Long-Distance Sistering

The prospect of starting a blog is a little overwhelming and a lot self-indulgent, but as my Dad always rightly said, I've never found a mirror I didn't like. Hopefully this blog will serve as more than a reflection of my exceedingly good looks and will provide some perspective and entertainment as I forge my way through advertising boot camp with a little help, encouragement and inspiration from my six-year-old sister, McKenzie. We live 700 miles apart, or one speed dial, postage stamp, or click of "send" away.


little sis (Kenzie) and middle sis (Courtney)


Here's the story of how we first met.

One fateful night in my junior year of high school, Mom and Dad sat my big sister Morgan and me down for a family dinner. A beautiful spread of cheese and fig compote, succulent grapes and a toasted ciabatta lay before us.

I knew something was up when Dad opened a special bottle of wine and didn't say much about it. Just when I noticed that there were only three glasses on the table, Mom announced that she was pregnant, and she was going to have a baby.
A Baby? I thought. How was that possible?
My older sister Morgan's response was complete unfounded excitement.
"A baby!" Morgan said. "That's awesome!"
Morgan was leaving in a year. She would hardly see the terrible twos.
Mom and Dad shifted their stare at me next, as though waiting for a reaction. But I was stunned.
"Why aren't you saying anything?" Mom said.
"Don't you guys know anything about birth control?" I said.
I regretted those words instantly. But as a rebellious hormonal teenager, I had fallen into a habit of not thinking about what I'd said until after I'd said it, or, more often, not thinking at all.


Nine months and several pounds of chocolate, pizza, and white death carbohydrates later (the white family nearly doubled in size before the baby was born), Mom went into labor. Morgan and I got the message at school. We immediately raced to the parking garage and heavy pedaled it to the hospital. When we got there, Mom was having contractions but not dilating. I heard the doctor explain to a nurse that half an hour of that was dangerous, for my Mom and for the baby. Twenty-nine and a half minutes later, the doctor announced that she would have to have an emergency C-section. A few nurses escorted Mom to a back room, and Dad signed some papers.


(Morgan, Dad and Courtney preparing to meet the little nugget.)


Hospital policy was that the patient could bring one guest into the emergency room, but Dad's policy was All for One, and One for All. Dad handed us some hospital scrubs while the medical staff prepared for the procedure. Then a nurse accompanied us into the operating room. Mom lay on the cot with a large blue sheet dangling from the ceiling separating her head from the rest of her body. Her face was what Miracle Max would diagnose as "mostly dead." I started to cry.

I watched as the doctor made his incision. The skin flared open the way a chicken breast does when you cut the trimmings. There was a short lag time before blood started pouring out, Mom's body resisting the doctor's unorthodox birthing scalpel. I looked up to maintain consciousness, where instead I found a ceiling-mounted mirror reflecting the doctor's view of the entire bloody dissection.

The doctor carefully removed organs from my mother's body -- red ones, brown ones, lumpy ones, round ones -- and placed them on a metal table on wheels beside her. Which one was my sister? I looked to my father, who held Mom's hand as the surgery continued. A drop ran down his cheek, a combination of consternation and perspiration accumulating along the rim of his face mask. I don't think he'd expected the doctor to take my mom apart, either, but he wasn't about to leave Mom's side to tell the doctor what to do. Morgan was behind me. I could feel that she was just as afraid as I was about what would happen next.


(Crying Baby White.)


Morgan was crying, I was crying, and then - suddenly -- a baby was crying, too. She had a great voice. I wondered, were we all feeling the same surge of emotion simultaneously? The same all-consuming familial bond? Morgan went to see the baby, who seemed pretty siked for her first bath, and I remained fixated on the rest of Mom's procedure. Mom has never lost any fight, but when she was completely knocked out and knocked up and knocked out with her body parts on a rolling metal nightstand, I feared for her life.
What if she doesn't wake up, I thought. My mom could die.

The doctor reassembled her parts, and before stitching her up, he lifted the last glittery ornament -- Mom's uterus -- off the side table and waved it in the air.
"Morgan, Courtney; look!" he said. "You were here once!"
Not the time or the place, Doc. Don' mess with my Mom!

[imagine family portrait here; mom would kill me if one actually surfaced on the internets]

Mom woke up eventually, and we got to have a heart-to-heart with the baby to-be-named McKenzie. She was way cooler than I'd thought she would be, and didn't even complain when I put my fingers behind her unusually large ears so she looked like a bunny.


(I'm so not a natural at this, but getting the hang of things.)


When McKenzie was two, I left for college, and we've been in a sororietal LDR ever since. Sistering one state apart isn't easy, but I do the best I can. And she does the same for me.