daphne anne

one of the many things keeping me up at night lately is the thought of my little sister growing up so fast i'll miss it. she's fifteen. i try to come home to staten island as much as possible so that we can hang out and every time i come home, i feel like there's something new and different about her.

it's strange but i really do feel like she's my kid. we are ten years apart so when she was a baby, i changed her and fed her when my parents worked (which was mostly all the time). one of my best memories is the first time she played in the snow. i worry about her grades. i worry that she's not being challenged at school. she's so smart and i know she can go to an ivy league college if she wanted to. it's just a matter of getting a scholarship so she doesn't have to go through what sarah and i have gone through.

she's sharing less and less with me. she used to talk about her fears and what she wants to be when she grows up. now she has her friends and she's the person they talk to when they have a problem. i just hope that she knows how much i want to be that person for her.

five or six years ago, i wrote the story below to one day give her so that she can know how unique she is and how proud i am of her.

Daphne

Nickelodeon in the background, she is the first person awake everyday.

She washes her face, her 4’0 frame not quite successful at being able to see her face in the mirror over the sink; brushes her teeth (first the top, then the bottoms in a counterclockwise motion); and combs her hair.

Today, she has her hair in pigtails.

Her outfit, already picked out by her from the night before, is draped over her mini-chair in her mini room. Dark denim flare jeans, with glittery butterflies and a blue t-shirt with "Princess" in little rhinestones in the front.

She goes downstairs, wakes up her older sister and the dog and puts a bagel in the toaster. Her first chore of the day is to feed the 1-year-old Yorkie who has a habit of nipping at the cuff of her pants while she walked. Her second is to make herself breakfast before going to school.

As a baby, she had the wise dark eyes of the experienced adult. Her tiny fingers would wrap around yours and squeeze when she saw you cry. Before she learned how to walk, she would smile knowingly, as if she too, shared the joke. And when she was angry, it was definitely best to stay out of her way or catch the wrath of her baby-teeth that would leave marks on your skin.

My sister, at 10-years-old, could give me relationship advice.

It was as simple as addition and subtraction- love minus respect/trust/understanding equals nothing worthwhile.

As if she somehow learned wisdom along with coloring between the lines and her alphabet.

She would look at you with eyes narrowed, a headshake and a deep sigh. Duh. You deserve more than that. What could you say in defense to that except nod your head and wonder at exactly what age do you get to be wiser than her?

Sometimes I catch her staring off into the distance and ask her what she thinks about. She tells me nothing in particular, that she’s just trying to imagine the world without stars in the sky.

Obedient by nature and by blood, she is that little girl in every class that gets nominated to be the hall monitor year after year. The humble one with straight A’s and gold stars who tells everyone it’s only because she studies a lot.

She loves to run around during recess, playing tag, the hardest to catch out of all the kids in Ms. Litrell’s fifth grade class. She has aspirations to be everything from a ballerina to a volleyball player and has been known to serve a mean ball underhand.

She’s the most sensitive one in the family.

In those moments, you see the child in her eyes. Beyond the tears, her worst fear is a broken home. When my parents raise their voices at each other, they’re careful that she’s not in the room. During the most turbulent times, she would crawl in bed with me, wracking sobs shaking her whole body. What’s going to happen? she would ask pitifully, hoping I could give her the answer she wanted to hear. But she never needed words. A kiss on her forehead, a rub on her back and she would fall asleep, curled tight into a ball against my chest.

And in the mornings, she’d be back.

Confident in the way that only children can be confident, she easily voices her opinions. Just because I’m the youngest, doesn’t mean you can boss me around she would tell us when we do boss her around.

She will graduate elementary school this year and enter the world of insecurity otherwise known as junior high. You wonder if she’ll make it through without changing her simple maturity. You wonder if puberty will affect her way of seeing things. You dread the day she dyes her hair and changes her clothes for the sake of being like everyone else. Maybe her black and white world, previously gray-less and cut-and-dried, will suddenly become a chaos of complications.

Somehow, you know she’ll be ok.

Soon the boys will come knocking on our door, the phone will ring, male voice on the other end, wanting to take her out, and there will be countless arguments because my dad will refuse to let her go.

Will she ace her SATs and go to a good college? She wants to be a teacher.

So many things to wonder about. What lies in her future? Endless speculation that requires nothing more than patience for the answer.

For now, she sits on the couch, Charlotte’s Web in her hand, reading glasses perched on her little nose and the dog, Jeter, resting his head on her lap.