Amanda

Today is my sister, Amanda's birthday and so I have been thinking about sisters. I also know that my friend Canadian Karen's sister is quite ill, so she too has been thinking her own sister.

Our lives, mine and my sister's, were very female centred. Our dad was away at sea a lot when we were young, and my mum was one of four sisters, one of whom lived near us, so the two of them more or less looked after us. Then there were our two nans. No grandads, just two nans, the severe but very matriarchal Welsh one, and the Brummie one. My childhood friend, Karen also had a twin sister and the four of us girls used to play together all the time. There were a lot of women in our lives. I don't know if that was good or bad, it just was.

My mother wrote an airletter every week to her sister in Canada. Her other sister would come and stay with us every weekend and over holidays, Christmas, Easter, Bank Holidays. Her oldest sister had died early, in her forties, but my mother and her sisters would talk about her sometimes, tearfully.

It is an odd thing, but despite all of this, we don't have the close relationship that my mother and her sisters had or that my friend Lori has with hers. I keep in touch with Amanda, I care about her and what is happening in her life, and I visit when I am in Britain, and enjoy her company, but we don't have to phone each other constantly, nor consult each other on small details of our lives. I think this is a lack, but it also means that we can happily live on opposite sides of the Atlantic without too much grief.

I often wonder whether it is this very fundamental relationship with my sister, the one person I had to share my parents with, that colours all other relationships. I am the older sister and I am aware very often, of behaving as such in friendships. And I have formed my most enduring friendships with women who have been brought up with a sister. I know that's a bit of a stretch, since a large number of people have sisters and I do have friends who have brothers too. But somehow, I think it is significant.

So, today, I toast my sister, I send positive thoughts to my friend Karen, anxious about her own sister, and I am happy for another close friend, building a realtionship with a newly re-found sister.