Three Sisters: From Hating Each Other to Side by Side

When Dad died, I was eight, my older sister (Ruby) was thirteen, and my younger sister was still very small.

Mom couldn't support the three of us, so she gave my younger sister to our uncle. My little sister became an adopted daughter and had to learn as a small child to live by reading other people's faces. My older sister had a strong sense of responsibility. Mom had depression and was despairing all day long, so my older sister shouldered the family's responsibilities on her own. I was the second daughter. I lived with my widowed mom and my grandmother, and I was often beaten and yelled at. It was very painful. The three of us had completely different personalities. When we grew up we hardly spoke, and whenever we were together we fought. There was a time when we didn't love each other; we hated each other, and we didn't know how to get along.

A dream

In 2002, I had a dream: the three of us sisters were twisted together into one cord, going side by side onto a battlefield to save people, to save many who were bleeding and wounded in the war. I kept wondering what this dream meant. Back then we hardly had anything to do with each other. Even doing something together was hard, so how could we possibly go side by side to save people? But that picture stayed in my heart and slowly became my dream.

And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Ecclesiastes 4:12

I knew I wasn't healthy, so I deliberately sought out good mentors and friends, and had a team that accepted me unconditionally walking with me. I received a lot of the love my family of origin had lacked, and then, by an act of will, I chose to love my older sister and my younger sister with everything I had. Whenever they had a need, I was there by their side.

A bag of coins and a music box

In the past, when my younger sister asked to meet up, I'd always deal with other things first, meet other people's needs first, and put her last, thinking, she's just my little sister, it doesn't matter.

Later I dreamed that my sister had her husband bring me a bag of coins. I thought, a pile of coins isn't worth anything, and I tossed it aside and forgot about it. My sister called and asked me, "Did you get it? Did you look at it carefully?" I opened it and saw that they were coins from countries all over the world, every one of them crisp and clear and brand new, as if she'd spent her whole life collecting them to give to me, and I'd just tossed them aside. That dream was a true picture of how I treated my sister day to day. I felt so sorry toward her.

Then I dreamed of a music box. In the middle of a fountain, a tiny little girl was dancing, as small as an ant, but dancing with her whole heart. That girl was my sister: she doesn't stand out from the outside, but she has a very rich inner world, and if you step into her world, she'll love you with a love that's very rich and very sweet.

From then on, I began to take special care of my sister. When she had headaches, I took her to the doctor; whatever she needed, I put it first. I understood that she'd been hurt a lot and especially needed memories of being cherished, so I kept loving her and giving to her, and we became best friends. My sister said later that because of this connection, she slowly came to believe that she was actually worthy of being loved.

Forgiveness brings healing

Coming out of the hurts of our family of origin isn't about changing how our parents treat us now. They're old, and many of their ideas are set. It's very hard for them to change, and very hard for them to grasp the hurt that their past words and actions caused us. If we keep waiting for them to understand, or even to apologize to us, we'll just keep being disappointed and keep getting hurt.

What truly heals us is our own choice, and it has nothing to do with how our parents behaved in the past or behave now: we simply choose to forgive, to honor, to love and to walk alongside, whether it's our parents or our brothers and sisters. My sister, too, by an act of will, made the hardest and the best decision: to forgive Mom, and to love Mom and care for her.

Only forgiveness brings healing; only love mends what is broken.

The first online Wise Woman course in 2020 was the first time the three of us sisters formally worked together to help others. It's been a long road, with plenty of conflict and pain along the way, but we didn't give up. We can't change the past, but we can choose the future. Love can work miracles!