a little piece of life

On August 13th, 1992, my little sister was born. I remember my mom being pregnant all those months. It seemed an eternity that she was pregnant with this little baby. I was six years old and I started to wonder whether I really was going to get a baby sister or whether it was some hoax because it was taking so long and I was (am) impatient. We woke up one morning only to find a note left by my dad on the bedroom door saying that my mom had gone into labour and they were going to the hospital. Soon after, my dad called us and told us the news: it was a little girl, a bit jaundiced, but healthy. He took us all to the hospital to see this for ourselves. And there she was, a tiny little thing in my mom's arms. Aside: when my mom had her first child, my dad made sajdah (prostration) to Allah (swt) and the nurses thought that he fainted. He got used to the whole childbirth thing though ;) She and my mom had to stay in the hospital for a few extra days. In that time we basically lived off of my dad's cooking (i.e. eggs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and some weird jam that came in a toothpaste bottle from the hospital's grocery store. When the baby came home she didn't exactly have a crib waiting for her. Instead, we took a laundry basket and put a bunch of sheets and fluffy stuff in it, and voila, a bed. My parents debated what to name her for some time. It's funny, my dad still has the brainstorming list of possible names! Though they liked the name Aasiyah, they finally settled on "Nusaybah," at the suggestion of my older brother, who happened to be reading the story of Nusaybah bint Ka'b at the time. So that was her name - it seemed like such a big name for such a little body. And we were all enamoured with her. A new life always brings so much joy, and happiness - though it was my mom who stayed up with her at night when she would cry, while the rest of us shut our doors and slept through the night. And the years passed - she crawled, she started waddling around (very cutely), and she started figuring out many evil things to do (like, opening the fridge and breaking eggs, etc.). Then she got into school, which she hated initially...then the years she learned to read but still couldn't pronounce the letter "R" (she would pronounce it as an "L"). So "Rug" would be "Lug" and "door" would be "dool." Today we found this note she wrote to me when she was 5 or 6: It says "Asma is very good. She is the queen. She looks very beautiful. She is my sister." From then on, I knew she was very intelligent. Then when she started wearing hijab - she must have been 8 or 9 then. And all our trips to the library on our street, where she'd always borrow books she had already read several times, even though I told her not to. The rest is a blur. It's interesting how I saw her grow up right in front of me, but I never really noticed. Time is a funny thing. Eventually, inshaAllah, she will grow up and have kids of her own and recount to them the stories of their childhoods. And hers will be only a very distant memory, as though it never really happened.