A few of you have asked about my sister lately... Hermana is in kind of limbo at the moment—too old to continue in her small school and with parents not convinced of what her next step should be. She is to stay in her bucolic day school for a few more months and then—well, then is the question. To which there are some answers and plans but none that I feel sufficiently confident will actually happen.
The subject of my sister is of course a difficult one. Even though I have had several years to adjust to the idea. The reality that her life will be so different from what I might have hope for her is a bitter reality that I doubt any of us have truly faced. There are key times when I am confronted with it and this month may be one of the most difficult. Hermana should be heading off to college at this moment. While it is possible that she would have made the northern migration most of us chose to go to college next September its equally likely that but, she would be attending University at home. She’d be feeling nervous about starting college and relieved that the pressure of choosing her course of study—a rather difficult choice for someone in their last year of high school—was over. I wonder whether she would have succumbed to social pressure and been the first of us to study business or if she would have followed her love of music and followed my brother’s path. I suspect the latter but there is no way to tell really.
Part of me focuses on the fact that she certainly seems happier than the rest of the women in my family. I am not sure why, because when I speak to my parents as well as my aunts and uncles, I don’t get impression that they have lowered expectations or some other chauvinistic conception of the world; however it must be said that all the women in my family have difficulties that our male cousins don’t seem to have had. Hermana is blissfully free of that at least. Her adolescence was a million times happier than mine and I suspect easily happier than all but one of my cousins. My fear should be that she may not always be as happy as she is now. But all my regrets, lately, are of what might have been. Hermana laughing with her friends outside of the university, complaining about the classes she needs to take, despairing that there are no boys worth dating in her class…
The first time this melancholy swept across me was a couple of years ago, I was brushing her hair and I realized we would never have the kind of sisterly relation– a kind of pastiche of Hollywood recreations of sisterhood no doubt—that I had somehow unknowingly absorbed or imagined. So my regrets are largely selfish ones what I won’t see her do, what I won’t hear in telephone conversations, what we won’t share and that is my consolation: the fact that her regrets seem few, that, although I know she wishes she could all the things that other people do, she seems happy and is surrounded by the people she loves or perhaps more remarkably, has learned to love all those who surround her. Would that we all had that talent.