When the Youngest "Grows Up"
Posted by Lynn Wehner in Family on Tuesday, December 14, 2010 9:00 AM
My baby sister turned 40 yesterday. Many blessings to you in this birthday week, Lisa!
She’s the youngest and I’m the oldest of our siblings. Her hitting this milestone is — well, it’s just plain weird. I don’t know who feels older — her, me, or our dad. There’s probably going to be a whole lotta denial going on for a little while.
I remember how adorable she was when she was a baby. I remember when we both took skating lessons at the same place and shared a room on special visits to Grandma’s house. I remember how she followed me around when we were growing up — especially when I had made the move into teenager-hood and she looked on with adoring eyes at me and my friends. I remember when she became an auntie for the first time and my kids looked on at the life of “cool Aunt Lisa” with their own adoring eyes and relished her visits.
We are both adults now and very close friends. But we still have the older sister-younger sister thing going on. That, of course, is natural. As the elder stateswoman, I went to college before she did — and was later there to cheer her on at her own college graduation. I got married before she did — and later served as matron of honor at her wedding. I had children before she did — and later took a long train ride when her first child was born in order to help guide her through those early days of learning to mother a newborn.
Yes, I’ll always be the eldest of our crew.
And apparently that’s pretty old. As Leah, the “baby” of my own family, pointed out yesterday morning when she was reading about coal — whose “story began 300 million years ago” … “Wow, Mommy, that was even before YOU were born!” Nice.
Do you have a birth-order dynamic in your family? What has happened with you guys as “the baby” has grown up? And are these dynamics more pronounced during the Advent and Christmas seasons when families gather?
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