The trade

“My sister is an only child”

I arrived second, but only in terms of timing and you know, as a child, accepting the arrival of a little brother or sister is not exactly the most wonderful thing in the world, not for everyone at least and I think the same thing happened to my sister.

After three years of attention, cuddles, gifts, start sharing all this with a tiny and ugly creature (every cockroach is beautiful to his mother’s eyes, we agree but sometimes babies are also ugly), that the stork had brought right in his house, it had become a difficult undertaking.

My sister started asking questions!

She didn’t understand why the stork had arrived at the exact moment when our mother was happy to have a belly shaped like a watermelon. The coincidence then wanted that after this “gift”, the watermelon was gone.

“Could it have been an exchange? Maybe it was the favorite fruit of that strange bird and our mother had traded it for a little sister… but… she wanted to be an only child! If only they had asked her…”

In short, suddenly, she began to feel a certain dislike for both the stork and the newcomer and decided that she would never eat watermelon for her entire life, but above all she’d never trade anything with a bird.

Oh yes, she was too young to make promises which, you know, are almost never kept. In fact, as an adult she found herself twice with a watermelon in her belly and also married to the bird.

And I, who had nothing to do with it, have spent half my life thinking I was wrong, because I never felt accepted. Instead the answers to my thousand because they were much simpler:

“My sister is an only child”

“The birds are nosy”

“The watermelon swells the belly”

But above all, my mother is a stork!