When I was in primary school, there was a girl who I greatly admired. She was wonderful: pretty, sweet, funny, she could sing and draw just like from a Disney movie and she had all the coolest toys! I wanted to play with her all the time. Maybe even a bit more often than that. We drifted apart for a few years in our early teens, but then we drifted back together with, it seemed, more in common than ever and we became incredibly close. That bond has been unbreakable ever since, only growing stronger over the years. If I had met her at 16, instead of at 6, I might’ve asked her to marry me but as it turned out we became sisters instead.
There are a lot of people I love in this world, but there are few with whom I feel such a genuine kinship with as with her. We are kindred spirits, soulmates if such a thing exists, and I am grateful, and confident, that when we are two old wrinkled ladies we will still be meeting up over a cup of tea and talking about everything and nothing.
Three days ago, my sister had a baby. And for one long day, in-between the birth and me visiting her, her hubby and the baby on their first day home from the hospital, I feared that our bond was now broken. I thought to myself that if ever there was to come a time when she thought “gods, why do I listen to this girl’s ramblings? I have better things to do!”, it would be now. And horrid as it is to admit, I spent a good part of the day crying preemptively over the idea that the next time I met her there would be some inexplicable gulf separating us (crying preemptively is, by the way, not one of my better habits).
Then, yesterday, I went to visit her and to my utter relief, everything was… normal. Well, as normal as is possible when some has a newborn. I brought chocolate cake and a teddy. She told me about the birth, about the hospital. We cooed over the baby. We joked around with her hubby about who it looked like. We talked about TV shows, and cars, and my parents summer house and, of course, about the baby and the baby’s toes and sleeping habits and tendency to keep her hands in the way while nursing. It was totally and utterly normal. It was just normal with a baby in it. A really, really awesome baby born to a really, really awesome mother, who remains my sister, my soulmate, my North Star.