Our Other Daughter
Alexi, the sister who carries this too
Brinlee has a sister, Alexi. She's ten. As a baby she was always smiling, always on the move, and she loved people from the very start, the kind of child who reaches for connection with everyone.
Alexi has grown up inside this. There's a name for children like her: "glass children", not because they're fragile, but because they learn to be so strong and so little trouble that the world can look right through them to the sibling who needs more. Alexi worries about us. She sees what we go through every single day, and she's learned to read it. Before she asks us for anything, the way any kid asks for anything, she'll often check first how the night went, because she knows that if Brinlee's night was hard, we'll be running on empty, and she doesn't want to add to it. She is ten years old, and she is already measuring her own needs against how tired we are.
One day she asked us a question we haven't stopped thinking about, about what happens when Katrina and I are as old as her grandmother: "How will you take care of Brinlee when you're as old as Vava?" She had already seen, entirely on her own, the fear that keeps us up at night, the exact fear this family lives with.
We try our hardest to give Alexi our attention and a normal childhood, and it is difficult. We don't want her to disappear inside her sister's diagnosis, and we don't want the rest of her life to become it either. Both of our girls deserve a future of their own.