Older Sisters May Be Life’s Greatest Gift to a Young Woman

Of all the things I own — clothes and jewelry, the books I’ve read, the very bed where I sleep and the duvets I alternate to keep me warm — perhaps only 15% - 20% were bought with my own money; and even that may be a generous guess. Many would call it a last-child privilege (the youngest always being a little more spoiled) but to me, it feels less like privilege and more like the obscure blessing of having older sisters.

I grew up around older people. The youngest of my siblings is six years older than me. The eldest could be my mother if she was married and had a child by eighteen. I suppose in many folds, that may be part of why I grew up calling her my mother — and my mother, my grandmother. It was acceptable at age four to early teen ages. We grew our relationship in that fold: my birth mother mostly did the whipping when I misbehaved, and my chosen mother raised me and spoiled me rotten. Her first baby.

I’ve spent the largest part of my life in the company of these women. I’ve inherited their clothes, picked up many of their habits, learnt about menstruation and how to wear a pad before I even saw my period, befriended their friends despite the age differences, and have been saved from certain experiences because I had their wisdom to rely on.

Once, in a conversation with fellow gym members at the women-only gym I go to, an older woman was stunned to discover that I was twenty-three at the time.

“I mean physically I can totally understand you being twenty-three, but I just assumed you were a petite older woman because you’re not saying things I hear from people in their early twenties.’

On another occasion, one of my friends from high school said to me, “you should spend more time with your friends.”

Defensively, I asked, “what do you mean? I spend most of my time with my sisters, they’re pretty much like my best friends.”

“Exactly. You should spend more time with people your age.”

A call for concern? I disagree.

Between mind and age, it is almost as though I was too young to be so old and too old to be so young. Perhaps that is the inheritance older sisters give you — a way of stretching time. They lend you years that are not yours. They lend you their lessons, their quiet bruises and unspoken maps. You walk beside them and, without noticing, learn how to step into womanhood before the world demands it.

For most of history, women have had to navigate life on their own. Many did it without support, guidance, or a community that saw them - like really saw them. In sisterhood, there are gifts not limited to things that can be folded into drawers. They pass down the kind of knowing you can’t purchase. From them, you learn how to read the room once you enter it. How to speak softly without surrendering your voice. How to hold your own in a world that might underestimate you. You inherit not only their clothes and their taste in music (for mine has being highly influenced by theirs but we’ll talk about this in another piece in the near future), but their unspoken codes: the way they can manage a moment of tension or negotiate their interests in spaces that rarely hand it over freely. Because of them, you arrive at certain stages of womanhood almost already fluent; the same way I knew how to use a pad before the blood even came.

Sometimes people wonder if this closeness is limiting - that by spending so much time in their orbit, I might miss the rawness of figuring life out alone. But I have never felt caged. If anything, they have given me a bigger world. Older sisters hand you the courage to walk out into the unknown because you carry their experiences and support as a compass. You have the courage to face the unknown because you know, deep in your soul, that no matter what happens, I can call my sisters.

But if you ask me, I’ll tell you that the pinnacle of it all is in the permission to be entirely, unguardedly yourself. There is no performance with them. Rather, there is a bareness of self. Older sisters make room for that. They are the kind of rare people before whom you can unravel without shame, knowing that your mess will be held (and oftentimes fixed). And while this form of love and friendship may be found in those with whom you do not share blood, it is a blessing if God grants it to you from birth.

So recently, when someone looks at me with that curious tilt, “you speak like someone older”, I do not try to defend myself. I’ve been called ‘dindin kebba’ from when I was a teenager. I’ve befriended men and women older than me and they have not once ridiculed me in any form.

The greatest gift in life is a big sister. And you are lucky if you have more than one. From Jankeh I learnt grace, generosity and picked the habit of reading. From Ya Fatou I learnt grit, independence and the power of a good network. From Fatou (yes, we have two Fatous) I learnt patience, calmness and the essence of a prayerful woman.

In their company I am, at once, the child they once protected and the woman they helped me become. And if that makes me both too young and too old, then it is a paradox I wear with grace. For the gift of older sisters is not only in what they give, but in the way they guide you to and through womanhood — forever shaped by your years combined.

The poets say the role of the lover is the same as that of an artist, that if I love you, I must make you aware of what you do not see. And none has loved me like my sisters.