Sororal Reflections

In the darkness of her room, within the perfect stillness of Christmas Eve, Sarah Dawson’s darkest thoughts were dragged up from the recesses of her mind before she drifted off to sleep. She thought about her mother and the almost-born baby inside of her and Sarah’s thoughts formed words, and those words were: I wish that her baby were never born. 

*

Now, before any snap judgements are made about Ms Dawson, some context is in order. Sarah Dawson, 12, had actually adapted quite well to a difficult life. Her mother, Leila, and stepdad, Paul, moved their family to Hamilton after Paul had found a new and better paying business consultant job. Sarah’s biological father left the family when she was two, and she could only remember him in snippets of undeveloped memory, like the curl of dark hair around a forearm or the smell of cigarette smoke. Sarah essentially grew up with Paul, her mother having met him only a year after her father left, and she liked Paul. She wouldn’t have said she loved him - she didn’t know if she ever could love him like a father and always thought there would be a part of her heart that would remain empty until her real father showed up and became a father again. But still, she liked Paul. He was nice enough. 

So, back to Sarah and Christmas Eve. You may be wondering what would possess someone to think so maliciously. The truth was, Sarah had been struggling with the idea of her mother having another child. First of all, there was the age gap. Having a sibling over a decade younger than her would eliminate any chance of a relationship between them. Sarah was, by all accounts, a voracious reader and someone who might have been called wise beyond her years. This had resulted in her finding some friends at her new school, but not quite fitting in. She had always felt like the girls she met at St Bernadette were too concerned with celebrities and boys for her liking. And yet, she accepted the camaraderie, even if she would have rather discussed Jane Austen and Mary Shelley than Harry Styles and Taylor Swift. 

Perhaps this fierce and practical intelligence explained her anger towards her mother and stepfather’s oblivious family planning. Having told her new friends at school about the sibling she was expecting, the girls all made embarrassing aww sounds and screwed up their faces and started baby talking. It was as if they were unable to think critically, Sarah thought. Sure, babies are cute, but if she were to go around basing her decisions in life around objective truths, she would not get far. 

She knew how different things would be once the baby was born - they already had been. How many times had her mother had to stay in and face the morning sickness that was tormenting her? How many weekends were ruined by trying to sit and read on the couch and having to listen to her mother retching upstairs and then seeing her come downstairs with a brave face on and try to make it seem like everything was okay? 

This wasn’t to say that Sarah was unsympathetic towards the plight of women. She considered herself a feminist and had already written a number of speeches at school on girls in STEM that were commended by her teacher and principal. It wasn’t what her mother went through that she had a problem with - it was her choice to have a child in the first place. The decision itself seemed like a slap in the face to an already good situation. She thought of it like getting a jack face down in blackjack with a king showing and deciding to say hit me. 

What about their life together wasn’t enough? Her mother had already recovered from the terrible relationship that brought Sarah into the world, and now she wanted to tempt fate by bringing another child into the world when she already had a perfectly good one! (She was often hyperbolic in her thoughts, of course. She knew she wasn’t perfect - she often bit her nails.) 

But it was this idea of change that seemed to come back to her again and again. Once the baby was born, it would become a different world in their house. Sarah had no experience with child rearing, but was well read enough (and had enough common sense) to anticipate the seismic changes that would occur within her family unit. Exhaustion, anger, mood changes, late nights, chores undone, rushed dinners, spilled food, crying (mother, child and father), cancelled plans and, of course, less attention. 

Ironically, less attention was something she could get behind - if she was going to get more time to read and write with fewer conversations around the dinner table about what Paul had done at work or what she had learned at school, she would be a lot happier. Overall, it wasn’t even the changes of routine or frenetic atmosphere that would inevitably overwhelm their household that irked her - it was the principle of the decision. It made her feel like she wasn’t enough.

She paused for a second and squinted into the darkness above her. A boing from her phone sounded and she ignored it - probably just something about what Harry Styles posted on Insta or something a cute boy had said. Sarah was effective at reflection, and would have to admit that she wasn’t the easiest to get along with at times. On a day-to-day basis, she was fine, she supposed. Quiet, introverted, but those weren’t sins. Preferred the company of herself and Dickens or Fitzgerald to others, but since when was it a crime to love great Literature? Though she supposed the time they went to a cousin’s wedding and she faked a stomach ache to sit in the car and finish Northanger Abbey might have given the wrong impression. It wasn’t that she didn’t like other people; it was just that she liked reading more. Or any time they had people over for dinner, Sarah would ask to be excused as soon as she thought it was polite, which was always, it seemed, far too early based on the wide-eyed look she received from her mother. 

