The Wonder Chronicles: 11
This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On Aunts
When I was 19 and my brother 15, our mother, 43, sat us down and told us she had news..
“I’m pregnant.”
After so long with just the two of us, my brother and I excitedly awaited the arrival of the new sibling. Back in 1986, we did not have access to the baby’s sex but we joked they would grow up to be a boxer judging from the powerful kicks inside her that our mother alerted us to.
Our father was at the delivery and guessed it was a girl as soon as the baby’s head became visible because she had a full head of black hair, just like me when I was born 19 years earlier.
My brother and I would spend hours just watching our new sister pound the air with her hands and feet during her hours awake. Definitely a boxer!
Six years later, when I was working six days a week as a reporter, I started taking my sister out for lunch on my one day off. I wanted to spend time with her.
She reminds me that back then, the waiter would take my order and then ask me what she wanted.
“Ask her,” I would tell him. “She knows what she wants. She can order for herself.”
My sister and I now live on opposite coasts of the U.S. She is now a professor. I just spent a week with her and Sisters’ Day Out–including our lunch together–is a treasured tradition still, 31 years later.
Our mother calls us Felony (me, with a couple of arrests under my belt) and Misdemeanor (my sister, the boxer) because we take no shit.
Once, angry at something I’d written that they disagreed with, someone mistakenly thought they could hector my sister about my work.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not Mona Eltahawy,” she stopped them in their tracks. “So perhaps you should look for her and tell her yourself,”
I think of us as (Rep.) Rashida (Tlaib) and (Rep.) Ilhan (Omar), because we take no shit and because merely by existing next to each other, juxtaposed, we complicate perceptions of Muslim women.
One of the disadvantages of being the eldest–especially daughter–is that your parents are younger and more energetic in their discipline. I have often marveled in envy at the things my sister got away with as she was growing up.
One of the advantages of being the eldest–especially daughter–is that you can share signposts ahead, e.g. MONAPAUSE!
One of the advantages of having a sister who is the most mature person you know is that she can tell you, lovingly, when the breakdown you’re having (before you started hormone therapy) is disconnected from reality.
I am childfree by choice. I have not mothered my sister. I have never wanted to mother anyone.
I have sistered her; sister as in comrade.
Find the misdemeanor to your felony. Look for a boxer.
My goal: that you are found by wonder.
My wish: that you intensely live.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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