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Five Girls and Two Sisters . . .

My niece is in town visiting from England.   She is one of five children, all are girls, and each and every one of them is completely different from the one before.  Five children, all raised in the same home by the same two parents, yet five totally different personalities with totally different views on politics, religion, love, and life.  How can five children raised under the same influence be so totally different?

My sister and I are twins separated at birth by an undisclosed number of years.  We would tell you but then . . .

We are now asking "the girls" to lie about their age.  They are now the age we say we are.  She jokes that the first two are from her husband's first marriage . . .  She and I are in deep denial.  When did we turn the age of our parents?  Whatever happened to don't trust anyone over thirty?  When did we even turn thirty?

She and I were raised by the same set of parents and assorted relatives, and somehow we have managed to turn out so very similar.  We are so much alike that we sound like each other, and it is easy to fool the girls into thinking that I am she.  They call and ask permission and I say okay . . .

When I was a young teen at first glance people would mistake me for her although she was slightly taller and thinner.   We hate pickles and chocolate does not make either of us wild with delight.  We both love cosmos, the drink, and rum and Coke, although I take mine with the diet version.  Okay, there are a few more differences: she loves to shop, isn't wild about receiving cut flowers as a gift, nor does she care for cheesecake.  I will shop for my home, not clothes, love cut flowers, especially Irises, and can anyone say Tiramisu Cheesecake?

When one of the girls married a few years ago, she toasted me as her second mother. It was an honor.  She is perfect.  They each are, and are each special in their own way, all loving and wonderful, simply magnificent, and it is such a pleasure to know and be friends with each and every one of them.

Like everyone, I have a few regrets in my life.  Just a few, a very few.  One of them is that I never had the opportunity to be adults friends with our mother.  I think perhaps it would have been a privilege to spend my adult years knowing her.

Instead, I know my sister, and she knows me, and through those five girls I can see how much my mother would have enjoyed being friends with us, and how much we would have enjoyed being friends with her.

It is soon to be April.  My mother's birthday followed her sister's on the very next day, and we can never transition into April without my remembering them and the influence they had on our lives.  They were very much like my sister and I . . . so very much alike, twins separated at birth by a more than a handful of years . . . my mother the glamour girl . . . my aunt the one who wasn't . . .

We are four women of two different generations . . . yet so very much alike.

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