Sisters

How I love this blog: www.aholyexperience.com - it makes me tear up every time. Today's post was about sisters. I don't have any sisters, a wonderful brother with whom I share a common language - one word or phrase can bring about understanding usually followed by HUGE laughter and often laughing so hard that tears come. I send him gross pictures of things, I send him texts telling him how pretty I look, I can pray for him, I can ask for prayer, I can share so much. Yet, he isn't a girl and doesn't have that certain understanding that comes from being a woman. And so while I don't have a biological sister I read this post and thought of my other sisters - ones not from the same mother but from the same Father. These are the women who share my life - who are a phone call away, a text away and on some lucky days we can even see each other and take a breather from everything. For it is with these women that I am more or, rather, even less. I am no one's mother, no one's wife, no one's anything......there are no expectations. Rather there is a loosening of self, a time when everything seems easier when you are with your true sisters. I love how a look or a word can translate into so much more - there doesn't need to be scores of explanation for they know. They know without saying that you are tired, that you do more than you ever imagined you would for your family, that you love your husband more than words could ever capture yet at times you feel so exasperated. They know that how you looked on your wedding day is not how you look now but that there is beauty in a face, a body that has given life, that has sacrificed, that has spent days playing and laughing and cooking and eating and loving. A body that once was made carefully through exercise and watching what was eaten rather than cleaning the plates of small children, enjoying a huge ice cream cone on a sunny day and when exercise comes in the form of running around the yard and following just starting bike riders. They know all of this without you telling them - for you also share a common language. I love this. I sometimes mourn that fact that I didn't discover this group til later in my life, this club that belongs only to women, women who are comfortable in their own skin, who have grown to love themselves enough to share and delight in the company of other sisters. I hope for my girls that they know this bond from early on. That they will walk through life knowing the love of a sister, not only blood sisters but the sisters that He has placed in their lives.