Dinner With the Sister

I had dinner at my sister's tonight. That may not sound like an event of note but in my family, with my background it's nothing short of astounding.

We grew up, the two of us, in unusual circumstances. Circumstances not conducive to positive emotional or spiritual growth. Circumstances that left their marks, not pleasant ones, on each of us. Marks that we have carried in different ways but that have changed the course of our respective lives none the less.

It has been almost eight years since my sister and I had anything that could even generously speaking be called a relationship. The last conversation I remember having with her was at the graveside of our mother and that did not go well. But we are trying to forge a new relationship based on new common ground now, eight years later. I wish I could tell you it is because of my initiative but it is not. If it had been left to me, she and I would still not be talking and I would have carried on feeling quite fine with that.

But she took the initiative, she felt the need to mend fences, bandage old wounds and try to move forward. And I commend her for that. Especially when faced with the trepidation that I have expressed as we have been going through this process.

It is not easy by any stretch and it is at times ridiculously awkward when you consider we lived together in the same home for years. But that is what it's like now and it eases just a bit each time we meet. Tonight I went to her home to have dinner with her and her husband. We talked a lot of small talk and kept things light which was fine by me. And then in the middle of setting the table we stumbled on the ultimate common denominator... the one topic that we could discuss without dredging up any painful memories or hurt feelings. The Partridge Family.

She immediately brought out her complete set of Partridge Family collector cards and we reminisced on how much we loved David Cassidy then and now and forever more while we listened to "I Think I Love You" on her Partridge Family cd (my sister has a few minor eccentricities). She suggested we could even sing along (I on the other hand am more inclined, as I suggested, to crank it up and get up and dance) so in the interest of common ground, we sat at the dinner table, to her husband's great chagrin, and sang with them.

I think the thing with old wounds is that sometimes you just need to cut away all the scar tissue and try to let the new growth come through. It's not going to look the same but it's better than being bound up by the pain.