A place for everything

Caution: this is long and a little something I have been mulling over in my mind for about 2 years and has just now been regurgitated into words

Families have places. And for a long time I did not know what my place was in my husbands family. It is a family of 6 kids. All very talented, confidant, determined people. At first I was especially intimidated and even jealous of JaDee's younger sister, CaMee. We were both getting married the same year. We had (have) very similar tastes in clothes, houses, style etc and I perceived a sense of competition between us. Plus I was taking the brother who helped her do everything from run the 400 in track to build her projects as an interior decorator in college. I wrote her a letter those first months we were both newlyweds, and explained my need to love her and for her to forgive me. We have always had a connection since then. Sharing children, friends, ideas and spiritual growth.


That hurdle crossed, I then had to adjust from being the oldest, and a daughter at that, of my own family to becoming the first daughter in law of a new one. A family that is tight with each other and has 3 girls to boot. This time I was jealous of the dynamics between the girls. They almost spoke in code with each other and their mother. A code I didn't know. About the people of their small town, the very close extended family that includes relatives most people only see on genealogy charts, and events that happened long before I ever came on the scene. I felt left out. It was a lonely feeling. But it was one I inflicted on myself for no one ever meant for me to feel that way.

I got over it. It was not easy and I hate to say that I hurt more than just myself along the way. I said things I shouldn't have in my selfish anguish.

Two things helped me get over feeling and understand the bond that these women share with each other. The first was the marriage of my own sister. Courtney is 8 years younger than me. I got married when she was 12 and had Carter when she was 13. For her entire teenage years I was an old married lady. To further the gap in our growing up experiences my parents got divorced when I was 23 and she was 15. Thus my youngest siblings were raised by a single mother, whereas I had a 2 parent household. While I am privy to a lot of what my mother went through (often more than I ever asked to know) I really never knew what Courtney's experience as a child of divorced parents was like during that time.

So when she married at 19 to her wonderful Blake, we started sharing life again. I got to be an older sister planning her wedding reception, talking about her college experience as she too went into secondary education, dealing with in-laws, and in turn, dealing with our mother as an adult child, and bossing our brothers around as only sisters can. We started forging a bond that is unique only to sisters. A closeness of the heart that ties us together. It is more than just shopping together, (although we had a great time at the Gateway this week and will not be telling our husbands exactly how much was spent. We will just casually start wearing amazing new clothes that will dazzle them into forgetting about everything but the beautiful women they married and they will be so blinded by said beauty that they will not even think to ask the price of such beauty).

The last few years we were in Utah, Courtney was 25 minutes from me. She joined me on journey's with my kids (which I fear contributed to her 5 year wait to have Brooke). We analyzed everything from our parents divorce to the pros and cons of ballet flats as the new trend in shoes. I was her diplomat when both our parents came to her graduation from USU and she watched all 3 of my children while JaDee and I escaped for a weekend. We can ask each other anything and know there is always someone in the corner for us.

The second thing that helped me understand the bond of my sisters in law and more importantly the bond my mother in law has with her 3 daughters was the birth of my own daughter. It was different having a girl after 2 sons. I can't justly express my ponderings over this event but I knew that what I had gone through to bring her into the world was something that she too had been divinely called of God to do. I was passing on a lineage that is as old as the story of Eve to her. Being female is a divine calling. Women have gifts bestowed on them to be compassionate, loving, understanding, perceptive, caring, loving, creative and nurturing. It is a blessing to me to have Olivia to share these gifts with and to guide her as she too gains a testimony of what it means to be a Daughter of God.

My mother in law must have felt this way about the birth of each of her girls. I now understand how and why they can communicate in code, ask each other first for everything, do everything for everyone when we are all together, and have their rituals and traditions amongst themselves and pass this all on to their own daughters.

I understand.

I honor it.

I do not feel left out because I have my own.

And I know that I do have a place here. It is different from my place in my original family and different from my family that I have with my husband and children. I feel a camaraderie with my mother in law and sisters in law; enough so that I can call them all my sisters. Because sister-in law is too impersonal to refer to the things we have come to love about each other. To general a term to imply the situations all of us have prayed about, fasted about, cried about and worked to accomplish together.

But at the same time "sister" is also a term I use for my own blood relation, as the red heads use for theirs, that means something different.