Sisters

I just got back from my annual Mother's Day weekend with my sisters at the Mall of America. Here I am, modeling the flapper-style hat that I bought yesterday at Maurice's. I buy hats to sell but never wear them myself - but my sisters insisted!

You might not guess it from the photo (I'm pretty good at faking perky) but I am completely exhausted from having spent the night talking with my sisters until nearly 4 a.m.

What do five middle-aged women (all of us, mothers and most of us, wives) find ourselves talking about in the wee hours of the morning? Well to give you an idea, I recall saying at one point: "Okay, now which body part haven't we covered yet?" For some reason, we seem to find the aging female body an endless source of amusement. None of us can boast a perfect body (or sex life) - so I say, thank God we can at least laugh about it!

I love my sisters dearly, but they are a terrible influence sometimes.

We picked this particular weekend to get together for a very good reason: it coincides with the Susan G. Komen "Race for the Cure." And so each Mother's Day Sunday for the past several years, five sisters and three nieces have run or walked the 5K together in honor of our sister (and aunt) Michelle who died of breast cancer in 2007.

Now one thing you should know about my sisters is that they love to eat and talk far more than anything else in the world. Shopping comes a close third. And exercise? Well, that doesn't even make the list. So it was only a matter of time before someone would start to question the exercise component of our weekend.

Apparently, yesterday morning when a few of my sisters dropped off their overnight bags at our hotel room, one of them tentatively suggested that perhaps the 5K race on Sunday morning was unnecessary, and that maybe the very best way to honor my sister Michelle was simply to have a wonderful, relaxing "sisters weekend" together -- shopping Saturday afternoon, eating and talking all night long, then sleeping late on Sunday morning.

Well, that idea caught on like wildfire. And so by the time I arrived at the Mall of America at noon on Saturday, it had already been decided - the Sunday race was out, and a Mother's Day brunch was planned in its place.

Initially I insisted that even if nobody else wanted to join me I was going to drag myself out into the cold on Sunday morning and do the run by myself. After all, we had already paid our $30 registration fees, and picked up our race t-shirts. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

But at about 3:00, 3:30 this morning as I struggled to keep my eyes open, not wanting to miss the latest installment of my youngest sister's sex life woes, I finally caved in. The idea of getting up three hours later to run a 5K that I hadn't trained for, with creaky knees that just might give out at around the halfway point, was more than I could bear.

I know that Michelle didn't mind. If she had been able to be with us this morning, she would have been happily sleeping away with the rest of us.

We miss you, Michelle. Happy Mother's Day!

Michelle, Sept. 2007. Photo taken at a "sisters weekend" at a cabin in northern Minnesota, two months before she passed away. All seven sisters were able to be together that weekend.