My four year-old has recently stopped calling his six year-old sister by her actual name and instead has taken to calling her just “sister”. It’s slightly unnerving and makes him sound as though he has been beamed through time from the Dark Ages, where he was the wholesome son of a lowly miller.
“Sister! Father has risen from his slumber – fetch the milking pail from yonder the barn and make haste for the cock is crowing and the sun will soon begin to warm the corn in the fields.”
The most confusing thing about this new development is that he refers to my daughter as “sister” to me, and every time he does it my brain takes a full two seconds to recalibrate and realise that he’s referring to someone I actually know. “I’m going to find my socks in my sister’s room.”
It’s so weird, your own son referring to your own daughter as “sister”, like you need a crash-course on who everyone is: it makes me feel as though I’ve been thrown into a parallel universe where my children aren’t my children at all and I’m this strange lady that they need to explain everything to.
“My sister said she wants the water bottle!”
Is your sister the one in the pink pinafore with a tutu over the top who I actually happened to give birth to and would know by scent alone, or just from the sound of her breathing, or by her silhouette or the way she walks or the exact curl at the ...