How to Be a Sister by Eileen Garvin (icecream ebook reader .TXT) 📗

myself, and remembering the unkind pull of the sharp teeth in my own snarly young locks, I was afraid I would hurt her. But this kid was resilient. I brushed, I braided, and I wasn’t half bad at it. She smiled at me and told me I did a pretty good job.

With Tony I learned to trust that I would know what to say when he padded into the kitchen at 10:00 PM in his little Spiderman pajamas to tell me he couldn’t sleep. That I would find some trick in my Auntie Toolbox to comfort him enough so that he’d be able to slide into bed and burrow his head down like a small animal, wearing the remnant of his security blanket like a scarf. And he showed me I can get over my ancient hang-ups—like sharing a bed with somebody else and not minding if I don’t sleep very well.

And then there was Bobby, the stoic eldest. When I went to bed and saw his light on upstairs, I thought about his lonely breakfast that morning in the dark kitchen. He had to leave at 7:00 AM each day for high school in the next town over and at fourteen was getting himself up and out the door on his own. I worried that I had been too serious about following my sister’s instructions about the rules. So I got out of bed and climbed up the stairs. I poked my head in through his open door and saw Bobby with his headphones on, doing his homework. I pointed at the clock and called him the family vampire. That made him smile. We talked about how fun it is to stay up late and how hard it is to get up in the morning. He told me about what he was working on, a critique for his creative writing class. I didn’t say much. I didn’t know what to say, but I just wanted him to know that I saw him, that I recognized him, and that I could see the person he is always becoming.

The next morning I listened to Bobby trying to get up for an hour—5:45 AM, 6:00 AM, 6:15 AM, 6:30 AM—his alarm shouting me awake every fifteen minutes. Alarm! Snooze. Alarm! Snooze. I dragged myself into the kitchen to make some coffee at 7:00 AM and told him he should get a medal for getting up so early. Before he left, I put my arms around him and told him to come visit me in Oregon soon.

Julia and Tony held my hands on the way to school, and I loved the feeling of their smooth little paws. More than that, I loved the feeling of trust, their cheerful assumption that I love them back, which I do, immensely. They let go of me and jumped up to walk the rock wall next to the sidewalk, all the while chatting away to me, not missing a step. At the school I watched them head into their separate classrooms and into a day that would become part of a lifetime as it piled up on the other days that had come before it. And I hoped my short time with them would be a good memory in that pile.

I DROVE HOME through the Pacific Northwest rain, dodging semitrucks and puddles, thinking of their red-gold hair, their sweet faces, their laughter. I thought about my sister and her husband, the architects of their children’s characters. How do you do it? I wondered. How do you figure out the right rules to sustain you through a day, a year, or a lifetime? When do you know you are teaching them how to become the people they were born to be and when you are getting in their way? Is it the success of the day-to-day or the crisis that proves it to you? How do you encourage them to do things their own way, and how do you stand back and let them fail, knowing that it is just one small part of who they will become?

Soon I was back in my quiet house with my needy cats and my patient dog. Nobody wanted to play with me. They just wanted food, water, and the couch. After climbing the stairs that night, I was happy to be in my own bed, but I missed the warmth and weight of Tony dreaming next to me. My house was full of the dark and the silence that comes from the absence of children. And even after all these years, I still felt the quiet created by Margaret’s absence.

I knew then that having Margaret as a sister played some part in my decision not to have children. It’s not that I was worried about giving birth to a child with disabilities. The odds are against it. And the rational part of me knew that raising a non-autistic child wouldn’t be as difficult. A child could learn and grow and change in ways that might seem like magic to me after watching Margaret struggle to learn the kinds of things we take for granted: Look at people when you talk to them; eat your food in small bites, get dressed before you come out of the locker room, don’t spank Father Bach or run a fingertip up ladies’ pantyhose on the way back from communion. My mother, Margaret’s teachers, and countless others worked with her over the years and so did the rest of us family members. There was so much that she could never master, and in trying to help teach her, I had always felt like I was failing over and over again.

It was not rational, but I knew it was part of the reason I’d chosen not to be a parent. I wouldn’t ever know what my life would have been like if I had made a different choice, but that was something I had to live with, just as we all live