I finally solved a personal mystery that's been plaguing me for years.

From time to time I would get this feeling that I had a lost sister that I barely remembered. It didn't make a bit of sense to me, because if she would have been older and died prior to my birth I would have known about her. If she would have died after my birth I would have remembered her, even if I was too young to remember. My mom's side of the family doesn't erase the dead. If anything we know more about them than we do our living relatives.

One of my uncles died nearly ten years before I was born. I know everything about him because my mom always talks about him. My eldest aunt lost her first son in infancy. This was three years before my mother was even born, yet I know about him because my aunt and their mother made sure he was known and remembered by his aunts and uncles. My mother would not have let me go through life without knowing about a sibling who died before I was born, and she wouldn't let me forget one who died in my lifetime.

That's why it didn't make a bit of sense that I would feel I lost a sister. I would have known my entire life if I had. I didn't say anything to my parents about it because they think I'm crazy enough as it is.

Then I found out the cause of it. Failed adoptions don't carry the same burden as a deceased child. You might hear about a sibling that died during childhood, or even in the womb, but with a failed adoption the children are still alive.

Which is exactly what happened. My cousin divorced his wife, he was given full custody of their son and daughter, due to extensive injuries sustained when he was hit by a car he was unable to care for them, so the kids lived with my family. My parents were actually in the process of adopting them. Before my cousin could sign over custody to my parents he died in a car wreck. That prompted his ex-wife, who had already lost custody (in the early 80s when it was all but unheard of for a man to gain full custody after a divorce) once to take my parents to court. She won the case.

After that the kids had no contact with the family. One of them came to a family reunion a few years back. No one knew who she was until she told them who her dad was. Then my mother took her by the hand and introduced her to everyone individually.

This was all after I had been born, but before I was old enough to form cohesive memories. They were living with us, in preparation for the impending adoption my parents were likely trying to foster a sibling dynamic between them and us, and I probably did have a sisterly dynamic with her even though she was my cousin's daughter. For some reason I forgot the boy entirely but the girl existed in some primeval part of my memory.

So I essentially did lose a sister, just not in the way most people think of when they think "lost sibling." But since she and her brother are still alive, and doing quite well for themselves from what I hear, I just didn't hear about it growing up the way I would have if I lost a sister through death.

I know this is irrelevant to everyone here, just a ramble, but it feels good to finally solve a mystery that's been bugging me since the age of 8, when the primeval memories (as opposed to the coherent memories I gained the ability to form after these events) started surfacing.

I think it is fully relevant dear.

We transgender persons, we lose a lot of people in our experiences from being transgender, so we are perhaps that much more sensitive to loss as a whole.

It is good you unravelled this particular mystery. Any gain, is worth something.