Personal Narrative: How My Sister Changed My Life

My sister and I have a routine we do each night when I put her to bed. First we’ll read a book, it’s the usual cardboard baby book that’s filled with pictures. I’ll sit on the rocking footstool and read. The pictures face her and from my perspective the letters appear upside down, it’s irritating when b’s look like p’s, d’s look like q’s, and vise versa. After a good two minutes of reading I’ll get up to turn off the light, then make my way back to her. What I do next is what my great-grandma used to do to help me fall asleep. I began to trace my finger on her face, whisper gently about it being a car on a road trip across her visage, starting out at the at the soft ground beneath her eyes, up the hill of her nose, and finally to the forest …show more content…
She was a preemie, small, and in an incubator. But at the time she wasn’t my sister, she was my cousin, the daughter of my aunt. I fell in love with her instantly the first time I held her, I have no idea how or why, but it happened. After a while my aunt stopped visiting her, doing whatever she wanted, until my mom told her to go back to the village for her own safety and sign over power of attorney so that my mom could visit her child at the hospital. I visited her a lot while she was at the Native Hospital and tried to convince my mom that we should adopt her. My mom visited almost every day yet no matter how much we visited something was wrong. My little cousin wouldn’t eat, so they fed her through a tube from her nose, before they went on to a more extensive method. Trying to prevent this from happening, my mom and dad tried to do a 48 hour trial to make her eat naturally, leaving my brothers and I in the care of my grandma. It was not successful. They scheduled her a surgery and implanted a tube in her stomach. My aunt was supposed to get her after that, but she never showed up. My cousin’s social worker filed it as abandonment, and because she had no place to go they asked us to take her in. We decided that she could live with us, but if we took her, we decided that we would not be giving her …show more content…
We took lots of pictures. Not long after my dad had to leave for business leaving my mom and I to take care of the baby. It was stressful, here we were with a recent addition to the house who needed special care, but my mother and I somehow managed to do it. I began to notice as time went on that my sister lacked attachment, most babies loved touch and interaction, but she seemed completely uncomfortable with it, she didn’t respond to smiles or hugs and she never would lay her head down on our shoulders. The several months she was in the Intensive Care unit she was seldom held, and because of it touch was a stranger, and part of her head was flat from laying on one side for so long. We did everything we could to try and fix this, we got her a special helmet to shape her head correctly, held her as much as we could, but the one thing we couldn’t fix was her eating problems. No matter how much we tried to feed her by mouth she would fight it, forcing us to feed her from the tube in her