Sometimes I wonder if it's too late to be an only child.

I was born the second of four children. I grew up in a traditional family, with traditional values and traditional differences of opinion. I might not have agreed with the political viewpoints of my siblings. We might have differed in our religious beliefs. And we certainly didn't share the same dreams for the future. But one thing I never doubted we shared was love. I didn't always like my siblings, but I always loved them.

After my mother died four and a half years ago, my brothers stopped talking to me. It happened gradually, over a six month period, but once both Mom and Dad's ashes had been poured into Monterey Bay,  Joe and Doug disappeared as thoroughly as if they, too, were at the bottom of the sea.

My sister followed suit, nursing some imaginary hurt. She and I had exchanged some heated and hurtful words after Mom's death. She had stabbed me in the heart, and made me question whether any of the past 59 years had been real.

But several years later, she finally responded to one of my barrage of emails and phone calls, and decided she wanted to be friends again. The only rule was, we weren't to talk about what had happened. No explanations, no apologies.

Whatever. Fine. Things went all right for a while, but then, last summer, I pissed her off again. I wrote about that in the first post on this blog. We got past that, and after her granddaughter was born, things seemed fine.
But apparently they weren't.

The last time I heard from her was just before the Super Bowl this year. She didn't answer my next two emails, and she didn't respond to the card and letter I sent at Easter. I figured I'd annoyed her again.

But I figured she'd get over it, right? As the weeks wore on, I sometimes thought of her, but mostly I just went on with my life.

Until April 15th. Yes, it's tax day, but it's also my birthday. This year, there was very little discussion of my birthday. No one asked what I wanted, or what I was doing that day, or if I wanted to go somewhere. My daughter said if I wanted to do something the weekend before, to let her know, but I really didn't.

The truth was, I was nursing this secret hope that there was a surprise in the works. I thought maybe my sister's silence was because she was planning on flying out here for my birthday and was afraid she would blow the secret if she called or emailed. In my mind, that explained why there was no card from her, much less a present, and why no one was pushing me to make plans with them.

I waited all day. I checked the mail, I checked my phone, I kept looking out the window. What a fool I was.
I cried myself to sleep that night.