Sister

Other people might have recognized at once the blessing that was your existence, our reunion, but it took me a while. I remember the shock I felt reading that first e-mail you sent me, relating the story, 30 years unknown and then just come to light, of how our mother had to give me up, unable to feed two hungry mouths on her meager waitress' salary once our father left two months before we even arrived. I'd known I was adopted but I hadn't known there'd been a choice, a parallel life-path I could have traveled but that you, my sister, did instead.

The tone of your e-mail was warm, excited, congratulatory - we had both gained a sibling hadn't we? But my reaction was anger, unease, resentment. Why had you been chosen instead of me? Had I cried louder, demanded more, been less cute? The sense of shameful inadequacies I'd combated and thought I had successfully overcome when told of my own adoption resurfaced, voices questioning my ability to be loved by others.

I sat there for five, then ten, then thirty minutes, unsure what to respond, how to respond. My eventual reply was terse and non-committal, confirming the details of my adoption that confirmed I was indeed the discarded twin. Your reply was almost immediate, eager to meet up and finally meet your genomic copy. In a daze, I agreed and immediately regretted doing so.

I had finally come to a point in life where I was comfortable, was settled, thought I knew who I was. To have all of that painstaking progress evaporate in the span of an e-mail was frustrating, to put it lightly. As irrational as it was, it was you I was mad at you, you who I felt was at fault. I didn't see how the turmoil, the identity reevaluation I was experiencing, could be worth it.

And then I met you. And it was stranger and funnier and more joyous than I could ever have imagined. It was a mirror, me staring at me, you staring at you, laughing the same laugh and smiling the same smile. Whatever anger I'd had dissipated, long forgotten and locked away in the era that was before you. Now everything is after you, which makes everything that came before pale in comparison. What initially seemed shattering turned out to be sustaining, an improbable flowering of family that I had at first shunned and then embraced.