My joy at finding lost-long sister not fantasy I had dreamt
She is skinny and sporty. I am bookish and fat. I write about my life for a living and she isn’t even on social media.
Yet she is my sister – my long-lost sister – and when we meet for the first time ever, I am convinced there will be an immediate sense of connection and kinship and sisterly love.
That it does not happen like that is a measure, perhaps, of how we mythologise our families, hoping to find in them a sense of belonging and identity simply because they share our DNA.
To understand how I came to be 43 with a sister who I had never met, you have to understand that my father was some 30 years older than my mother.
So by the time I was born in England, two years into their marriage, my father was living a life that was decades and continents away from the one he’d had in South Africa with his first wife.
And my half-sister, who still lived there.
I was barely a toddler when my parents divorced. As I grew up their relationship was – to put it mildly – strained.
On my occasional visits to see him in London, miles from North Wales where we lived, we struggled to connect due to his emotional coolness and the generational gap.
It was not the kind of relationship where I felt free to ask questions.
If I did, he would obfuscate or let them evaporate – and disappear.
So although I always knew I had a sister from his first marriage, she seemed so remote to me that I almost didn’t believe she existed.
I never even told friends about her because to say I had a ‘sister’ felt like a lie.
What I knew about her was very little, but I did know that she was older than my mother, which itself was weird.
And that her mother had died when she was very young.
Visiting my father during school holidays, I saw pictures of her. With her thick dark hair and wide brown eyes, she looked like an older, much more beautiful version of me.
Far more like me than my blonde-haired blue-eyed mother. I often wondered if we shared other similarities.
And I liked the idea of having a sister. When I was little, I imagined doing her hair or how she might take me shopping for dresses.
As I grew, my fantasies of sisterhood matured but remained Pollyannaish.
As a teenager, I imagined an older sister whose clothes I could steal; someone I could go to for advice about relationships.
I held onto those fantasies, especially as, in my 20s, my mother and I became estranged.
Could this sister be a woman I might have a different relationship with?
And then my dad died. He was 90 and I was in my late 20s.
You always think there will be more time – but suddenly he was gone, leaving so much unspoken, including my sister’s whereabouts.
I hoped my sister might reach out at this point, to help with funeral arrangements or put an arm around me.
At the funeral, I looked for her and longed for her, but she never came.
Sometimes, later, I searched for her. I Googled her and scoured social media for her name, not sure I was even spelling it correctly.
Perhaps she had got married? Perhaps she was dead?
I never really believed I would find her, but I never completely gave in.
For years, the cost of going to South Africa was prohibitive but also I had no idea where to start looking for my dad’s former life there.
I had a vague idea he’d lived in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
I focused my online research on Jewish communities and, at the Jewish cemetery in Johannesburg, I found my paternal grandfather’s grave.
Then, last year, I finally made it to South Africa and visited his headstone but it only made my South African family seem more lost.
The day before I was due to leave, the friend I was travelling with had the strange idea to ask the cemetery reception whether they had any contact details for family members.
It seemed so unlikely that I felt slightly embarrassed asking the man behind the counter.
He walked off leaving me waiting awkwardly in the office, then after 10 minutes reappeared holding my sister’s phone number.
I needed a drink before I could call her.
What do you say to the sister you have never met? My heart thumps along to the ring tone. A voice answers – in a panic, I gush: “It is
your long-lost little sister Katie; I’ve finally come to South Africa to meet you – if you’d like to meet up?”
“Sure,” she said coolly, as if I had not waited 40 years.
I felt immediately disappointed and also anxious that perhaps there was a reason she chad never contacted me.
I picture a much older version of the photographs in my dad’s flat – a woman with long grey hair and dated clothes – so I am surprised when a women in fashionable cargo pants and a shaved head opens the door.
She is in her early 70s. She is still beautiful. And has my brown eyes.
She does not rush to hug me or break down in tears. As homecomings go, it feels somewhat dispassionate.
While for my part, I am so overwhelmed by the sheer scale and confusion of my feelings – of longing, questions, curiosity and desperation all entwined – I feel paralysed.
I have built up the possibility of finding my sister with so much potential. I have mentally and emotionally invested so many years in this moment – but now, finally together, she has never felt more remote.
There is none of the recognition I expected to feel and suddenly I understand that she is a total stranger after all.
In contrast to the enormity of the situation, we make small talk. We chat about life in South Africa while I interrogate her face for pieces of myself and watch her mannerisms for clues we are related.
