Nama's Natural Life

I do not miss my sisters the same way.

That sounds obvious, I know. People are different. Relationships are different. Family damage has range.

Still, it catches me off guard how two people can come from the exact same place and live in me so differently.

With Janette, it is not sweet.

It is not some quiet sadness. It is not a thoughtful little ache. It is not me getting misty-eyed and staring out a window like I’m in a music video.

It is ugly.

I’ll Leave a Light On comes on and I am done. I mean full-body, snotty, cannot-get-myself-together sobbing. The kind that makes your chest hurt. The kind that leaves you embarrassed even when nobody saw it.

Because what lives under that song is not just missing her.

It is fear.

Not vague fear. Not “I worry about her sometimes.” I mean the real kind. The kind that sits low in your body all the time, whether you admit it or not. The kind that makes you think one day the phone is going to ring and that will be it. That will be the call.

That is what Janette is for me now.

Love and fear tangled up so tight I cannot separate them.

Jenny is different.

Jenny comes across my phone in sisters TikToks. The funny ones. The dumb ones. The ones where two women are laughing before they even finish the sentence because they already know where it’s going.

And with Jenny, I smile.

I don’t fall apart. I remember.

I remember how fun she is. I remember the humor. I remember that sister feeling of not having to explain the joke because the joke is half built already. She still lives in that part of my mind. Not as fear. Not as panic. More like warmth with a bruise under it.

And I understand her distance more than maybe I should.

Or maybe exactly as much as I should.

I do not regret refusing to crash a wedding. That was never going to be my move. I am not forcing my way into a room where I was not invited and then pretending it means love won. Absolutely not.

But I do respect a mother choosing her daughter fiercely.

I respect that very much.

Serena deserves that. The kind of love that says, I am with you. The kind that does not wobble because other people are hurt or offended or wish it had gone differently.

Jenny has become a good mom.

And that is not a small thing for me to say. That is not me trying to be gracious for the page. I mean it.

Maybe that is part of what makes family so hard to write honestly.

Sometimes nobody is fully the villain.

Sometimes people hurt you and you still see the good in them clear as day. Sometimes they make choices that cost you something, and you still understand why they made them. Sometimes you can love someone, respect something about them, and still feel heartbroken by where it left you.

That is a harder story to tell.

Cleaner stories get more applause.

But this one is true.

I love my sisters.

That is the plainest thing I know.

I love them differently. I miss them differently. They show up differently. One takes me straight to terror. One makes me laugh first and ache second.

Neither of them is nothing.

And maybe that is the worst part of family when it breaks in a way nobody can neatly explain:

love does not leave just because the relationship changed shape.

It stays.

In your throat when a song comes on.
In your chest when a stupid TikTok rolls across your screen.
In the part of you that still reaches before your pride remembers the rules.

That is the part people do not say out loud enough.

Sometimes the people you love most are not gone.

They are just no longer yours in the way they used to be.

And that hurts almost as much as death, with none of the casseroles.