For the last three months, I’ve woken every day to a new picture of my sister’s baby boy. He’s in her arms, on a blanket, poking his head up from her sling like a turtle. She’s living across the ocean in Hawaii, so we text multiple times a day: about the baby, her body, our family, our hearts. A few days ago, she texted me a picture of her baby snuggled up against her, passed out like a drunk, his tiny baby arm slung casually over her chest. It was almost the same photo as the previous day.
“Same position again,” she texts. “Literally here 90% of the day.”
She’s on her couch, a white mammoth cloud, looking out at the Honolulu coastline. I’m on mine, a cream sectional overlooking my garden in Vancouver. Worlds apart, as usual.
I write back: “I have so many beautiful memories of the late nights and early mornings on my couch in that same position with a sleeping baby, and you just don’t dare to move or they wake up. So many hours just sitting still, when nothing else in the world mattered. God I miss that.”
We’ve been at this exchange of memories since she got home from the hospital on Christmas Eve.
“I imagined it that way,” she responds. “Like a chance to finally slow my life down and decrease my anxiety and meditate, but all I’ve done every time this month is fall asleep, nodding off or panicking about some ailment of my own or his.”
Every text elicits a memory, a smell, an emotion. We are nine years apart, and at polar opposite ends of the parenting spectrum. At 53, I did not expect to be reliving my own long ago, newborn experiences through the prism of my sister’s baby, and certainly not at the exact time as I navigate the transition away from daily motherhood, with my own two children having recently left home for university and their own adult lives.
At a time in my life when the circle felt like it was closing, she is opening it up again. Offering up new life, new starts, new stories. Now, alone on the couch, I contemplate the woman I was for so many years, held by the endless service and sacrifice of raising two kids, and the woman I am now. Who was she, the woman on the couch feeding her babies all those years ago, and what was she thinking about in the twilight hours? What does she remember?
***
I was the first of my friend group to get pregnant. At thirty, I wasn’t that young, but none of my friends were ready to give up Burning Man, all night parties or their careers. It would take most of them another decade. I couldn’t wait. I was traveling all over the world writing for a newspaper. I was falling in love with my new partner.
At thirty-one, I was on my couch breastfeeding into the dawn, just as my sister is doing now. As I stared at my beautiful baby boy, the slow dawning of an unexpected realization emerged: my dream of going back to work, traveling and writing was no longer what I wanted. I wanted to be with my baby 24/7. I remember being so torn about whether or not to take a dream assignment in Afghanistan to train women journalists, a task I would have jumped at just a few months earlier.
I can see now through the clarity of years that everything in my life hinged on that decision. A promising career tossed aside for my baby. There’s nothing I regret about that, but I often wonder what my life would have looked like if I had chosen differently, if I’d had a supportive partner, if I’d been less overtaken with motherhood.
What I also remember from those early days on the couch with my newborn: endless hours just staring at my baby. My mind — always busy and full — was often empty, sated with hormones and a burgeoning, fierce love unlike anything I’d ever known. I was shocked and awed that I could spend so much time doing nothing and still feel so fulfilled. This was the time before iPhones. Sometimes, I would read. Sometimes, I would write. Mostly, I would sit and think; it was the first time I’d really taken that much time for quiet reflection.
My sister texts: “Should I be doing something other than staring?”
“Nope,” I write.
“What do you remember doing in the endless hours of feeding?”
“I don’t remember anything!”
“Your memories are still there,” my sister texts back. “Maybe my journey will inspire you to share them with me.”
Also this: “He barfed allll over me again lol. How much spit up is too much?? ”
***
When I was a new mother cradling my infant on the couch, my sister was literally 22 years away from having her first baby. She was a university student living in California, and not to be obsessive about synchronicity, but she was 22 years old.
Some more important numbers: when I left home for boarding school at 16, my sister was just 7. I never lived at home again. I spent my summers working and traveling and then went off to university. Our brother, a couple years younger than me, left shortly after, and she became virtually an only child, at home with two unhappy parents — alone. When my sister went away to university, she moved first to California, then to Chicago, then Boston, then Hawaii. She too never came home. Eventually I moved back to Vancouver, where we grew up, but she never did.