And it may also be true that she was rather opinionated  and would question anyone who would listen as to why they read what they read or even worse, why they didn’t read. To her, a life lived without reading was akin to eating food but not tasting it, and she had chastised many an older family member who had responded to her litany of questions with inane answers about reading ‘the paper’ or ‘social media’ instead of the correct answer, which was, of course, fiction. Poetry. Drama. The study of the human condition. Non-fiction was for wackos. 

And still, with all of her thorns, her idiosyncrasies, and her foibles, the toughest pill to swallow was that she felt like her mother wanted a do-over. Like she wasn’t good enough for her. No amount of theorising or analysis could get her through that one. And that hurt. 

*

And thus, those thoughts floated into her mind on the eve of Christmas and stayed in her mind long enough for them to become real. As she drifted off to sleep, she regretted what she had said to herself - she knew that thoughts could become dreams and that dreams could come true. 

*

Sarah Dawson revered dreams. She kept a journal beside her bed and would write down anything she could remember about them. To her, they were the closest anyone could come to the truth of existence, so they had to be documented. 

She would include things she dreamed about in her stories, though she was nowhere near letting anyone read them. She would wait until they were ready, polished like shining diamonds, and unleash them on the world in an Emily Dickenson-esque deluge of virtuosity. 

Or something like that. 

In the meantime, she would write and think and dream. The dream she was having on Christmas Eve was not about Christmas - she had outgrown a lot of the more childish traditions around the holidays years ago, though she still liked being surprised on Christmas morning with one of the ‘big gifts’ she had asked for. The look on her face when she got the Jane Austen collection with the gilded frames was priceless. 

In her dream that night, she was running and there was darkness all around her and she could only hear her feet slapping against some unseen surface. In the distance, she could hear a piercing sound and the closer she got, the more she realised it was a scream. She ran faster and the scream got louder but nothing changed in her dream and the darkness remained until she opened her eyes. 

She pinched herself, turned her head, felt the wall beside her, cool and smooth. But the screaming continued. 

She stood up and ran out of her room, seeing her parents’ bedroom door open and the light on. Inside, her eyes adjusting to the dim light, seeing her mother standing with her hand against the wall, her eyes reflecting moonlight but filled with pain, her eyes wet with tears, the carpet wet with something else, her stepdad with his hand on her shoulder and in that moment, Sarah Dawson believed in everything. 

She immediately believed in magic of all kinds - the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Jesus, Mary and Joseph and the Loch Ness Monster. Because she had wished this to happen. Or something like it. And it had. 

She fell to her knees and started to weep: “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have thought it. I -” 

Paul looked at her with confusion: “What’s that? Sorry, your mother is - well - she’s going a bit earlier than we expected. But all is okay. If you could do us a favour, kiddo, and grab those bags from the spare room. Put them by the front door and I’ll help your mom down the stairs and we can head to the hospital.” 

Sarah looked at him with tears in her eyes. “You mean, the baby… is okay?” 

“Well, at the moment -” Paul looked at his wife and she squeezed his shoulder so hard that it probably drew blood. “Let’s just get to the hospital. The bags, Sarah? If you don’t mind.” 

That Paul. Always so polite. Sarah moved swiftly, but caught a glimpse of her mother on the way out of the room. The pain was written across her face and Sarah knew how vulnerable she was and realised how she had been wrong to be so angry, that she was the one who was being selfish. She apologised again under her breath and ran down the stairs, hoping that her thoughts had not become a reality. 

*

In the car on the way to the hospital, Paul drove like he never had before. Though the streets were nearly empty, he treated them like a practice course for an F-1 driver. Sarah held her mother’s hand in the backseat and listened to the ragged breathing that was coming from her lungs and felt her body shake as the wincing pain shot through her every so often. 

As they turned into the hospital’s parking lot, the streetlights caught the first falling flakes of snow.

*

Hospitals, like fire and police departments, are immune to the indolence of any holiday, be it cultural, national or religious. Sure, the people there might dress them up with trees and lights and put out bowls of candy, but when push came to shove, they had a job to do. Cancer isn’t Christian and most certainly doesn’t take Christmas day off, and car accidents still happen on Chanukah. 

