The air is fuzzy around us, the slowly diffusing blue of a long summer evening turning into night. My sister will be going to college soon but for one more week, we still share a bed. The roseprint sheets are tangled around our legs and spread among them are the soft pastels of a dozen magazines.
“What if I don’t meet someone I want to have kids with?” she asks and her face is so sincere I can’t look away. She wants so badly to be a mother. She is 18.
I am 15. Her desire is so intense it ripples around her and pushes me away. Throughout my childhood, I’ve mostly thought of myself as a slightly less adequate version of my sister.
I’ve been in training. When I get older and better, I will become my big sister. But here, in this moment, a crack forms.
I don’t have any interest in kids, in mothering, in building a family. It is her intensity that scares me though. I fear that I will never want anything the way she wants motherhood.
Throughout the years to come, my sister will tell me that I just need to give it a little time. Soon, I will want to be a mother. It never happens.
And the fear of not knowing what it is that I want instead shadows me as I move across the country picking up waitressing jobs and dancing at strip clubs and dreaming about making movies, taking pictures, writing stories. Through it all, I am envious of my sister’s focus. I am in my mid-twenties when I first watch , Barbara Loden’s 1970 directorial debut about a young woman from the Pennsy.
