“What will become of her after I am gone?” she asked me one evening. “We will make provision for her,” I said. Molly shook her head. “People are cruel,” she said. “Who could we trust that much?” “Nettle?” I suggested. Molly shook her head again. “Must I sacrifice one daughter’s life to be caretaker for the other?” she asked me, and to that I had no answer.
But as I peered in I saw not Molly but Nettle sitting by her sister’s bed, looking down at her with a face of tragic wistfulness. She was speaking softly. “For years, I imagined a sister. Someone to share dreams with, to braid each other’s hair and tease about boys and take long walks with me. I thought I would teach you to dance and we would have secrets and cook together late at night when everyone else was asleep. And here you are, at last. But we will have none of that, will we? Yet this I will promise you, little Bee. No matter what happens to our parents, I will always care for you.” And then my Nettle lowered her face into her hands and wept. I knew then that she mourned for the sister she had imagined, just as I still longed for the perfect little girl I had dreamed we would have.
~ quotes from Fool's Assassin, by Robin Hobb
I was given my little sister to care for for the rest of her life basically from birth. Unlike Nettle, all grown, I was 3 and they'd had my sister for me so I wouldn't be an only child. She was tiny, failure to thrive, and grew and learned things "on her own schedule," like Bee. Also like Bee only one person could understand her, and that was me. I was her translator as Molly was Bee's. My sister is Autistic (as am I, but I largely escaped notice other than my dyslexia) and didn't meet your eyes with her bright blue ones either. She's also legitimately prophetic, the Vatican has a file on her. 😅
I was the one throwing pinecones, but at the children who bullied her for being the size of a child 3 or 4 years younger than she was. I was and am her protector, even from across the country, but unlike Molly's wish that Nettle not end up her caretaker, I will be my sister's once my mother passes (hopefully a long time from now). But like Nettle I do it willingly.
I've never read anything that manages to explain the mourning process for the kind of child or sibling you'd wished to have, the wild, wolf-like need to protect one's pack that having such a child in your life *should* produce considering how the world works, and showing that said child is still an entire person with their own autonomy and dreams and personality just like everyone else, instead of pulling a typical "autism mom" move of focusing only on how the child being different affects the parents/siblings and not at all on how that's a whole human bean you're talking about like they're only ever going to be a curse on your family. Instead Bee, who is so, so loved by her family, gets given her own POV chapters so you don't only see her from the outside and it's so, so good.
Was I crying over it while trying not to hydroplane on the highway? Maybe. I'm currently waiting while the tiny girl I care for (she's 10 but very smol, she has Downs Syndrome and a host of other stuff going on) has her PT appointment, because my life is just full of Bees.
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