What does it mean that we only lived together for seven years of her life? How can you even know a sister you’ve never grown up with? And what does it mean for us, as sisters, that we have never lived in the same city, at least not as adults?
We’ve never had a daily relationship, never just hanging out and going for a walk or to get groceries. It has meant that every visit is crammed with catching up and activities, often dinners and celebrations with other family members. Now that she has her own baby, it means never dropping by with food or to hold the baby while she goes to the gym. It means loss. It means having the kind of relationship I don’t want, the kind of family I don’t want. I want proximity, shared daily experiences, support. So does she.
My daughter, born three years after my son, is now a 20-year-old herself and living faraway in Paris. We also no longer have a daily relationship — although I want and crave one. We can’t go for a casual coffee; I can’t run over to help her when she’s sick. We share daily texts and Facetimes and the same geographical challenges I have with my sister. My son, too, lives across the country in another city. Life repeats itself; patterns emerge where they are least expected.
As I sit on the couch in the deep dark of the night alone, what am I supposed to learn from these patterns? What am I supposed to see?
***
When my son was born, my sister flew in from university to be there. What I remember: her holding my thigh, tenderly administering a wet cloth to my forehead, finding ice chips and feeding them to me, staring into my eyes as my partner lay asleep in the corner, telling me I could do it, rubbing my back as I lay moaning and swearing. She was my person. She was fierce and strong and so young. That’s what sisters do, right?
She was always surprising me with her interest and questions about the minutiae of motherhood. As a pre-med student, she was always there for me when I called to ask about my sick kids. When my daughter was born, she wanted to be there. We had it all planned out.
The day my water broke, she was my first call. “I don’t think you have to come yet,” I remember telling her. “I’m not having the baby yet. Wait a couple days.” I was deluded. My daughter was born a few hours later. She wouldn’t have made it anyway. But sure enough, my sister was there less than a day later, holding my new baby, falling in love with her beside me, playing with my now-three-year-old son.
She was, despite the constant interruptions and geography that kept us apart, becoming a crucial part of my life and that of both my children — second mother, fun auntie, soul sister.
What I remember: the effortless way she held it all together for me, with me. The ease with which she entered the room and knew exactly what to do to help.
What she remembers: not having a complete conversation with me for the next decade.
***
Like my sister, I thought that after I had a baby, I would slow down, meditate, write. That first year, on Canadian maternity leave, after I got the hang of things, there were many long, quiet, creative days. I edited an anthology about motherhood with the baby on my lap, between naps and diaper changes. On the couch, grateful for the unexpected sabbatical from my job, feeding into the dark of the night and the dawn of early morning, I would read and dream, feeling the wash of warm summer air drifting in through the open window, his quiet cooing the only sound in our hushed apartment. This was my love
story.
My then-husband wasn’t, although of course I wanted him to be and although it took me years to realize why. Love — I was learning through this baby — was about taking care of someone. My then-husband had never taken care of me. He was kind and good around the house, but he had a short temper and his life ethos was minimal effort. Once, way later, when our kids were starting to ride bikes, I asked him to join us on a ride around the city. We were all at the door, eager and excited to get outside. “Please come,” I begged. “No,” he said. “I’m not spending money to rent a bike.” He stayed home. This happened all the time. I have almost no memories of doing things together as a family.
Luckily, my sister has a different love story. But in motherhood, we are having parallel experiences in lives that have never been parallel. Now she’s the one, glued to her couch, staring at her tiny baby’s moon face, falling in love as I once did.
Swap the warm air of Honolulu through the open windows for the chill of Vancouver, and the tableau is much the same. The years are different; the view certainly is different; we are different. But we are now connected through time and space and a shared experience she has been craving these many years.
She texts about going back to work. She’s nearing the end of her three-month maternity leave from the hospital.
“How will I manage to leave this baby for 15 hours?”
