Travels (Part 2) and More

“Momma, it’s Aunt Claire! Aunt Claire is here!”

Claire is, of course, my sister, and thank goodness! Claire is exceptionally smart and extraordinarily strong. She is principled and generous, introspective and kind. She is also an incredibly hard worker. In addition to raising two young boys with enviable energy and patience, and teaching full-time at a community college, she runs an impressive homestead, complete with gardens, goats, turkeys, chickens, fruit trees, and berry bushes. When she’s not milking goats, she’s freezing beans or canning peaches. When she is not reading chapters of Lemony Snicket aloud to her boys or taking them camping, she is making zucchini muffins, shelling hazelnuts she’s harvested herself, turning compost into her garden beds, or cutting her lawn with a carbon-neutral reel mower.

Claire came to stay with us soon after the girls were born. My memory from those days is hazy, but I have a vivid picture in my mind of Claire, standing at the kitchen island, kneading pizza dough while reading Science magazine. If the girls had been big enough for the Ergo then, she would have had one on her back.

In this way, Claire’s company can be, at times, a little daunting. She makes pizza dough while reading science articles I’d struggle to understand under any circumstances; I’ll pull a frozen pizza from the freezer and maybe manage to check my email while it cooks. Last semester, even with all her other responsibilities, she managed to audit a geography class and do the homework diligently. I’m lucky if I catch the news headlines on NPR. Claire regularly writes letters to old friends, practices the piano, meditates.... I struggle to remember to spend five minutes in the morning doing Kegels.

Claire and I mostly keep in touch through handwritten letters. In July, she sent a letter in which she expressed her hope that one day my family could join hers at The Lady of the Lake family camp in northern Idaho. It was a special place for her, she said, and she would love to be able to share it with me one day when my kids were bigger.

But family camp is always the third week in August, just when school starts here. When I go back to teaching next year and the kids start school, I knew it would be virtually impossible to make the journey. Waiting until my kids were older wasn’t an option; it was now or never.

“Let’s do it!” we agreed over the phone one morning; by noon I’d bought four plane tickets from Asheville, North Carolina to Spokane, Washington.

When I told them about my plans, my friends raised their eyebrows. Two connections? Ten days? By myself? I started to second guess my decision. Just what had I gotten myself into? I talked to Clayton about our plans, trying to prepare him for what was to come.

“How many days in Washington?” he asked. “Show me with your hands.”

I reluctantly held up all ten fingers, anticipating his concern. Clayton doesn’t like to be away from home for long. He looked at me, and then he raised the thumb and index finger of his left hand, carefully holding down his three other fingers with his right.

“Two,” he said. “I think two days is good.”  

Claire raved about family camp. The mornings full of activities for kids and parents alike, the afternoons swimming and boating down by the lake. An art show and a parade, and contra dancing every night. And the music! Everywhere there would be music. It sounded great, I agreed. And yet, I didn’t empty out my savings account and drag my kids across the continent for family camp. I did it for my sister.

Watching my children grow into their roles as brothers and sisters has made me think often of siblinghood, of what it means to be a sister or a brother, and of how those relationships impact our lives, often from as early as we can remember.

Siblinghood is an odd relationship. Our siblings are the playmates we don’t get the luxury of choosing-- or refusing. As children, we surely spend more hours with our siblings than with anyone, probably even our parents. If we are lucky, they are the friends we will know the longest, and the ones who will bear witness to all the many stages and phases of our lives. Our siblings know us deeply, not just the personas we eventually learn to present to the world, but all our private faults and secret insecurities.

It is not an easy bond. My little brother used to come at me down the narrow hall to our bedrooms, both arms flailing wildly from side to side. “Oh no! It’s the washing machine,” I would yell and try to escape into my room. (Our mother was unsympathetic; “You must have provoked him,” she would say, and I’m sure she was right.) But it was with my brother that I first learned the art of compromise. Sure, I would play with Action Man, as long as he was Barbie’s boyfriend. Cars? Okay. It was fun to devise all the relationships between them. That red sports car was the mom. That green truck the dad. It was like playing house on wheels. In one particularly memorable scenario, a yellow hatchback was to be married; I insisted we make her a wedding gown out of toilet paper. (The first time my brother played cars with a friend, he was in for a big surprise.)

