something important that I had forgotten in my room. I don’t recall why now, but I know that there was a sense of urgency about the whole thing at the time. Dad was not a patient man and he hated to travel anywhere. Based on a lifetime of previous trips with my father, I suspect that he wanted ‘to get the trip started so that he and Mom could come back home’.

Whatever the hurry, I went barrelling down the hallway to my room to grab whatever I had forgotten and came rushing back out, intent on getting back to the car before Dad lost his temper. And there, standing at the end of the hall, was my sister – my baby sister – my one and only sibling. I had forgotten about her altogether; had not even said good-by. I stopped dead. For a long, long moment, we just looked at one another. “Well, guess I’ll be going,” I finally mumbled, suddenly, inexplicably, shy.

“Yeah,” my sister responded, shifting from one leg to the other, also uncharacteristically quiet and devoid of her usual spark. She was so tiny at the time: she had had a bad bout of mono, topped by an even worse bout of tonsillitis, and although she was now taller than I was, she weighed less than a hundred pounds (45 kilos). We stood on opposite ends of the hallway for what felt like an eternity. Finally, I awkwardly shuffled toward her, in the direction of the front door. She didn’t move.  For want of something tangible to do, I reached out awkwardly to hug her.

And suddenly, the one person I thought hated me like no other, was holding onto me like she would never let go, her little body shaking with deep, racking sobs. I held her, first in reflex, and then in wonder. I understood for the first time in my life, how completely my sister loved me. Me!

The thing is, I loved my sister, too, yes, but it felt to me that we had been fighting with one another since she had been born, when I was almost three years old. She was the kind of kid who was always in trouble; always up to something. She was loud; she had a foul mouth. She had a terrible temper. I had covered up for her so many times: never hit her back when she pummelled me; artfully covered a hole she had kicked in my bedroom wall for so long, that by the time my parents found it, so much time had gone by that it was useless to get angry with her for it. I had had the dubious distinction of waking her for school for the past seven years. It usually took at least three tries, and I learned to be well out of her way by the time she finally got out of bed and stalked bad-temperedly into the bathroom. My sister was not one to be crossed, especially first thing in the morning.

And yet here she was, sobbing like a small child onto my shoulder, as if her world had ended. How could I not have known the depth of her feelings for me…

Patti Moore Wilson/© wednesdayschildca.wordpress.com

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