I don’t mince words. “It will be painful.”
***
When my kids were young, we often visited my sister with my mom. My mom, the provider — the husband I never had.
We would sleep on air mattresses in my sister’s tiny apartments in San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. My sister was always singing and dancing with my kids. Always buying cakes for birthdays and half-birthdays. I remember in Chicago walking around in the unbearable heat of summer through a water park with one baby in a stroller and the other on her shoulders. I remember she took us to a chocolate café, and my kids got so high on sugar they both ended up under the table, unable to stop laughing hysterically and we had to leave.
She was in medical school at the time, and our visits were always short, but she was always engaged and present. She loved my kids like her own. Once, she flew in from Chicago, surprising us for my son’s birthday. She arrived at our house and went straight to work shepherding the kids into my backyard, organizing games and expertly navigating the little boy fights about who would be first to hit the piñata. We took turns holding my daughter, cleaning up and reading to both kids before bed.
When she left to go back to her life, I was bereft, and it took a few days to adjust to not having her around. This is what happens when you have a long-distance relationship with a loved one. You live for the visits. The rest of the time is anticipation.
The woman I was on the couch all those years ago? She thought she was creating a family that would surround her forever. She thought all the sacrifice, hard work and emotional energy meant she was building the kind of family she’d never had, but always wanted. She couldn’t ever have anticipated this life of constant arrivals and departures. If she’d known, could she have been more prepared? Could it have blunted the deep sorrow of not having the kinds of daily relationships she craved?
***
My sister recently had her first outing with her baby; her first time leaving the house a month after the birth. She had many questions: what happens if the baby cries at the pharmacy? I really need my prescription filled. Where do you feed the baby in public? Do you whip it out or cover up?
A memory emerges: of my own first outing, walking a stroller down a leafy residential street, sitting on someone’s lawn to breastfeed, crying in frustration that it was so much harder than I thought, covering up with a baby blanket, not having the courage to go into the shop to get groceries.
Weeks later, I met up with a friend at a café. My baby was in a sling and when I sat down, he started crying. I was sweating and stressing. “Just feed your baby,” my friend said. “Who cares what anyone else thinks?”
It was revolutionary. It changed everything. I whipped it out, and then covered up as best I could. No one seemed to notice or care. I shed my self-consciousness like a dirty shirt, thrilled with this permission to not care what others think.
I share this story with my sister, with the hope that it will help her too. But she doesn’t need my help. In just the first month of her new baby’s life, she has already faced many pressures: to breastfeed, to put the baby on a sleep schedule, to entertain visitors when she’s not ready. But already, she knows how to trust herself.
***
To say my sister has been there for me for every major threshold moment is a huge understatement. When my kids were 10 and 13, she encouraged me to come visit her in Hawaii — alone. I had only very rarely left my kids — a combination of disastrous previous experiences and a partner who made it too much work. But she insisted, and I knew it would be an important and long-overdue step for me to get away.
We spent a few days together at a yoga retreat on the North Shore of Oahu. For the first time since my newborn moments on the couch all those years ago, I had time for quiet contemplation. Overwhelmed with the hectic, relentless daily machinations of young motherhood, I hadn’t taken five minutes for myself, hadn’t stopped to listen to the still, small voice in my head.
On the plane ride home, that voice got loud, and I suddenly knew what I needed to do: leave my husband. My sister knew, of course. She was the person I would call after that, when things got hard with my separation, then my divorce. She was wise beyond her years, throwing back advice I’d given her in an endless loop of positive feedback.
“You’re handling this so well,” she wrote after I got home, after I’d told my then-husband it was over. “It’s such a big transition and as usual, you sound so strong and balanced and positive. Enjoy this space, this freedom, this ease. You did this incredibly brave, incredibly difficult and scary and yet awesomely self-loving thing. Just appreciate yourself for that. I’m so proud of you and I’m here for you.”