We share little in terms of lifestyle but surely she is a portal into our shared history, I think, and ask her about my South African family and my father.
She shares some details – that my father was Orthodox Jewish when he raised her (secular by the time I was born) – but also shrugs at many of my questions.
She seems to know as little as me.
She shows me photographs of herself travelling the world as a young woman, pictures taken by my father in Rome and Paris, and I feel a flash of envy because they did so much together.
Yet she speaks about him coolly. I feel oddly protective of him.
In my fantasy I had imagined this moment would play out differently – that she would make me feel closer to him. Not more distant.
Then she tells me something that I do not remember at all. That when I was a little girl, and she occasionally visited our father in London – then in her mid 30s – she used to find notes that I’d written to her.
I must have been not even 10. I wonder, silently, why she never wrote back?
“Those notes,” she says, “were the only kindness I saw in that place.”
As she says this, I feel angry with her for not remembering our dad more kindly.
It’s true, he wasn’t emotionally open, but he opened up the world to me. On my brief visits to him during school holidays, he took me to the Ritz casino, the Reading Rooms at The British Museum and the salt beef bar at Selfridges.
He told me I could go anywhere and showed me a life beyond rural Wales. I had so little time with him and she had so much.
For all the things we do not have in common, something we do is that we have no family around us.
She has been alone since she was young when her mother died and my father moved to England: I haven’t seen my mother for years.
I have a sense, through our stilted conversation, of our desperation to connect, but we are too like my father, too emotionally awkward, to manage it.
She tells me she’s always loved dance music and that she travelled the world with her partner going clubbing in Ibiza, London and New York.
She especially loves Sonique, she tells me as she gets up and turns up her speakers and the dance music plays through her flat.
It makes me smile because she has my dad’s energy. She is in her 70s and spinning around her flat to Sonique.
And because I don’t know what to do or how to manage all of my feelings, I stand up and I start dancing with her.
And there we are, two sisters dancing together.
After barely a couple of hours I decide to leave. I am flying home the next day and feel overwhelmed.
But as I stand up to go, I am surprised to realise I am crying.
I think it’s the stinging realisation that it has taken us our whole lives to find each other and now perhaps we will never see each other again.
For the first time in my life, I have a sister. And as immediately, I have to let her go again.
Impulsively, I reach out to her and our stiffness vanishes as we hug.
Back in England, we make a real effort to stay in touch. I email her about my life in my Somerset cottage, sending her photographs, telling her about my work and complaining about the cold.
She replies telling me about the impossible heat in South Africa and how she is watching the tennis.
We send each other music – although she is into wild dance music and I prefer folk.
We have a long phone conversation in which we try to give each other the rundown on my 40 and her 70 years.
We swap numbers and start enthusiastically messaging.
For a couple of months we ping pong messages back and forth but after a while, I find it all too much.
She messages so often and I am so unused to having anyone check in on me.
I ask her to calm her messaging, but she doesn’t. When I don’t reply she sends more messages.
She has gone from stand-offish to suffocating. Or is this my avoidant nature flaring up? Either way, I feel claustrophobic.
Then it blows up. Someone very close to me dies and I become hypersensitive.
When I stop replying to her messages, she emails saying she is worried about my mental health.
I am furious. It feels such a leap. Is this family? Having your deepest insecurities used against you?
I realise that I am angry too for all the times she hasn’t been there for me, when I actually needed a big sister.
Where was she when my – our – dad died? I want to know.
I stop talking to her and think about how I managed all these years without a sister. Why should sharing DNA with a woman I don’t even know matter more than my genuine friendships?
I wonder if family and blood means anything. Yet, at the same time, I am touched by the thought that deep in her bones she has the same genetic material as me.
As the silence stretches between us, I think about sisterhood. I realise how invested I have been in a fantasy sorority and start to wonder if this conflict, this confusion, antagonism and exasperation might be – rather than doing each other’s hair or sharing clothes – the genuine sisters’ experience.
I feel heartbroken that, having gone halfway across the world to meet her, I have lost her by email.
After a few weeks, I decide to try again. We reconnect and start slowly messaging.
It feels good to be back in touch even if this time I am even more hesitant. We are more honest too.
We start to listen to each other properly, we air our feelings and I am touched by how much we both want to try to connect.
I realise that she is also just a woman trying to make her way alone in the world, dealing with her own trials, who longed for a sister too.
I wish she was here and I could get to know her more gently over time, in real life, where nuance isn’t so easily lost.
But she is so far away that I also know I may never see her again.