On being a big sister.

A side note about the body pillow – at about 1am last night, when I turned over for about the seventh time, J muttered something that sounded remarkably like “Get the stupid body pillow already… so maybe I can sleep too.”

So, OK. I’ll get it. Probably not until Sunday, but I’ll get it.

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When we were growing up, I probably wasn’t the nicest Big Sister for both my little brother and my sister. To be fair, I teased them a LOT – I was a lot older than them (4 years older than my sister, 5 than my brother) – and so I suppose I wanted to know their place. Or something.

So my sister tells stories about, when we had company and had to share a room, how I used to scare the shit out of her by knocking on my headboard and saying “C – ET is at the door. You have to go answer it!” She’d cower in her bed, too terrified to move.

I vividly the one time she actually had the guts to get out of bed and open the door. It wasn’t ET. It was my father, who had heard us talking.

Woops.

But there was a tacit rule in our house. No one except for me got to tease or bully either my brother and my sister. Not even my mom – if she lost her temper with my brother (and trust me, he was a little shit. She lost her temper with him A LOT), I’d step in. If my little sister had trouble with the schoolyard bully, I’d make sure that they knew she was not to be messed with.

And I was the one who taught my little sister about sex – over a bag of M&Ms in a park. I was the one she came to when she got her first AF. I was the one who bought her her first drink at a bar on her 21st birthday. I was with her when she tried her first cigarette (a VERY bad idea). I was the one she told when she started to have feelings for her friend A (who is now her husband).

Et cetera.

And over the years, my little sister has become a close friend. We talk every couple of weeks, sometimes more often. She’s listened as I’ve cried over our inability to conceive. She was one of the first people I told about our BFP. 

She is one of the sweetest, most caring, kindest people I know.

Last January, she called me to tell me that she was stopping the pill. She told me that they were just going to “see what happens,” to take their time – they were in no rush to have kids, but they wanted to stop preventing. I have to admit, I was upset. Not because I didn’t think my sister deserved it, but because, well, I was still reeling from my SIL’s pregnancy and I selfishly wanted to be first.

But the months have passed, and nothing’s happened for my sister and my BIL. Every once in a while, she’d mention that she had AF, and that was it. I mentioned that I probably knew more than anyone needed to know about getting pregnant, so if she needed advice to let me know. But I wasn’t going to force anything on her.

Yesterday morning she called me at work. She wanted to ask my advice. There apparently was a ski trip that she wanted to go on in February, and she would have to pay the deposit by early December. She wasn’t sure that she should go, because what if she was pregnant?

So I asked how things were going. And she told me that they had resorted to having sex every other night this whole cycle. Because they wanted to “get serious” about trying for a baby, since obviously their strategy of half-hearted timing didn’t seem to be working for them.

It was the hesitation in her voice that got me – I could feel her worry. Just under the surface… that niggling doubt.

“What if something is wrong?”

It nearly broke my heart. And I can’t get our conversation out of my mind.

Please.

Not my sister too.