It's Easier to Stay Angry Than to Say You Miss Her

Anger is the easier sentence. Tell a friend you're furious with your sister and she follows you without needing anything else. Tell her you miss your sister and the question arrives inside a minute, and it amounts to why don't you call her.

Missing her gives something away. Anger keeps you the woman who was wronged, it keeps your decision out of the conversation. Saying you miss her puts the decision back in, because it means you wanted something and gave it up on purpose. Women stay angry well past the point where they still feel angry, and then wonder why the anger comes and goes.

Much of what gets called anger at a sister isn't aimed at her. You're angry at a mother who wouldn't choose, who kept inviting both of you and called it fairness. You're angry at an aunt who treats the two of you identically, as though the last four years were a misunderstanding you'll both get over. Your sister is who you say it about, because nobody knows how to answer a woman who says she's angry at how her family works.

Siblings learn how to treat you, and they learn it from your parents. If you were raised as the one who gives way, your sister didn't decide that on her own, she took it in at seven along with everything else in the house. She's a real person who did real damage, and she's also doing the job she was handed. Anger at her is accurate and too small for what happened, and the gap between those is what you keep feeling as confusion.

What you miss usually isn't the sister you had. It's the one you'd have had if your parents hadn't decided early which daughter would be looked after and which would do the looking after. You wanted somebody to split the drive to your father's appointments, somebody to text when your mother's test results came back. She was never going to be that, and you wanted it anyway.

Some women feel almost nothing and feel guilty about the nothing. Grief is what a family reads as love, so a woman without any looks cold, including to herself. What she has instead is relief, and the relief has an object that isn't her sister. She's relieved she isn't checking the guest list before agreeing to Sunday dinner, isn't lending another $400 she won't see again, isn't the one her mother calls to smooth it over afterward. Relief that a job ended reads like a statement about the kind of woman you are.

So you produce more sadness than you have, in the amount your family can use. You say you hope things work out someday, you soften your face at the right moments, you let your aunt believe you're working up to something. Keeping everybody comfortable is the same job you had before the estrangement, still unpaid, now done from further away.

You can miss your sister and be right to have left. Being able to say both is what acceptance turns out to be, and the reason it takes years is that the first half sounds like taking back the second. It doesn't. You can miss her in March and still not want her at your table in November.