sisters and selves

To add to the list of things that make me proud:  Watching my grown-up baby sister play piano, holding the attention of a room, seemingly unaware of anything but herself, together with the music.

She is so expressive.  It's what everyone commented on after today's recital.  It was so beautiful, really hearing the music that had vaguely floated past my ears, echoing throughout the house while she practiced.  But it wasn't the music that brought tears to my eyes.  It was the image of this girl I have known all her life, in her flamingo-pink shirt, curling her long legs under the piano bench, letting grace flow through her arms and hands and fingers, embodying the music in every gesture.

Thirteen.  It's the age when so many girls take the first step away from their childhood and begin to capture what it means to be a woman.  At this age a girl's beauty is liquid and transparent; glowing.  She is the essence of time, a parent's fondest memories and a future of potential combined.

For many of us, looking back, this was the hardest age to be.  Society's pressures are merciless and often painfully confining; I hate revisiting my thirteen-year-old self and seeing how I defined myself.  I want to tell her, my younger self, not to listen to those other voices - but it's no use labeling them as "other", because the loudest and strongest voice was my own.  Telling myself to conform to what I thought was the ideal.  Inwardly criticizing myself for being less.  Believing that I would never be what I wanted to be.

She lives inside me still, but I have grown so much, and now my thirteen-year-old self makes up only one small part of me.  Now every time I see a thirteen-year-old girl I want to somehow convince her that she is beautiful, not for what she wants to be, but for exactly who she is.  It took me years to learn that, but now I believe it and I know it is true.  As a girl continues on her journey to becoming a woman, her translucent beauty turns warm and golden, distinguishable from every other woman and startlingly beautiful.  It is our history, scars and all, that makes us beautiful.

So in perceiving my beloved sister today, I saw her clarity and flexibility, but I also saw myself.  In contemplating my own story, I understood the place where she now stands:  a knowledge of how far she has come in her journey, and how far she will go in the future.  I cannot choose her trajectory, but I hope and pray to be a loving, guiding hand.