But all those hours spent together making automotive wedding dresses-- or whatever other thing siblings might do together-- don’t necessarily effect a life-long closeness. I met a mother recently who confessed that her antagonistic relationship with her brother nearly destroyed her parents’ marriage. When it comes to having siblings, there is no guarantee of affinity. I’ve met plenty of parents struggling to come to terms with the fact that their children just don’t get along. And yet more often it seems that the opposite is true, and, as the parents of siblings, we get to watch as our little ones plant and tend the seeds of a deep and enduring love.

I watch, fascinated, as my own children navigate the often turbulent waters of siblinghood. There’s a certain cry the girls make only when their brother is tormenting them. “Clayton, leave your sister alone!” I scold, often without even looking. But more often these days they disappear outside together, or close themselves in Clayton’s room, and I hear them fighting knights or playing with transformers and army men. When the girls tire, Clayton is quick to compromise. “Want to play baby dolls now?” This morning I walked in on them, and saw Dee Dee scrunched up in the doll bed.

“Can I be the baby now?” Clayton was asking.

“Just three more minutes!” she told him.

At bedtime, both the girls beg for a hug and a kiss from their big brother, and he dutifully complies, basking in their love for him. Clayton, at nearly five, already plays it cool with his affections, but they are transparent nonetheless. Early this summer, as we walked out on a dock on Lake James, he herded his sisters away from the edge with both arms. “Mom!” he  said, panic in his voice. “Don’t let my sisters fall in!”

A biologist would probably say it is in his genes. Clayton shares half his DNA with his sisters, so he’s got a vested interest in keeping them alive. But there is something more there, too. A child’s family is his rock. When I was in third grade, I made a little clay pot for my mother on my new toy potter’s wheel, painting it while my brother looked on. Around the outside I wrote in dripping letters, “We love the family.” That little irregularly shaped pot has sat on the kitchen windowsill in my parents’ house for decades, and every time I see it there I am struck by how much those four words say. The inclusive “we,” the love expressed, not simply for the individual members of our family, but for the unit itself. As a child, one’s family is a haven of belonging in an unknown world, a circle of “us,” drawn tight and safe amid the madding crowd.

We grow. We go out into that world, and make our place in it, and find that the tight circle of our birth family need not be drawn so bold. Years later, it is our children who say family with a capital F. The circle is drawn again, the delineations clear. We are The Family. No matter how irritating Clayton finds Dee Dee’s voice (“I don’t like the way she talks,” he tells me) or how furiously the girls fight over books, or toys, or a spot on my lap, they are all on the inside, together.

Only now, as a mom, I see how the edges of all these family circles can overlap, like the rings of a giant Venn Diagram. My brother and I lost as young adults some of the closeness of our childhood, but now, with children of our own, I feel our bond renewing. I am grateful. I want my kids to know and love their cousins. When they draw the circle of their family, I want Anand and Eashan, Emil and Walker, to be on the inside, even if that bright nucleus of Witsell remains.

The ties between my sister and me have held us close over many years and across many miles. She is my closest confidante and my first friend, my role model and my inspiration. I went to Washington because she wanted to share a special place with me, and I wanted to honor our bond by going.

Family camp on Lake Coeur d'Alene was indeed wonderful. I will cherish my memories of our time there: Clayton flying off the dock into the lake, his jubilant face suspended above me; Dee Dee’s shout of glee every time she spotted her uncle; Sylvia’s body curled against mine in the narrow bunk of our room. I will remember Clayton’s pride when he told his favorite knock knock joke over the microphone, and the way the girls-- Sylvia on my back, Dee Dee on my sister’s-- held hands as Claire and I hiked side by side along the path to Inspiration Point. I will remember the thrill of contra dancing after breakfast, and the immense love I felt for my children as we paddled a canoe together out on the clear waters of the lake.

My kids remember best the song that was sung to them as they headed to their beds, a lovely song about a train of sleepy kids bound for Morningtown.

Clayton’s at the engine.

Dee Dee rings the bell.

Sylvia swings the lanterns,

To show that all is well.

Somewhere there is sunshine,

Somewhere there is day

Somewhere there is morningtime,

Many miles away.

Dee Dee’s face would light up with wonder as they sang. Her name! In a song! And really, it was the best part of the day, summer camp at its most magical. I loved it, too. It was such a rich metaphor, the way the lyrics held my children tight in their own little verse, honoring the circle that is our family, while the chorus of voices sang on, glorying in their harmonies, rejoicing in the greater circle that holds us all.