Some reflections on family birthdays, coincidences and similarities.

Today is my baby sister’s birthday. It was also our mother’s birthday. My little sister reminds us proudly that they were both born on this date, on a Thursday, at 4.30 in the morning, in a thunderstorm. 

 

I don’t remember the thunderstorm but I do remember going into my parents’ bedroom to meet my new sister and demanding that she should be called Pat, after my baby doll. Since people were already clamouring that she should be called Phyllis after our mother, a name our mother never liked, I got my way. But she was never Pat, almost always Patricia and sometimes Tricia, until she went to live in Spain where everyone calls her Pat, or Pa’ as the Andalusians frequently drop final consonants. 

I suspect she became Pat when she moved away from home to study, reinventing herself as so many of us did when we began to live independently, no longer identified as so-and-so’s daughter, sister, or whatever. As it has become so much more expensive to go away to university, more and more young people these days end up studying at the university nearest to home and do not move out at all. It’s a rite of passage that has disappeared for a lot of young people since the introduction of university fees. Another reason to be glad to be a baby-boomer!

My Spanish niece posted a photo of her mother, the birthday girl. 

 

In lockdown my sister has grown her hair. For longer than I care to remember she has always had a very severe short haircut, often done at the barber’s rather than at a ladies’ salon. 

 

And suddenly, with hair framing her face for the first time in years, she looks like the person whose birthday she shares, our mother. 

Family resemblances are strange!

Our daughter, who just born looked like my mother without her false teeth, as a young teenager felt she so little looked like either of her parents or her brother that she convinced herself she was adopted. I came across her rifling the desk, hunting for the adoption certificate. She took some persuading that there was no such certificate. That may have been when we first told her the story of her home birth with the complications that led to an emergency run to hospital. She still doesn’t really look much like either of us. Maybe in a few years time she will wake up one morning, look in the mirror and discover that she has turned into her mother after all. It’s more or less what I did and I know that a number of my friends had the same experience.

Incidentally, finding my small sister in my mother’s bed on the morning of the 27th of May 67 years ago convinced me that that was what happened; that was how it worked:- women went to bed at night and woke up next morning with a baby in the bed. As simple, easy and painless as that. After all, the same thing had happened a couple of years previously with the arrival of my brother. I knew that babies grew in their mummies’ tummies but that was the extent of my knowledge of the facts of life for the next few years. If only life were so uncomplicated!

Anyway, there it is. My baby sister is another year older. I expect she is having a warmer 27th of May in Andalucía than we are in Saddleworth. 

That said, today began very nicely, with blue sky and sunshine, showing off the local bluebells very nicely. By lunchtime the clouds had moved back in but so far the rain has managed to stay away.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!