My Sister
By: Zachery Cotto
Reflection: I was hesitant to even write this piece, let alone read it to a room full of my peers and professors. Creative nonfiction is always a dicey genre to write in. I get caught in the ethics of storytelling: Am I portraying this person fairly? Did an event happen the way I told it? Are there any important details I left out--maybe because of something I forgot?
Since this was a story about the relationship I have with my sister--the person who I hold closest to me--I was terrified of any ethical malpractice. I was going to show a very intimate part of myself. My vulnerabilities were the focus of this piece. I showed how I relived youth vicariously through my sister. I showed the wish I had for our family to finally have a father figure. I showed how I wanted to be that father figure. I showed the ways our lives parallel and how history repeated itself. These are all such personal themes in my life. Jumping onto that podium made me feel like I was six years old again, attempting my first ride on the tilt-a-whirl.
When I started reading I feared that I would stumble on my words or that my inflections would be off. But as I continued it all began to flow naturally. I got lost in the moment of the story myself. I began to feel this dizzying momentum. I didn’t anticipate the confidence I felt. The struggles I had were lost. Ever fear I had about how I would portray myself and my family had disappeared. It all felt less stressful in execution. Things that seem scary in practice aren’t as daunting when you finally get them over with.
My Sister
My sister just had her fifth birthday and that scares the shit out of me. Not necessarily because I’m more aware of my mortality waning or because she’s growing up too quickly for me. I’m scared because I remember being five. When I drove her out to her first day of Kindergarten and saw that startled look she gave, the way she clenched her arms around her stomach and told me about how she had to “go potty”--I saw glimpses of myself in her actions.
Since the day she was born, I’ve had this sense of empathy for her. I was born without my father around. I’ve not seen or talked to him once during my twenty years on this planet, but I still feel like I know him better than I’d know myself. He avoided contact in any way he could despite the fact that we tried to keep in touch with his family for much of my youth. My Mother and Grandmother had to take him to court when I was eight just to prove that he was my biological father. He didn’t want to acknowledge that I was his kid.
My sister was born into this world the same way: With a deadbeat dad who showed that he didn’t want anything to do with her by not being there. My mother had been dating him for years. She thought he was someone special and he left her the second something even gave him a sense that he needed to be a responsible adult. He didn’t want to change her diapers or teach her how to count. He just wanted to waste away his days as a bachelor past his prime.
I hated it. I was left with an animosity I’d never felt before. I knew the pain of knowing someone never wanted you. I felt the years of that void; The lack of parental guidance made me feel like I was sailing a ship into manhood without any course or destination. I saw what I was missing through my friends, cousins and neighbors. I saw it on television with sitcoms of full, happy families and the love they had for each other.
Now, not only did I have to live with this abandonment, but so did my closest blood relative. She had to grow up knowing that someone who should have been there for her wasn’t. The man who was supposed to tuck her in or take her to prom or hug her when she failed her first class or fell off her first bike never showed, and I feared that she’d end up like me, waking up at age 20 wondering what her life would have been like otherwise. I didn’t want that to happen to her. I told myself I couldn't let it happen to her.
Since the second she was out of the operating room I tried to be there for her like her father wasn’t. I remember standing in the room, exchanging glances with my mother and my grandmother. I was the first to suggest a name. Samantha. I recalled that this was the name my mother told me she would have given me had I been a girl. My mother and grandmother agreed. It was the first moment that I felt like I could be there for her.
Three years later, she showed me her first acknowledgements of her father’s absence. Samantha was watching a show with her mother--Caillou--and she looked intently at an episode where Caillou and his father made a card for his mother on her birthday. After that she kept asking my mother if she could make a card with her dad, just like Caillou did.
When my mother told me it felt like a pit in my stomach was growing, it reminded me of that void I felt whenever I thought about my father. It reminded me of that time I fell off a jungle-gym and cried my lungs out, but no one came. I wanted to embrace her, hold her, tell her that I would give anything to go back and force him to stand in that operating room and feel the love I had felt for her the second that she came into the world.
When I came home that weekend I asked her if she wanted to make a card for our mother’s birthday--despite the fact that our mother’s birthday was months away. She danced, and squealed in delight.
When we sat down and started working with all of the arts and craft tools littered about the table, I looked over at her smiling visage. She was bouncing off the walls with excitement it seemed, and I was responding in kind with my own sense of pride… at first. The last thing I recall her saying in that moment was something that scared me--just as her age scares me now.
She told me, “Thank you daddy.”