Catching Up

Blog post #145 of 365

My sister and I have had a reasonably rough life together and apart. We grew up in the same house with one of my little brothers. We were raised in the same home with the same parents and family but we see the world very differently. Our memories of our childhood intertwined as they were are remembered differently. I think it goes back to that old saying there are three sides to every story yours, mine and the truth. I believe the truth is ours. Our own view of our world are seen through our eyes and remembered in our brains is our truth no matter how different from "reality" it might be. However she would probably argue that her views are correct and mine are wrong. I'll just agree to disagree.

We had different lives.

She struggled in school. In part from an illness that left her having seizures for several years. The kind of seizure the onlooker doesn't always see. She zoned out and would lose large gaps of time. Imagine a learning environment with 25 to 35 students and one kids just "daydreams" for bits of time. I can see how someone might struggle in that environment. Many teachers probably had no idea how hard it was. She says she has a learning disability but I tend to disagree.

Our biological father was harder on her. She ruined his independence. His ability to be carefree was taken when she arrived. He blamed her. He took his frustrations out on her. I arrived two years later and even though I wasn't a boy I was forgiven and tolerated a little better than she was because she broke him in. She was "defective" in his eyes and that couldn't have been easy either.

We grew up and started our own families. Made our own choices and to be honest we both made a million poor choices (in my opinion) but did the best we could with the choices we made both good and bad. As time went on we grew apart although I don't think we were as close as we could or should have been.

Since my sister moved away first to Pennsylvania and then further to Australia we got even further apart. For a time after she moved to Australia if I wanted to interact with her or speak to her at all I had to make her mad. I did at times intentionally and unintentionally agitate her. But as we have aged and I think matured. We  have grown more tolerant. I post photos of her kids and grandkids. Not to rub in her inability to see the but so she can see them too even if only through the photos. I believe she learned that many of the things I have done through the years were not done to anger her but to give her a look into the life she left when she left the States.

She got married again almost a year ago. This is her fifth husband. He helped her return to the States for the first time in thirteen years. She has ten grandchildren and had never met any of them until her return last month.You can imagine the amount of catching up that needs to happen when someone has been away for so long. When they have missed so much of the lives of people they know and love. Especially the ones they love and hadn't met yet!

These few weeks have been filled. Unfortunately filled with doctor appointments and shuttling back and forth between home and visits with people my sister needs to connect with and sites my sister and her new husband wanted to see while they were here. There really hasn't been much time to catch up. No time luckily to dwell on differences or on the negatives of the past.

I'll update again later.