I Would Have Clawed Her Face Off
Next thing I knew, all of my sisters, except one, had made plans to drive or fly in to celebrate Boxing Day with us.
Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss the beauty of sisterhood.
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I Would Have Clawed Her Face Off
Every year, my sisters and I get closer. We had about as hard a childhood as one can imagine. Out of respect for their privacy, I won’t go into the details on everything that we had to endure, but it certainly wasn’t easy.
As most kids growing up in the middle of dysfunction, we fought over everything. Still, we had a bit of a weird dynamic in that while we could be in the middle of a brawl at home, once we went outside, there was an us-versus-the-world mentality. We joke now that it was our childhood trauma that bonded us for life, but really, it was love.
This is not to say that it was always easy for us to protect each other. And there were definitely past sins that marred our relationships with one another. Some cuts are deeper than others, and they took decades to heal. However, the death of our grandparents over the last five years seemed to be the catalyst that finally ended the cycles of pain. It’s not really surprising that burying the two people who were bright spots in our childhood would do that for us. As if their deaths were the last gift of love they gave us before leaving.
My husband makes me laugh because, as I was writing this newsletter, he called in to talk to me. He had to make a last-minute trip to his company’s Oklahoma plant and felt a bit guilty about leaving. But he unknowingly called right in the middle of my flow state. He probably saw the annoyed look on my face when he interrupted my train of thought because he said, “What?! Did I interrupt another phone call with your sisters?”
He’s become accustomed to our daily chats. If we aren’t on FaceTime, we are texting. Almost every time, the conversation is about nothing, and half the time, we are interrupted by one of our children. Still, it’s become one of my favorite rituals. It’s in these moments that I can feel our bond solidifying.
And while I love these moments, there is nothing like being in the same room with them. We are always scheming to get together, which can be tough with three of the six of us living states apart.
With the distance in mind, we had been talking for weeks about how to get our husbands to agree to get together sometime over the Christmas break. Luck struck when one of the sisters, who had just moved to the New York area, announced that she would be traveling to Texas to visit her in-laws for their 50th wedding anniversary. Initially, they were going after Christmas but had decided to come in earlier, giving us the perfect opportunity to steal a couple of days for us: one down and two to go. Boxing Day, a uniquely English holiday, is celebrated in our house every year. My sister asked if they could spend it with us. We made sure to talk about it in our sister group chat, in hopes it would entice the others to join in. Fear of missing out (FOMO) among sisters can be a powerful tool when used correctly.