Sibling Rivalry

When strangers ask me how many brothers and sisters I have, I usually have to pause, and think before answering. If it’s just the run-of-the-mill stranger, who I won’t see again and the answer “two” will suffice my conscience, I go with that. If it’s someone I think I might remotely run into again, who might remember my answer of “two,” and then question me about why I am suddenly talking about ‘my little sisters,” or, “my other brother,” I have to answer more truthfully, which is more of a mouthful than a number. There are stories and backstories to my answer, which makes things complicated. On a good day, I have six, though two I almost always claim, since I was raised with them, despite the fact that we share zero DNA, two “halfs” as I refer to them, since that denotes the fact that we do not share the same father, and two “littles,” because thats what they were to me when I met them: 4 and 8…little sisters.

Sibling relationships are complicated.
Adoption makes that even more complicated.

I was in graduate school when I found my sibling’s families. My sister is lucky enough to be born in a state that allows her easy access to her Original Birth Certificate (you know, the one that’s historically true, and lists the vagina she came out of, and not the made up one that she carries identifying her as being my sister by blood). Once she got that certificate in the mail she had a last name and my sleuthing dug up an old Classmates.com account and voila, she was in contact with her mother. And her sister. Or half sister. I’m not sure how she classifies it, now.

My brother wasn’t so lucky as he was born in the same locked-down version of Washington State law that doesn’t allow us access to our own medical and historical documents without having our parent’s consent (though how the fuck we get the consent when we don’t know who these people are is beyond me). We did have first names, though, and the information that they were married, or at least HAD been married at some time. 24 hours of hardcore internet searching, cross-referencing and examining birthdates and address records, led me to his parents. They are married. One older half brother. Two younger full sisters.

The English language doesn’t have words or names for my brother’s sister. No, she’s not my sister-in-law, I told someone one time. She’s my brother’s sister. Or my sister’s sister. Funnier yet is when I talk about my sister’s mother, a lovely woman, who I got to meet one spring day at my parent’s house.

Confused yet? Cause I sure am…

It’s strange enough that I have to always explain that, yes I have 2 moms and 2 dads, no they aren’t step-parents, and no they aren’t gay, either. I have between 2 and 6 siblings, and my siblings have siblings, and I don’t have a name for that, or a name for my sibling’s parents, either.

So I was talking to my sister Poochie this week, and she was telling me her excitement and anxiety about going down to see her family in Oregon. That she was walking Hood to Coast with them, her mother, and grandmother, and aunts and cousin and her sister. And that she was excited because “all the girls” were gonna be in the same van.

But I would not be in that van.

And I felt sad.

Left out.

Not intentionally, or like I even want to be a part of her family in that way, but because she and I weren’t doing something together. That I had to share, and sharing is hard, and I wanted to say mean things like “my son is cuter than your other sister’s son,” but I held my tongue.

Her reunion with her family is what I’ve wanted and advocated and fiercely defended to outsiders and our parent’s alike. Same with my brother, though he is much more private about his encounters wiht a fully functioning biological set of family, though I am often startled when pictures pop up unsolicited online.

I am jealous.

It’s not that I want their other lives, but I sometimes long for it to not be so fucking complicated.
Mostly I just kinda wish I was wearing pink sneakers and walking to the ocean with my sister.

Wild: A Review

My hips and thighs and ankles hurt. Not from hiking 1,100 miles, like Cheryl Strayed does in her memoir, Wild, but from lying still, in bed, for hours on one side, cuddled up to a smallish human being who aches for my nipple to soothe him into slumber. I often feel alone, and resonated deeply with Cheryl’s descriptions of the necessity to do her trip alone, while appreciating and loving the people she meets along the way. Very much an example of the hero’s journey, and while I’ve heard reviews that state it’s over the top, I felt she lived up to her “Queen of the PCT” title given her by her fellow travelers.

I was introduced to the author by women in the processing group I lead. One suggested we check out the advice column “Dear Sugar,” and that she had also written these things that were worth mentioning. My co-leader said she had Wild on her nightstand and was making her way through it. Fascinated with a story about the PCT, a trail that I once fantasized about hiking solo, too, I knew that I had to read her adventure, if for nothing else than to see, perhaps, a glimmer into what my life could have been like, if I had done a different solo trip than the one I actually did.

I think my three day solo adventure to Ohanapecosh, my childhood campground in the Mt. Rainier National Forest, actually prepared me for those 6 months in India. I wonder if the 6 months in India prepared me for the solo adventure of motherhood. And when I say solo, I don’t meant that I’m not mostly-happily partnered up, or that I don’t have a great network of supportive people around me to watch Potamus or go to coffee with, but because the journey to becoming and embodying motherhood is inside me, a trek I’ve only been on for a short-though-feels-like-fucking-ever time. I am on a trail, and I pass beautiful things, and hard things, and I feel like stopping and resting my feet and sleeping for 1,000 hours, but the drive to keep moving forward, the nudge from the foot in my side saying “feed me mama,” is still there. Like Cheryl, I have my own Monster…her pack, my baby. Love sometimes. Loathe others. Feels heavy and full and bears down on my hips making them ache from swaying to relieve the pressure, if only for a moment.

I am tired after reading this book. I feel like I have so many more miles to walk, through snow and rain and sunshine, and while it gives me hope, it shows me just how hard it actually is. She doesn’t sugar-coat the difficulty, from losing toes, and gaining callouses, to the intangible diffulties of overcoming fear and the cocky unprepared pride she had starting out her journey.

I would recommend it to so many of you. She will go on my shelf of spiritual and literary dashboard saints. Maybe I’ll wedge her between Donald Miller and Anne Lamott, or closer to Elizabeth Gilbert and Sherman Alexie. I feel inspired. I feel like I can hobble to bed and not feel guilty for memory foam or a down comforter, but know that my journey is hard and that is okay, because my journey is different, but that maybe I’m doing it for the same reasons or entirely different ones, and that is okay, too. Maybe, when I reach my destination, my own Bridge of the Gods, I will be healed, just like Cheryl.