From Left to Write Book Club: The Kids Are All Right

After Connor was born, Ed and I spent a fair amount of time discussing whether we would ever go through that again, and by that, I mean - sleepless nights, a child who would not allow me to leave the room without making his displeasure known, and did I mention the sleep? Wow, was Connor an intense baby.

When we bandied about the idea of another child, I kept returning to this. My sister will, at some point, be the only person who holds my past. She was there from the beginning, and I fully expect her to be around with me for a good number of years - quite possibly to the end.

She's great, but she's not perfect. Unlike many older siblings, my sister did not break my parents in, which is a bummer because as a younger sister, I shouldn't have had to tread on territory like breaking curfew and bending other random rules. This territory should have been covered with her teen years.

On the flip side, she helped me navigate through high school, she tried to keep me out of trouble (and this is where she will insert the story about how she rode her bike all the way to our elementary school and back one day when I left my lunchbox there, and my mom had frankly, had it with me leaving my stuff everywhere - she tells it in a selfless way, as if she were just being nice, but I believe having that lunchbox at home when my mom got home meant I got to spend the night with a friend, so in retrospect, I think she might've just done it to get rid of me for the night). And, my sister, who NEVER raised her voice, and never got in trouble, and was never mean to anyone once told this punk on the school bus to "SHUT UP" when he was making fun of me. And he did. I had been in a bike wreck and scraped my upper lip pretty badly. At one point during the healing process, it was all yellowy, and this jerk on the bus started taunting me about boogers on my face and my sister silenced him. I would've just ignored him and cried about it at home, but she stood up for me. And in doing so, taught me an important lesson.

Sure, we went through a few tough years, where I was trying to find my independent place in the world and she was in my way. And even now, life isn't always perfect. She happens to be very opinionated and those opinions can be based on her random thinking, rather than actual facts, and that can be annoying. Seriously. She'll still tell me I should not have given birth to my children at home. And those two birth experiences? They rank as the only reason I would ever even consider having a third child.

But no matter what, she holds my past. And it's a shared past, and having someone like that in life has been very important to me. It's a way to sort through history, with someone who views it through roughly the same lens, or at least with similar formative experiences.

The discourse over whether Connor would or would not have a sibling often ended with me saying "but if he doesn't have a sibling, who will he have when we die?" and Ed was all logical and stuff, and would say things like "not all siblings are friends, so having a second child does not guarantee bliss ever more".

I was reminded of just how important my sis is to me when I read the latest From Left to Write Book Club selection, The Kids are All Right. In this book, four siblings record memories from their childhood: before their father died, while their mother battled cancer, and after their mother died.

This book not only reminded me about my own sister, but it also made me panic several times, as I thought about what would happen to Connor and Helen if Ed and I were to die. And even though the thought of leaving Helen and Connor alone in the world at some point makes my heart hurt, I do feel good that, in all likelihood, they'll have each other.

No one could possibly understand them better than their sibling.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the From Left to Write Book Club. We write posts inspired by the books, not reviews. I laughed, I cried, I thought a lot about my sister and my own mortality. It's a great read. Now that I've read it, I'll be passing it along to a friend.