For weeks last summer I watched two adult mourning doves flit in and out of a nest in the upper left corner of my porch, co-raising a pair of chicks. I watched them outgrow the nest, until eventually the parents stopped coming around. The next day, the nest was empty. I figured the chicks had flown off to start their own lives, eager to build nests of their own. And then I looked down.
Two baby doves were snuggled together right at the foot of the porch door, craning their necks to take in a world that surely looked different on solid ground than from high on their perch. I'm no scientist, but I'm pretty sure all things that are good and holy in this world are girls, including these birds — it's with that logic that I decided they were sisters. And for that one fleeting period in their lives, before they'd even learned to fly, those sisters had nothing but each other.
My grandma, Sonja, was born in Nazi Germany in 1938, to two Jewish parents and an older sister. When she was just weeks old, the young family fled to Switzerland, where they lived as refugees for a decade until they emigrated to Queens, NY. The grief and trauma of genocide followed the family everywhere, but in Switzerland especially there were long stretches where they were all separated, whether one was convalescing from an illness or away working.
When they were together, however, the two sisters made dolls and traded chocolate for chewing gum from US soldiers and played games that made them laugh. All my life my grandma has described their bond as a sort of "secret language" — something impenetrable and specific and life-giving.
I, however, am sisterless. A sister is all I ever longed for, someone to explain all the superficial markers of girlhood, like tampons and smoky eyes and push-up bras. I had to borrow sisters from friends just to learn the basics, like when Emma P.'s older sister taught me how to braid hair on the school bus in first grade. She was four years older and very patient, and I worshipped her like a deity.
Sisterhood is something I've primarily engaged with as a metaphor — an act of feminist solidarity, a strong bond between lifelong friends. It's something I've tried my whole life to engineer, feeling glimmers of it in friendship groups that would stay up late and play truth or dare, or have clothing swaps, or get ready together to go out dancing.
But you don't need to have a sister to know that true sisterhood is made of more than slumber parties and clothing and makeup. Sisterhood is really being seen. Sisterhood is not having to explain.
My grandma's sister, Rachel, died in the fall. It was just me in the room with them as they said goodbye for what would be the last time. Rachel was weak from her illness, but she gripped my grandma's hands with surprising strength. I watched through a blur of tears as she kissed her little sister's cheek. Of course they were grown women, both well into their 80s, but the expressions on their faces reminded me of those two baby birds huddled together on my porch, looking out at the uncertainty of whatever comes next, comforted by the knowledge that the other was there at their side.
My grandma and her sister were so different. They disagreed on politics and religion. They married very different men, raised their sons differently, worked different careers, and, for a long time, lived on opposite coasts. But until the very end of Rachel's life, being together transported them back to girlhood, when their first and greatest concern was looking out for the other.
Sisterhood is not a monolith. Not all sisters get along, not all sisters are supportive. Sisterhood isn't even defined by gender. For a sisterless girl like me, I've had to do a little DIY and forge a sense of sisterhood from my other sacred feminine relationships, with my grandmothers, my mom, my friends, and even random women out in the world. Many of us speak a dialect of that secret language my grandma described — can read the subtle twinge in a smile or flicker in a glance.
Now that it's spring, the mourning dove parents are back in the nest and sitting on new eggs. As I wait for the next generation to hatch, I'm reminded of the many ways we sisters lean on each other, blood-related or not — to face wherever it is we're going and know that we're not alone in the journey.
— Emma Glassman-Hughes, associate balance editor
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