July Writing Challenge – Day Two – Dear Paula

Here is the entry for the second writing challenge. The prompts were:

• Genre: Memoir/Personal Essay
• Form/Constraint: Direct Address
• Word Count: 1,500

I chose to write a letter to my sister.

There’s some back story you need before you read it.

Back in April, my mom got seriously ill. The kind of ill where they sit you down and tell you the time left is measured in weeks (days!), not years. Dad, with his dementia, wasn’t able to make the calls. And as much as he gets under my skin, I wasn’t going to make him try. So I picked up the phone and started working through the family, one by one.

I called my cousin Patricia. Towards the end of the conversation, she said something that stopped me cold. Someone had been trying to get hold of Mom. A woman. And then Patricia told me why.

When Mom was twenty years old, she had a baby girl. A daughter she was forced to give up for adoption. She carried that secret for nearly sixty years and took it to the grave with her.

Patricia gave me a number. I rang it. And that’s how I found Paula. My sister.

We’ve talked. We’ve met a few times now. And it has been the most unexpectedly wonderful thing to ever happen in my life.

The cruelest part? Mom and Paula never got to meet. Two days after we found each other, Mom passed away. Two days. That close. I won’t pretend that wasn’t a hard time, Mom and I were close in a way that makes present tense still slip out of my mouth when I talk about her. It kinda kills me to have to correct myself.

But Paula arrived at exactly the right moment. She’s not a replacement for Mom, though with her stunningly beautiful face and those mannerisms, she absolutely could be. That’s the strange thing. She’s not a stand-in. She’s an addition. A part of my family I didn’t know was missing until she walked into it.

Her, her husband, my two handsome nephews, they’re in my life now. And I smile every single time I think of them.

So this letter is for her.

My sister.

Dear Paula,

I have a sister. I’ve always had a sister, I just didn’t know her name until a few months ago. You’ve been my older sister my whole life and I never got to call you that. Not once. Not until now. Bit of a communication breakdown, that. Someone dropped the ball. Or more accurately, several someones spent decades covering it up, but we’ll get to that.

Here’s the strange thing about the geography of it all. I grew up in Lichfield. Staffordshire. You were what, twelve miles away? Fifteen? We could have met on a bike ride, assuming one of us had a bike and the other had any idea the other existed. We could have passed each other on the A51 and never known we shared blood. We probably did pass each other. I was probably in the queue behind you at the Co-op at some point in 1989, glaring at the back of your head because you were taking too long with your change, and neither of us thought to say “excuse me, are you my secret sibling?” because why would you? That’s not a thing people ask. All those years I was walking around the same corner of the world, and my sister was just down the road. I think about that more than I should. I think about being a teenager in Lichfield, miserable and confused, and how different it might have been if I had known there was someone out there who shared my blood, who might have understood without being told. But you were there. Right there. And neither of us knew because apparently our family tree had some very creative pruning.

I found out about you through our cousin, Patricia. She told me someone had been trying to find my mother. That was the key that turned the lock, your knowledge of her name, your searching online. I remember standing there with the phone in my hand, the floor tilting under me, thinking ‘there’s another one. There’s another family member out there, and it’s my sister.’ And I cried. I did. But I was happy. The two things happened at once, like a chord struck with both hands. Joy and shock, right on top of each other. I looked like an absolute wreck. Snot, tears, grinning like an idiot. It’s a good thing nobody was filming.

And here’s the timing of it, which still feels cruel in a way I can’t fully articulate: I was on the verge of losing my mother when I found out I had a sister. I was already braced for one kind of loss, and then suddenly there you were, a gift I didn’t know I was waiting for, arriving at the most complicated possible moment. The universe has a sense of humour, I’ll give it that. A dark, deeply mischievous sense of humour. But it also has a habit of opening doors exactly when you need them, so maybe I should stop complaining and just say thank you.

We met at the Bowling Green. I used to work there, back when it was the Monterey. So the pub where I met my sister for the first time is the same pub where young me, the me who didn’t know you existed, pulled pints and wiped tables while dreaming about getting out of Lichfield, and possibly serving you! There’s something circular about that. Something that feels written, even if it probably isn’t. And also, a little bit mortifying. Teenage me worked that bar. I dread to think what I was like. I probably served people with the exact wrong amount of attitude and thought I was very cool.

