Sisters
BY KATE BAILEY
Photo Courtesy | Kate Bailey
When we were little, my sister and I technically had separate bedrooms. We lived in a modest home, and our rooms were directly across the tiny hall from one another. We kept our things in our assigned spaces, but every night it seemed, we ended up in my sister’s room together. She, in her bed, and I, on the trundle bed that hid underneath hers during the day. I don’t feel like we slept very well there together – I can still see the way headlights flashed through her window – but I know that we were together, and that was the most important part. Every night, I’d grab hold of the metal handle to pull the bed out, and in the morning before school, I’d lay on the carpet, put my spindly arms against the adjacent wall, and use my feet to kick the trundle back into its secret spot.
My sister and I are two-and-a-half years apart, but our connection has always been more like that of twins. We can communicate simply without words. We listen to the same songs at the same time 400 miles away from one another. We have the same voice, the same laugh, and sometimes when we talk on the phone, it feels like I’m talking to myself. We aren’t that much alike, really, though – just eerily connected in a way only tight-knit siblings can understand, I guess.
When I found out that my second child would be a girl, I couldn’t believe this odd cyclical nature of my life. My mother had my sister at the same age I had my oldest daughter, Jane, and she had me at the same age I had my youngest daughter, April. Jane looks nearly identical to my sister. April, nearly identical to me. Jane is a brilliant and beautiful show-boat like my sister. My mother always claimed that I brought her an enormous amount of peace and tranquility when I was born, and the moment April was laid on my chest, I felt the same (even though she tried her hardest to convince me otherwise when she barely slept for about a year and a half).
When my family went to the beach last September, my oldest daughter had a meltdown. Nothing had happened – she was just tired and overwhelmed. My husband and I tried and tried to console Jane. We held her, talked through it with her – nothing worked. As we finally felt like giving up, my one-and-a-half year old sat next to her in our little pop-up tent, ate crackers, and just gently caressed Jane’s arm and back while she cried. When Jane finally laid down, April laid down next to her, hand still resting on her arm, and they just quietly stared into each other’s eyes. Within moments, Jane stopped crying and was ready to carry on with the day. April didn’t have to say a thing. She just had to be there. April’s hand – made up entirely of the same things as Jane’s – was enough to do the job that I couldn’t do, even as her mother.
Photo Courtesy | Kate Bailey
I took photos to capture that moment – one that showcased the pure magic of siblings raised to love one another. I stood on that beach, and I thought of a time several years prior, when my sister and I sat cross-legged on a hospital bed, face-to-face, and I sternly told her, “This is not your life,” after she had an awful incident with an ex-partner. Her icy exterior broke, and she stared into my eyes and cried. I thought of the way the sun outlined her face when I told her nonchalantly years before that I wasn’t sure if Eric and I could have children, and she said, “It’s okay to want this, Katie.” I looked into her eyes, and I knew she knew. I couldn’t keep my desire for children from her, even though I tried to keep it from myself.
As mothers, we carry these babies and birth them and nourish them, and our connection will always be as primal as it can get. But a sibling is something different entirely – like an extra you in the world. My sister and I grew up in the same household with almost entirely different experiences. Our personalities, the way we were treated, the things we lived through. But we were there – together. And to be in the trenches with someone is a connection that is undeniable. Now, as adults, we are able to look at each other and say, “How do you remember that?” We look at my daughters – her nieces – and we say, “How do we do right by them?” We are all too aware of the weight we carry as women raising women.
But the beauty of having daughters is that I don’t have to carry that weight alone. They have each other. When this world seems too scary for them as girls, they always, always have each other. To know that I have my sister – no matter how close or how far, how present or how absent – makes this world a lot more comfortable. Like someone is just always on my team no matter what. Someone is made up of all the same stuff I’m made of, and no matter how different we may be, she understands me to my core because our cores are the same.