The Twisted Sisters

My sister and I share our birthday next Saturday.  She was born six minutes into my second birthday in 1971. 

She is the only person on earth who grew up like I did.  When I call and tell her mom's latest antics, she understands.  Those conversations don't take very many words.  She gets it.

She loved to scalp and de-arm or de-leg my Barbies.  She didn't like Barbies and hated it when I played with them.  Her mutilation would make me cry and mom would send her to our room.  We didn't like that interference; I'd go sit on the landing outside our room and we'd plot revenge against mom.  She once heard us planning to push her down the steps. 

Until she was in third grade, she thought my name was "Hunny" and would hurl it at me in our little girl battles.  "I hate you, Hunny!" she'd yell before stomping off.

On my first day of Kindergartern, she got a wee lawn chair and sat in the yard by the lilac bush sucking her thumb.  She waited the entire three hours for the bus to return me to our little world.  Of course our little world was never the same after that; she was always my very unwilling student in the new game of "School."

The advent of our brother was life-changing.  The little foreigner displaced her as the youngest and he was from the strange world of Boy.  We didn't care.  We found our old clothes and dressed him in them.  Dad wanted that to stop long before it did.

She was as perplexed as I at our brother's potty training.  The boy couldn't get on the potty without being stark naked.  The habit lasted until he was four.  We'd find a trail of clothes all the way to the bathroom and know he was in there.  We laughed hysterically the day he came back to watch tv with mom's sanitary napkins taped all over his little body.  He even strategically placed one for modesty's sake. 

We were there the day he stepped on his hamster's tail and saw the comically tragic look on his face when the tail came off the hamster.  Bent over double with tears pouring down our faces, we were dubbed the "Twisted Sisters" by our very annoyed baby brother.

Left alone often with him, we also shared the darkest moments of his early rage.  We would hide in the bathroom when he was at his worst.  One of us would sneak out the second bathroom door and run to get mom or dad while he spent his rage throwing things at the bathroom door.  'Twas a very scarred door indeed.

As teens we suffered each other.  'Nuff said.

I asked her to be my maid of honor when Joe and I married.  She was a great maid of honor.  Our mom was sick by then, spending most of her days in bed.  My sister and I planned my wedding and spent hundreds of hours in that frothly Bride world. 

She fell apart on my wedding day.  She read the second reading at our wedding from Corinthians.  "Love is Patient love is.  Kind love never leads to anger It bears."  She read lines rather than sentences.  The video cracks me up.  We're not sure why she fell apart.  Was it the potential change to our sisterliness?  Was it the normal nerves of someone not used to public speaking?  Was it that both boyfriends were in attendance?

Three months later I found her at her first morning class at St Kates.  Her professor poked his head out the door when we squealed and saw us jumping up and down in the hall.  "Not coming back in, I presume" he said.  She grabbed her bag and we went to Dayton's to buy Adam's first little onsie.  That night I gave Joe the tiny yellow onsie when I told him we were expecting our baby.

The new auntie was a little shocked when she found out the baby was a boy.  She practiced memorizing his name on the way to the hospital.  "I'm NEVER going to remember!" she kept repeating.  She walked in the hosptial room, took tiny Adam in her arms and visibly fell in love.  She spent all her spare time at the hosptial, touching his sweet baby skin and holding his tiny baby fingers. 

She couldn't participate in feeding the baby, so she did everything else.  She dressed him.  Rocked him.  Changed his diapers.  He always pooed on her -- often explosively.  She's a germaphobe to her core, but she never stopped caring for tiny Adam.  Her ability to ignore germs with my boys carries through to this day; they wipe sweat on her, and she just laughs albeit with a tiny shudder.

She often stayed at our house.  One morning I woke and found her and Adam in the kitchen.  She'd made him three or four breakfasts already, and was trying to prepare the next one.  Apparently annoyed that she couldn't figure out what she wanted, he was biting her thigh.  She was frozen in pain and clearly couldn't figure out how to make it stop.  Couldn't help laughing.  Loudly.

Never sure she wanted her own baby, Adam changed her mind.  He was such a content baby, she thought she'd like one too.  Hers wasn't the same calm easy baby, but she was the perfect baby -- the perfect daughter -- for my sister. 

Joined later by Jake, our three offspring became more than cousins.  They are siblings of a sort.  My sister and I shared mothering the three of them for the duration of their lives.  Her and I grew up in the bosom of a tribe; not able to offer them the same, we offered them each other.

Now the mothers of teens, we share sure knowledge that there is no one who loves those three like we do.  And there is no one they love like they love us.

Twisted sisters we are.  Twisted and twined genetically; twisted and united by mutual admiration and respect; twisted and melded as friends. 

I love you, Staci.  Happy Birthday.