Sisterly love

Yes it’s incomparable.

If you have grown up with one, or a mom to a pair who are bickering incessantly, constantly, you know what I mean. Like most Moms, I too have developed selective hearing and manage to tune out most of the

She did it first…

She always…

..and react only when it reaches the level of..

It’s bleeding, look she scratched me!

That’s enough.

If you don’t stop behaving like cats and dogs I’m changing your names to Tommy and..well Kitty..

Oh! Can I be Kitty? She always growls like a dog anyway.

How dare you? You are the one who runs howling to Mom. You Tommy Shooo

Shall I scratch you again and show you? You…

Too late to take back my words, I tune them out again.

Motherhood does teach you some amazing skills!

In Sickness and in Health

What do I do to get them behave like normal, loving siblings?

Princess Aurora came home from school complaining of a sore throat. It soon turned into a horrible sniffy, sneezy, weepy affair and when she showed a slight increase in temperature you can guess what it did to my hardly there equanimity.

Even then the catfight was still on.  

Being Loverna, I switched to the selective hearing mode-they had to be in separate areas of the house till the worst was over.

As I convinced Aurora to sleep with me, Elena teased her endlessly about being a baby and missing her “day” to sleep on the top bunk..

Aurora got her back by grabbing the remote: Now you can’t watch TV because I have put my germs on this.

Elena cribbed that it was not fair this one was getting away with not finishing her dinner because she felt too sick.

Aurora kept insisting she was the one who was sick and needed to be near the toys, so her sister should be sent out of their room.

I continued not to hear.

The tone changed a little….

Mamma, can I come in for 20 seconds-I have to tell her a secret

Mom, I am missing didi….

I want to sleep in my bed…

Ok Mamma. I am not coming in, I’ve kept this book outside the door-please give it to her.

This is sooooooooooo not the natural state of affairs…

In spite of all the closed doors, Elena too caught the bug, and they were both thrilled! More so, when they were both on the way to recovery, and I was the one down in a bad way: sneezing and sniffing, and behind the closed door.

They got to have Maggi for breakfast, miss school and fight together all day.

Here they are fighting over colors, elbowing and jostling each other, while making “get well soon” cards for Mom. 

A Promise to Cherish

Elena has to “learn” an essay on “Raksha Bandhan”

“Rakhi is a festival on which sisters tie a Rakhi on their brothers’ wrists and the brothers promise to love and protect them forever…….”

But what do people who have no brothers do on Rakhi?

My girls tie Rakhis to each other.
After all when it is about a promise:

to care and cherish

to be there for each other in sickness and sorrow, in tussles over pencils and party-shoes, in the moments of making up and fighting other kids for each other

to cry for each other exult in each other’s joy

to create memories that sustain through a lifetime

to celebrate a relation which combines the joy of being friends as well as family and so much more……

Isn’t it all about sisters too?

Sibling bonds-Is this what they mean?

As soon as my daughters wake up, they instictively look for each other, and start fighting like cats and …well cats.

The issues are different each morning, they keep changing throughout the day, but the argument continues…quite like the heated political discussions onboard the CTC routes.

Come on gals cap it-----

I too grew up with a sibling.

I can’t say we never fought but then we fought over real issues:

Like who gets to watch DD1 or DD2 on TV.
Actually I can’t remember why we needed to argue over that one, but anyway the issue was a real one.

And the telephone-that was too real. It was about someone curtailing my conversations by keeping the line busy all day, screening all my calls and inflating the family phone bill.

Even who gets to drive the scooter and who has to ride pillion (or take the moped) was as real an issue as it can get.

I guess that was all, except a few minor ones which were about…

And any way we didn’t have this incessant bickering going on, our confrontations were different…….

Like that once I tried to give him an electric shock or the one time he punched my nose so hard that I had to be rushed bleeding to the hospital.

Oh and there was that one time, when we managed to explode a lighted tube light, I don’t remember who had thrown the bat at whom…

He was even rude to me even on the day he was getting married, and had the cheek to forget about it, asking me to guard his shoes as he was getting ready for the pheras. I walked off!

And the once……

On second thoughts, I guess the girls are better off with these cat-fights about non-issues.

As for my brother and me, yeah despite the miles we’ve still managed a few altercations when we met, over the phone, on email, and sometimes without saying anything to each other.

And yet there are times he is the only person I can speak to.