In your vengeance lies mine.

I woke up to yet another Facebook announcement that should have been communicated in person and I think I might just be angry enough this time to finally share something of significance here.

I have a sibling. Lucky me. We shall call her Louisa. And there will be many parts to this story. Many, many parts.

For a quick overview for all those not living inside my brain, for my entire life I have been made to feel guilty for not being able to save Louisa from our abusers as children. It has something she has held against me for literal decades, despite her being a psychiatric inpatient for several years as a teenager. It gets a little more complicated than that and our barbed wire relationship caused chaos in early adulthood, and there are things I did have to hold myself accountable for as the trauma began to leak and burst from every angle and I said things out of turn. But that is for another day, and probably not as bad as I have let myself believe.

For now, let’s stick with the current context. I’ve struggled for years with infertility. I have held a dead baby in my hands as I bled, crumbled through multiple postpartum bodily symptoms with no child to love, and ached and yearned so intensely to be pregnant that at one point I really thought I might be losing my mind. In the end, we went down the fostering and adoption route to parenting, and I ADORE it. But it does not strip away the pain I went through for years with excruciating miscarriages and the emotional blowouts that followed. I still want to be pregnant. It’s not something I can explain, it’s simply a full body biological consumption. Or, a knowing that it is what I am someday destined for. But, it is manageable now that I am a parent. Just a background hum rather than a howl.

Louisa and I have had an incredibly rocky adult relationship. Over this last year, it’s been okay. We would text occasionally, exchange niceties. I thought I was being very niceties actually. I knew they had been trying for children for a while, and even sent her a long heartfelt message saying how sorry I was that it was taking longer than they’d hoped, that I knew how it felt, that I cared for her pain.

They all knew about my history.

Anyway, as it turns out, she’d been pregnant the whole time, the whole family already knew, and I found out on Facebook.

At first, because my default is ‘seek to understand’, I assumed she kept it from me because she was afraid of telling me, and didn’t want to hurt my feelings. That every single one of my family members had also agreed that this was the best route. To ‘protect’ me.

But no. After two weeks of crying straight at the betrayal and the lies (there had been something else she had done which made me suspicious all was not, in fact, touchy touchy feely feely – for another article), I arranged a facetime.

‘To be honest, I couldn’t care less about your infertility. I couldn’t care less about you. I don’t care if it hurts. You aren’t worth thinking about. It was all intentional.’

Word, for word.

As you can imagine, I was deeply, traumatically wounded, confused, stabbed in the gut with a serrated knife. What the fuck? And in a heartbeat, all the guilt and shame and self-punishment I had been carrying for years on her behalf, shifted to full fucking rage.

This morning I found out the gender via a friend of a friend on Facebook. And I think if you touched my skin it would hiss, the anger is that palpable still.

I don’t know how to shift it. I don’t know how to understand. I don’t know how to rationalise it so that my brain can break it down.

I tell people I’m okay with being made to be the bad guy, with my whole family being sold a narrative about me that isn’t real. But I’m not. I’m sensitive as fuck. And I’m not going to apologise for that.

I think she should have privately messaged me to tell me I was going to be an Aunt. She’s not a friend I know from high school. She’s my sister. We went through so much together. And hey, maybe she didn’t owe me a private announcement. But to intentionally allow me to find out months after everyone else because she wanted it to sting me? Just plain nasty. Cruel. Vicious.

I’m so done feeling sorry for her and blaming myself for her pain. I’m exhausted at everything she has put me through. All the ways she has used me. All the times I saved her life (seventeen times, if you were wondering), cooked her dinner and washed her clothes when I was still a child myself, helped her with her homework and stood up to teachers at school for her, I raised her. For what? A lifetime of scapegoating.

What a fucking waste.

Oh, and it’s a girl by the way.