“Where shall we see a better daughter, or a kinder sister, or a truer friend?”-Jane Austen

The phone rang at my Grandmother’s house on December 23, 1978. I answered it, and it was my Father calling to tell me that after 11 long years as an only child, I was a sister…I had a sister.

When I finally got to see her, she was tiny, just a bump over 5 pounds. And she has stayed tiny. When my boys, and later other nieces and nephews, and now her own children, outgrew her they would shout:

“We’re taller than you Aunt Maggie!”

And she would reply:

“Aim higher boys, aim higher!”

She had a head full of dark hair that promptly fell out, and stayed out for a long time, necessitating a long season of bows being taped to her head. And when it came back in, it was blond and has stayed that way.

It was as though Santa had delivered me my very own personal baby doll. I learned how to take care of babies, and how not to, by taking care of her, like student teaching for being a parent. I always suspected that what I felt for her was pretty close to what I would feel for a child, as it turned out to be.

Then she became a child that followed me around and wanted my attention and got in my stuff. One night in high school I was sitting on the couch with a boyfriend holding hands, and I looked over to see her on the other side, holding his other hand. There was a brief, tumultuous time when we shared a room, a tiny room. Many harsh words were spoken, many tears shed. We never speak of it.

Then she became a teenager, and I became sounding board, keeper of the secrets, letting her tell me things that I sometimes didn’t want to hear, so she would have an adult to talk to.

Then a college student, then a young woman, then a Bride, and now a Mother. I cried for the entire hour it took us to drive home from her wedding and I couldn’t have told you why. I have never felt so many competing emotions, until I had my own children.

I have been child care consultant, chief celebrater, commiserator, coffee dater, and somewhere along the way it became mutual, and we have arrived at friends, the best of friends. She’s the first person I tell news, good or bad, and these days she talks me down off the ledge as often as I do her. There is a way of talking, of crying, of laughing, and a shorthand to our relationship that I have with no one else. She insists that we must die at the exact same moment holding hands, as the only acceptable option. I am hoping she can arrange that.

And sometime today I will tell her, and mean from my heart, as I do every year:

“Happy Birthday to the best Christmas present I ever got.”