Designing Lorri

Thank you for joining me for day two of the Thankful 30. You can read Day 1 here. I will do my best to keep up with this each day! I hope you’ll share your challenge link in the the comment so I can follow yours too.

Day Two: I am thankful for my brother and sister.

I was an only child the first eight years of my life. After that, my mom married and I had an evil step-sister. We were never close, and when I thought we were friends it turned out she was just lying to make herself look good. We have zero communication now and my mom and her dad are divorced. But before all that, at the age of 13 my little sister was born. Barely a year later my brother was born.

For various reasons, some being her inability to tolerate fussing and others being health related, my mom left me to take care of my brother and sister a lot. When I say a lot, I still have not met another person who has had to wipe their own siblings butt more than me.

Thankfully, we are past the butt wiping stage–they are now 13 and 14 years old. They are great kids with big hearts and opposing personalities. What I’ve learned most from my relationship with them is that God gave me a gift of communicating with children and encouraging them. When all the adults in my life were pointing out how bad it is to care for children and how my situation was great because I’d never want children, I only realized how good I am at “mom-ing” and how badly I did wanted my own children someday. What’s more, I realized the flaw in all these pitiful adults who saw, and continue to see, children as burdensome pests.

We have out differences. Being 13 years apart makes me more like an aunt than a sister, but I think we’ve learned so much over the years. I often regret all the things I gave up because I knew I was needed at home to help with my siblings, but I also know that someday it will all be worth it. So thank you, God, for my brother and sister.