Sunday is National Sisters Day, and for the occasion I handed the mic to the person who has known me longest: my younger sister, Rachel Mulvany, making her debut on this podcast. Rachel is a pharmacist, a qualified personal trainer and Chief Wellness Officer at fabÜ, and this was the first time in her life she'd sat on this side of a microphone.

What followed wasn't really an interview. It was more a lifetime of shared history, pulled out loud in real time: the smear tests we'd both, entirely by coincidence, been booked in for that same morning. My marathon training, quietly abandoned somewhere around week three. A running mishap of mine that Rachel has never once let me forget, and clearly never will.

A story I didn't know I was keeping

Halfway through recording, I mentioned something in passing, something I'd always assumed Rachel already knew. That our dad wasn't in the room when she was born. He was at home with our other two siblings. It was never a secret. It just never came up.

Rachel had no idea.

So, we did the only sensible thing. We called our mother into the studio, live, mid-episode, and asked her to settle it once and for all.

The family archive

From there, the conversation turned into something closer to a full excavation of our childhood. The crooked teeth and the orthodontist bill that nearly cost our parents the house. The green gabardine coat I convinced Rachel, for years, was actually part of our school uniform. Growing up around a mother who worked night shifts as a midwife, building a home life around whatever hours she had left.

One detail stayed with me longer than the rest, said almost as a throwaway line: the football trials Rachel was told she'd have gone to, had she been a boy. It wasn't delivered as a grievance, just as how things were at the time. But it says something about the world we were both raised in, one where what you were allowed to want could quietly depend on what you were born as.

What sisters don't usually say

Underneath all the slagging, and there is a lot of slagging, is the thing sisters rarely say to each other outright. We didn't either, not for most of the conversation. That part is worth hearing in our own voices rather than reading it here.

If you have a sister, this is the one to send her.