She's always been very different from my oldest sister and myself, even in physical appearance. My mom used to always say that my oldest sister thinks with only her heart, and the middle sister thinks only with her brain, and me...well I have a nice balance of both (phew!).
It's true. Natalie can be truly heartless sometimes. As a child, I used to call her "the mean one" because, compared to the oldest, she never played with me or payed me much attention. Granted, my sisters are 11 and 13 years older than me. So being so young when they were in high school was, I'm sure, trying times for them.
Then she got married and moved in with her hubby (for now, I'll skip all the crap that went on in between - there are too many details and frankly a great deal of pain that I don't feel like getting into right now). She would invite me over to stay with them regularly. It was nice actually. I'd stay the night to get away from our crazy mother, and because we lived in the different ends of town, it was always like a mini vacation.
Later, I found that she was a little to cynical and way too blunt. She acted like a snob and ended up being the black sheep between my mom, myself and my sister (whom she never really got along with in the first place).
Ten years or so later, she and her hubby split up. Except she decided not to tell the family, until a year later when she confided in me about it. I think we had finally passed the time where I was the younger sister. I had finished school, had been working for some time, and had taken the role as caretaker for my mother. For all intensive purposes, I was an adult.
What bothered me about her not telling me was, well first of all, not telling me! I mean, she came to birthday parties and fourths of july and he came with her and they wore their rings and pretending like nothing was wrong. I felt so lied to. But on top of that, I felt really bad for her. She was so afraid that her family would judge her that she went through the whole thing alone. That's just sad.
But instead of getting angry, I simply asked her if she was happy. She said yes. And that was really the end of that. She explained that she was afraid I would judge her. I think she was relieved to know that I wouldn't. It was a little harder telling my mom and other sister.
And then my mom had a major surgery and all three sisters were forced to spend a lot of time together and all kinds of feelings came flying out, feuled by the stress of literally sitting in a hospital all day for weeks.
Cut to about three years later, and she's been with a new guy for a couple years. I like him a lot, and her divorce has actually brought us a lot closer together.
She turned 35 this year and went to the doctor who basically said "er, if you want to have kids then you better get going." Nice one doc.
So they decided, as she put it, that they weren't "trying," but they weren't "not trying either." And just early September she found out she was pregnant. A shotgun wedding followed, which my dad knows nothing about (neither the baby nor the courthouse wedding) and I finally convinced her to tell my mom because I thought my mom could use the good news.
I wonder what else she's hiding...
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