Mom, the Baby Stinks!

My sister was born in my family’s old apartment one week before we moved out. I was two and a half years old at the time. I don’t remember the apartment much, although the house we moved to, where my parents still live, is within walking distance. I was too young to remember the color of the carpeting, or the height of the midwife who rushed to our place when my mother went into labor. What I remember is arms. There were the arms of my father and the arms of my mother, her hand clasped tightly in his. There were the arms of the midwife, bare and steady. There were arms encircling me, tan and freckled. They were the arms of a lady named Meg. She was my mother’s friend, and she was in charge of watching me. I was seated on her lap, off to the side where I could barely see my mother through Meg‘s freckled arms. When my sister was born, and the cord was cut, Meg eventually let me down from her lap. Two more arms had come into the world. They were tiny arms with ten tiny fingers. When I reached the side of the bed, my tiny sister, Michelle, was in the arms of my exhausted mother. I walked up to them and said, “Mom, the baby stinks!”

Yes, the very first thing I said about my sister was not how beautiful she was, how fragile looking and small, but that she smelled. My sister has never let me forget that fact once she learned it from my parents as an older child. She teases me about it incessantly, although I think it would be in her interest to let it slide. Who wants to be thought of as smelly, even as a baby? This is just one of the many things we disagree on, and we have disagreed on plenty. My mother once wrote a song about how much my sister and I could bicker. We certainly haven’t always gotten along, but I would give my liver for her, and donate my two arms too if she ever needed them. My sister is my best friend.

When I was a kid, my mom used to take my siblings and me to a lake by our house. We would spend all day in the water, feeding the bigger fish, and catching the minnows with our cupped hands (and letting them go). My sister and I would float around and pretend to be fresh water mermaids; readily available Cattails would become our tridents (we didn't know those were supposed to have three prongs). I remember playing make-believe. For a long time, the favorite game of my sister and I was "Lilly and Ivy," an ongoing story where we battled monsters, and had grand adventures through the many realms we imagined our yard to contain. "Don't step on that flower!" Michelle would yell, "It makes you walk backward." But it would be too late. I would already have stepped on the daisy, and then my sister would have to chase me around the yard, as I stumbled backward through it. She would find a magic leaf to end my plight. Then we would make spears out of the branches of our "Sunflower tree," and use them to battle the goblin hiding in one of our forts. We always won. Our adventures always had happy endings.

We grew older, and eventually grew out of our make-believe games. We would spend the day at the mall shopping, or call our friends and get a group together to go see a movie. Even though we were two years apart, we tended to hang out with the same people. And then she got sick. My sister, Michelle, got very sick. It was the winter of 1999, and I remember because so many people in our small town were freaking out about “Y2K.” All of my parent’s energy went into caring for my sister. I would stay up all night, my insomnia fed from the energy of their fear for her. I would stay up late with my sister, and fall asleep in her room. My mom brought blankets in, and we slept on the floor. Then, one night I woke up to chaos. My mother was leaning over me, panicking, “Call 911!” She turned back to my sister, and I remained, laying dazed on the blankets on the floor.

“Call 911! Michelle isn’t breathing.”

“What?” I gasped at my mom.

“Just bring me the phone!”

I ran down the hall, and into our kitchen, but the phone wasn’t on the hook. I was terrified and panicking, and I didn’t think to hit the button on the phone’s base that would make it beep, hinting to its location. I tore through the house, searching the countertops and tables. I found the phone on our dinning room table, and ran it to my mom. My arms were shaking by the time I got there. Michelle was sitting up in bed, coughing. She was okay. She was going to be fine, but I realized that day just how precious life is. The people we care about can be taken away so easily. Life is such a fragile gift. Endings aren’t always happy. The bacteria that was infecting my sister’s system couldn’t be defeated with tridents made from cattails or spears made from our “Sunflower tree.” My arms weren’t strong enough to make her better. That took the arms and the brains of doctors over the course of four months. Her lungs were so damaged from her illness that she had to use an inhaler for a year after she had otherwise recovered.

My sister has always been there for me when I’ve needed her. She has taken care of me when I’ve been sick, and talked me through the rough times when I’ve been down. I know that I’m lucky to have a person like her in my life, a person I can depend on no matter what. A person who I’ve already been through so much with.