Just like the expression that rolls off the tongues of so many Nepalese stallholders, it just so happens that my sisters all have a totally different take on our household environment and the way we were raised … as though we were raised by different parents. What’s interesting though is that the older we get the more common ground we find … as though our cellular memories are starting to meld.

During this time of ‘escaping to mummy’, I have had the opportunity to spend the first ever quality time with the sister who is number three in line (I am number four). She’s never liked me but it’s never been relevant since we have never spent enough time together for it to matter. But talking this time, we have together discovered the reasons for this dislike.

You grow up in the same household as someone and just go ahead and assume what you know is known by your siblings too. You also assume you are being brought up by the same parents. Both these things are not the truth. I was stunned when my sister told me that she had no idea that I was a paid informer. I thought it was known across the whole snobby middle-class neighbourhood that my mother rewarded me to snitch on my sisters. It just seemed so obvious … the same way I learned never to tell my other sisters anything that I didn’t want my mother to know. I have had three sisters for almost 40 years and it is only now that a foundation for any kind of sisterly relationship is developing because of a mother who incites a kind of sisterly antagonism every time she is around. I know she never meant to but I can’t help but wonder whether deep down she harboured a jealousy of a bond she couldn’t be part of. Perhaps she was concerned that we might shut her out. Regardless, I ponder the reasons she seems critical of the bond I have with my own child and I realise that I carry with me a lot of her baggage when I proclaim that there will only be one child in my life.

“There are no facts, only interpretations.” Nietzsche