My Sister Becomes Human

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The other day while she was getting ready, my younger sister turned to me to describe a mundane feeling. She told me, “you know that feeling when you think you’re forgetting something but you don’t know what you’re forgetting? That just happened to me with my purse!” It’s not really the expected things about watching her grow up that floor me. I knew she’d probably start walking, I knew she’d likely repeat language and get better and better at it. But it’s the mundane stuff that really gets me.

When she displays evidence of having an interior life, I really take stock of what is going on. Her memory baffles me. She will recall activities we’ve done together that I would need to at least see a picture of to recall. She is a very active kid with a broad vocabulary. She has the beginnings of a great problem solving ability, and she is becoming more open to accepting challenges instead of running from them.

When she was very young, I was basically a ghost. She wouldn’t recognize me as her sister when I would show up, likely because my appearances were pretty rare. I was in college at the time, broke as hell, and all I wanted to do was spend time with my friends. I was a loner throughout highschool, so my obsessive clingy friend phase got delayed a bit. I was also intimidated by the responsibility. This was a child. Someone who would learn from me. Me, who knows nothing at all. At…