sistering & daughtering

I was talking with my mother on the phone this afternoon, mostly just making sure she and Paul had made it home (or mostly home, being still nearly 100 miles from Anacortes) after their stay in Pennsylvania this past week. Mostly this, but also there was this: "Well, Emily, we got our boy married."

Indeed we walked our boy down the aisle three days ago, our six awkward elbows linked inextricably at least for those few moments, him looking adorable and anxious and ecstatic, us in our fancy red get-ups looking anxious and happy and, I imagine, ever so slightly bereft.

It's a funny thing to be an older sister walking a baby brother down the aisle. And it's an even funnier thing when that relationship, this sibling bond of ours, seems in some ways so much closer, so much more intimate, than the relationships shared between most siblings I know.

I drove down to Philadelphia Friday afternoon with three friends and our conversation (between naps by at least some of us in the back seat) ranged far. But the moment that jumped out at me, the moment I have been carrying with me, was a particular exchange between Jill, driving, and Dave, in the shotgun seat, half heard through my sleepy hazy daze, curled up in the back.

They were talking about kids, specifically about how many they might, in an abstractly futuristic way, have. Jill said she wanted two, that she would never have only one child. Dave retorted, with a surprising edge to his voice (this is Dave after all, one of the kindest, gentlest creatures known to man), that she should watch what she said next. She explained that both of her parents are only children and both are neurotic, and she doesn't want her kids to be like that. (I know I am paraphrasing here, and was not entirely awake, but this is how I read, how I remember reading, the conversation.) He countered with the fact that both he and his husband are only children and quite well adjusted, thank you very much.

I wouldn't disagree with either of them, knowing them and their families as I do. But what I would add, what I found lacking in their discussion, wasn't so much how the kid(s) it(them)self(ves) would turn out, but any acknowledgment of the joy that a sibling relationship can provide.

Friends and lovers come and go, parents die before their kids, and the world moves on. But I know on some indisputable level that no matter where I am in the world, no matter where Nathan is in the world, we are not alone in that world.

It's a pleasing thing, having a brother one adores, and the three of us, my mother, my brother, and me, we make an odd little trio sometimes but a formidable one, I think, in our love for each other.

And it was such a happy, a thrilling, a satisfying thing, accompanying our boy down the aisle on his way to his new bride, all of us lucky enough to be surrounded by people we love -- friends and family from Washington State, Washington D.C., France, Pennsylvania, New York, Kansas, Norway, and more.