I remember you walking in. That’s the image I keep coming back to. You walked through the door and I saw her. I saw our mom in your face. Not a vague resemblance, not a ‘you could be related’ squint, I saw her. The same eyes, the same set of the jaw, something in the way you held yourself. I didn’t need a DNA test. I didn’t need paperwork. I just needed to see you walk through a door.

We hugged and we both cried. The hug was an honest response to the situation. Two adults, strangers in every official sense, holding on to each other because the alternative was too complicated to process. We had forty years of missed Christmases and unshared secrets to compress into a single embrace. We did our best. I think we did alright.

I’m sad about the things I missed. I’m sad I wasn’t at your wedding. I’m sad I wasn’t there when my nephews were born. I’m sad I wasn’t the brother you could call when life got hard, the one who would drive through a storm to sit beside you, though at this point I should confess I’m not great in a storm, I’d probably text to say I was on my way and then get stuck behind a tractor for forty minutes. But I’d have tried. I’m sad for all the ordinary, unremarkable moments that make up a shared life, the Sunday dinners, the inside jokes, the arguments, the reconciliations, the slow accumulation of knowing someone. We were robbed of that. Not by us but by men who thought they knew better. They didn’t. A deliberate cruelty? Maybe, but robbed all the same. And I reserve the right to be a bit pissed off about it on an afternoon when I’m just trying to get on with my day.

And I wonder, did you ever think about it? Did you ever wonder, growing up, if there might be a brother out there? Did you ever feel the shape of someone missing, even if you didn’t have a name for it? I’d ask you directly, but I’m still learning which questions are okay to ask. I’m still learning the contours of this new landscape. It’s a bit like dating, except the stakes are higher and you can’t ghost each other because you’re family. Not that I’d ghost you. I’m just saying, the etiquette for this situation is not well documented.

Here’s something I’ve noticed: we have the same mannerisms. The same way of moving through a room, the same gestures. I see myself in you, and I see you in myself, and that’s a kind of miracle, isn’t it? To find your own habits reflected back at you in a woman you met a few months ago? It’s proof of something. Biology, sure. But also something else. Something that can’t be reduced to chromosomes. But I also see mom. I see her so much in you. And that’s the strangest part, I lost her, and in the same season I found you, and you carry her with you. In your face, in your voice, in the way you stand. She’s still here. Through you. And you can get to know her through me. Because I carry her with me too.

I loved you before I met you. That sounds like a line from a bad song, but it’s true. Some part of me was waiting for you, holding space for you, and when you walked into the Bowling Green, that space filled up instantly. Love came first. The getting-to-know-you is happening now, in its own time, and I’m grateful for every conversation, every message, every small revelation. Every time you send me a photo or a memory or just a “how’s your day going,” I’m quietly thrilled. I don’t always say it. I’m working on that. I do get such a thrill from calling you ‘sis.’

But I have to be honest with you, and with myself, about what’s happened since. Finding you cracked something open. Not just the door between us, but something older, something buried. Since we found each other, I’ve discovered more lies in my past. More things I was told that weren’t true. And it’s made me suspicious. It’s made me wonder who else might be out there. Whether the story I was given is the whole story, or whether there are more doors waiting to open. Do I have other sisters, or maybe a brother? Because from reactions to my questions and from knowing the stories of my fathers past, I wouldn’t be surprised. At this point, I’m half expecting to find out I’m also related to the postman.

I don’t say this to burden you. I say it because you’re my sister, and sisters deserve the truth. The whole, messy, incomplete truth. And as my sister you’re the one I’m supposed to come to with this stuff. Finding you was the best kind of earthquake, it rearranged my world for the better. But every earthquake has aftershocks, and I’m still feeling them. And I think you understand that because you’re feeling them too.

Here’s what I know for certain: you are my sister. You were always my sister, even when I didn’t have a name for you, even when the miles between us kept us apart. You are not a late addition to my life. You are not a postscript. You are a truth I finally caught up with, on an ordinary day that turned out to be extraordinary. In a pub I used to work in, of all places.

I want to be in your life. Properly. Not as a distant brother you message on birthdays, but as someone who shows up. I want to be there for the things I missed. I want to be there for my brother-in-law and my nephews. I want to build something real. Because I love you all so dearly. And because I’ve already missed too much.

We have time. Not the forty years we should have had, but we have now. And now is not nothing. Now is pints and awkward questions and laughter and catching up. Now is the good bit.

I love you Paula.

Your brother,

Rob x