This is what Sarah Dawson noticed from the waiting room at St. Joseph’s hospital - that even in the wee hours of Christmas morning, the hospital that was a world unto itself ran with the well-oiled efficiency of a machine designed to save, and give, life. 

It was this world that she inhabited as she sat on a bench in a waiting area near the maternity ward. It was as if she was in a vacuum - the maelstrom of activity that ebbed and flowed around her didn’t assimilate her into it; she sat outside of it with her thoughts. 

Her thoughts were dark, not surprisingly. The guilt of her words plagued her, needles of ice inside her stomach that warned her that if anything went wrong, it would be her fault. Her mind wandered, too, back to all of the times where she had been a bit unkind, or even misanthropic to her loving family. She felt like slapping herself in the face for her selfish behaviour. Who was she to think that she was the centre of the universe? Why wouldn’t her mother want to have a child with a new, kind and stable man in her life?

Paul had come out quite early in the process - he had bags under his eyes and he shook with a nervous energy. 

“It’s all good for now, hun. These things just take a while.” He handed her a chocolate bar and told her to eat, that it would help keep her strength up. He smiled at her as he walked towards the doors and was buzzed in by the duty nurse. 

Hours passed and she waited. And waited. She was quickly realizing how uninformed she was in the intricacies of birth giving. She had known it was hard - she wasn’t that dense - but wasn’t aware of just how hard and long the entire process could be. Her ignorance washed over her, mingling with her shame and fear. If she could just go back and do it all over again, she would be a better daughter. More supportive. Offer to bring her mother a glass of water after she was sick instead of sighing on the couch and turning another page in whatever she was reading. 

She tried to imagine what it would be like to be in that room - she imagined that it would be really warm, the air thick with spent energy and tears. After a moment, she experienced something quite novel. She couldn’t imagine anything else. This wasn’t covered in detail in anything she had read, and she realized then that she had stumbled on something that was entirely out of her realm of understanding, and for good reason. She was twelve! How could she have ever thought that she had enough worldly experience to understand something this sublime. 

Her chastisement of herself was cut short as her exhaustion caught up to her, and against her will, closed her eyes to find a restless sleep. 

*

She opened her eyes to the doors opening and buzzing. Paul walked towards her wearing scrubs. His features were inscrutable, but she was sure there was pain in them. (Years later, after going through something similar, she would understand that it was exhaustion and fear on his face. And that after a while, exhaustion and pain and fear became inseparable.) A tall man wearing scrubs and with sharp features walked beside him. The sleep in her mind lifted as panic set in - what if… what if the baby hadn’t made it? 

“Good news, kiddo,” said Paul. His eyes still had that light in them that she liked - he was a good man. “You’re a big sister to a beautiful baby girl.” 

Sarah Dawson froze. She wanted to stand up and scream with jubilation, she wanted to cry, she wanted to sleep, she wanted to curse the frailty that had ever made her think that she was strong enough to curse her mother with a silly thought, she wanted to hate herself for thinking that thought - but in the end, she stood up and hugged Paul. They didn’t speak to each other and the man beside them just smiled. 

“Want to see her?” asked Paul. Sarah’s rapid steps towards the doors and her glance at the nurse were answer enough. 

*

A somnolent light filled the room she entered with tentative steps. Her mother, her dark hair plastered to her face with sweat, was smiling. On her chest was a tiny figure with the tiniest nose and mouth and the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen - they were blue, just like hers. She didn’t want to say or do anything; she felt that if she did, she would be disturbing a moment of tranquility that may never exist again, a tableau in this world of carnage that was pure love and happiness.

Her mother looked at her and there was love in her eyes. There was no less love than there had been before - more, even. 

“Come and say hi to Estella,” she said in a dreamlike voice. “We thought you would like the name. So very Dickensian.” 

Sarah’s feet wouldn’t move at first - the warmth of the room had numbed her senses like anesthesia. When her feet began to shuffle, she saw the baby in a more delicate light. Her face, and her mother’s, were shrouded in the incandescence of the warm lights. Sarah Dawson stood before her new sister and mother and no words came to her. The image that would be emblazoned in her mind for the rest of her days was of a light so pure and holy that it could have only come on Christmas day. If this wasn't a miracle, she wasn't sure what was.

She reached a hand to her sister’s face and for a second, the newborn child’s eyes met hers. Tears ran down Sarah's face freely and she looked to her mother who radiated love. 

“She’s… beautiful.”

Her mother didn’t reply, but her eyes said that Sarah was too. It was the best Christmas gift she could have asked for.