because my sisters were chosen

The women in my family are on a mission. Again.

There is a certain brand of stuffed toy animal whose popularity is sweeping the nation, and my niece Katie, who is about to turn 9, wants to give them as favors at her birthday party. The only trouble is that they're mostly sold out where she lives in Pennsylvania. So my sister Laura, Katie's mother, enlisted the help of our other sister, my mother and me, because we live in different states.

My mother tried, but had no luck. My sister Molly was excused because she lives in a small town far away from retail. But this morning I went to the gift shop near my house, as soon as it opened, and within three minutes I had an armload of animals, trying to avoid imagining what I looked like, a 45-year-old woman with a lunatic expression in her eyes, searching desperately for a stuffed platypus. I brought them up to the counter, hoping that the "one per customer per day" quota wouldn't apply to any of the species on my niece's list. Score! I couldn't wait to get home and call up Katie, who was ecstatic when she heard.

Each of my sisters has a son and a daughter. I have no children of my own, and these nieces and nephews are, as they say in the South, my heart. I don't love the girls—Katie and her cousin Sadie—any more than I do their brothers, but I think I love them differently, with an awareness of their roles as inheritors of a tradition of female strength that has defined and sustained me all my life.

Every morning, my mother, my sisters and I check in by e-mail. We joke that it is because our mother lives alone and we want to make sure she hasn't fallen down the stairs but, really, we all need it. We give agendas for the day, weather reports, encouragement and (when solicited) advice about challenges any of us might be facing. A lot of times, we vent—about work and long waiting lines, idiots on car phones, and kitchen smoke alarms that go off for no reason. (Never about the men in our lives. For some reason, our loyalty to them either trumps or flies under the radar of the one among women.)

When Laura's son Jack—our first grandchild and nephew—was born in January 1996, a snowstorm socked the Northeast. Hearing that Laura was in labor, I set off from Boston by Amtrak because the airport was closed, and Molly boarded a
train from Washington, D.C. She made it to the hospital in time to be with Laura for the birth (Laura's husband was there, but queasiness kept him out of the delivery room)—to witness Jack's emergence, and to inform Laura that she had a son.

Perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of our family's female bond is the day my grandfather died in 1993. He'd been sick and in the hospital, and during his illness and that of my grandmother, who died a year before, it was my mother and her sister who took care of their parents. They had two brothers who lived not all that far away, but, as one of them said in a phone call to my mother, "It's just so hard."

The day my grandfather died, my mother, my aunt, my sisters and I gathered in his ICU room at the hospital. Molly was the last to arrive at 5 p.m., having driven the eight hours from Baltimore. When she finally made it, my mother went over to my grandfather, who was on a ventilator and hadn't spoken for days, patted his hand and told him, "I have all my girls here with me now." It was her signal that he could go.

Forty-five minutes later, he started to fail. We could tell, and the nurse confirmed it. All five of us put our hands on top of his, and talked to him. Laura had to leave the room for a minute, but the nurse put her hand on Laura's shoulder, until my sister could come back in. It may seem perverse, but I have never felt so alive as in those minutes my female relatives and I helped usher my grandfather from this world. It is an experience of having done something important and tribal, something great. And we did it together.

Last year, Molly and her family spent a semester in New South Wales. My mother and I went to visit them, and they took us to the Blue Mountains, where there is a rock formation called The Three Sisters, named for figures in an aboriginal legend. For Christmas, Molly enlarged and framed a color photograph of The Three Sisters for Laura, my mother and me. I keep mine on a wall of my home office, where I look at it often—especially (and probably not by accident) when I am lifting weights.

The men and boys in my family have their own form of kinship. It seems to have a lot to do with sports, vehicles and building things in the woods. I can't make my nephews any promises about what's in store for them, from my own experience; I leave that to other guardians.

As for my nieces, I'm sorry for them that neither of them has a sister. But I want them to know how powerful a sisterhood they were born into. And this: that if Katie or Sadie ever needs any or all of us to hold her hand in the hospital, find her a stuffed platypus, or meet her at the top of a mountain in Australia—we'll be there.

"Sisterhood of the traveling aunts: The connectedness of women is the strength that binds" by Jessica Treadway. Jessica Treadway is author of the story collection Absent Without Leave and the novel And Give You Peace. October 7, 2007                Copyright ©2007, Chicago Tribune