And so it was, with her love and support, I began my life as a single mom. But ironically, we started to drift apart. Not far, but farther than we’d been for years. Days, sometimes weeks would pass without a text. And although we both knew we were there for each other, she was on her own journey to get pregnant — a long and challenging process, rife with an unjust number of setbacks and devastating loss.
Meanwhile, I was as busy as ever parenting two teens solo, staying up late for party pick-ups, waking up early to work and attempting to rebuild my life post-divorce. I was there for her when she called with the news first of one miscarriage, then another. She was there when I called her with updates on my disaster dating. But we were worlds apart, with her lodged in a dark tunnel of grief, and me just emerging from mine.
When I asked her recently about that time in our relationship, she texted: “I think it was less a drifting apart and more a period of quiet. It was too difficult to talk to anyone; there was very little to say. Talking about it would have just made it worse and feel even more unfair.”
Now that she has her own baby, we are in deep connection again, partly through my memories, once dormant, now reawakened. Buried memories, it turns out, are only buried until you think long and hard enough. Or until your sister has a baby.
***
When I first visited my sister after her baby was born, he was two months old. I gasped when I held him for the first time, awed by how deeply I felt for this little baby who was not of me, and not my own, but who felt, in my marrow, like family.
I held him and didn’t want to ever give him back. My sister, exhausted, was happy to share. While her newborn slept in my arms, we both sat on her great white couch, overlooking the brilliant view of a distant Hawaiian ocean, and she told me her birth story.
She slowed it right down and told me, minute by minute, what had happened. The induction, the pain, the C-section, the violence. I put my hand on her back as she sobbed and stroked her beautiful head. And in that way of ancestral story sharing, it felt sacred.
***
My sister has always been a natural mother. Seeing her with her own baby was one of the most profoundly beautiful experiences of my life. After 44 years, there she was in her kitchen, cooing at him like she did with my son all those years before. There she was on her couch, holding him as he fed, stroking his tiny soft head, as though she’d never struggled to breastfeed, as though it was all so easy. There she was in the hallway, rocking and swaying.
Even when she wasn’t holding him, and I was, she was rocking and swaying in that way mothers do. It’s amazing what we know as mothers. What we endure. My sister, who as a shift worker in emergency rooms for decades thought she knew exhaustion, didn’t know this.
This morning, she texts: “Popping my tits out in the park!” Followed by some laughing emojis and hilariously — some cherries.
In the picture, her half face, smiling that deep, contented smile I know so well. Her baby is feeding, his tiny hand resting on her shirt. I can only see the back of his head and the trees in the distance. When I play the “live,” I see the wind in her hair. And I see her through the distance of years, how much it’s taken her to get here, how much love she has to give, how grateful we both are that she gets this moment. Finally.
I see the parallel in how we parent: fiercely. Really, that’s just how we both love. From a childhood where love was conditional —if you behaved, if you did what you were told, if you followed the rules — we have carved out lives and families from this fierce, unconditional love.
The symmetry is striking: how we, as sisters who grew up years and countries apart, have come to embody the same kind of motherhood.
***
This morning, on my couch at home, I am thinking about the woman I once was, the woman alone with her babies in the quiet dark, and the woman I am today, wistful and worried. Worried about my son driving to his job in the snowstorm across the country, about my daughter’s loneliness in Paris, about my dad’s recent diagnosis, my savings account. I worry I will forget everything.
My sister worries too. Her list is just as long. That’s just what we do.
Then, she texts a photo of her baby in his stroller: “Zoom in on his chins.” And then she sends a TikTok video of a mother who, in a daze with a toddler beside her, looks at the baby chair she is rocking with one foot, and panics when she realizes her baby is not in there. She gets up and paces around like a crazed maniac looking for the baby — who is in her arms.
“I understand this on every level now .”
“Same,” I text back. “It’s never ending.”
Image: Photo by Sarah Chai, Pexels, licensed under CC 2.0.
- On Sisterhood Across Time, Borders and Babies - January 7, 2025
What a beautiful story of life. There is so much love and yearning in your story of sisterhood, babies, divorce and renewal. Thank you.