Entry #3: The Gentle Sister

Not long ago, I came across a piece of paper decorated with Ziggy lying in a yellow bean bag chair, printed with the words, "Thoughts I've Been Thinking". It was a pack of stationery given to me as a Christmas gift, but being the literal sort I am, I never wrote letters on that paper, only...well, thoughts I was thinking. To do anything else seemed a sin.

Under the title, "Thoughts I've Been Thinking", I had written in my childish hand an essay about my sister. I'm proud to say everything was spelled correctly, and it read:

"I've been thinking: why do I have such a nice sister? Is it fate? I really don't know. She is nice. She makes popcorn! When we are sharing a candy bar or ice cream, she takes a bite and says, 'You can have the rest. I do not want it.' Sometimes we camp out in her pup tent, and I am never scared because she is there."

And so today, I am writing about my sister, the oldest of the three of us, and probably one of my closest friends today. She is the only member of my family I regularly speak with, even though we have been separated by an ocean for over a decade. And despite the age gap--she's 7 years older than I am which made it hard for us to communicate for a very long time--she has always, always looked out for me, treated me nicely (even when I didn't treat her very well as a child), had my back, and believed in me.

My mother often said Cathy was raised in one hand with Dr Spock's book in the other. It may be true. She was placid, obedient, shy, and eager to please. She was also easily hurt because she lacked the ability to deceive or build a protective wall around herself to help shield her true nature from the world. It is difficult to imagine two more opposite people than my sister and I, especially when I was still a highly active child as she battled the stormy teenage years. Where I was outspoken, demanding attention in order to compete with the far older members of my family, she was quiet and just wanted everyone to get along with each other. When trips to visit our grandparents (and the "best behaviour" they required) would exhaust my tiny reservoir of self-control and I threatened to explode, it was usually my sister who would say, "Hey, I found a candy bar in a drawer...wanna share it?" or "You're right, it's kinda dull here...let's go for a walk and collect leaves" or even, "Do you want to take a nap on my lap?"

And being a kid, I probably never thanked her for everything she did. When my brother entered his teenage years, like all young men, he became silent, moody, and wanted to be left alone. Gone were the golden afternoons of inventions, 45s playing Queen and Steve Miller on his turn table, and Sunday afternoon film festivals. I felt lonely and forsaken, and this was when Cathy would fill the gap. Even though she'd be busily typing away at a term paper or working on some Algebra, she always let me into her room, even if it meant sitting quietly and reading a book or just playing with some toys. I think she always knew how left out I felt most of the time, and being a nurturing sort, she could never let anyone feel bad for very long.

It is difficult to write about things which have always been there, the way it's hard to put into words how large and beautiful the sky is or how the wind always comes to blow away the old and sow the new. It's only in looking back do I realise how much security Cathy offered just by offering herself, and how little I appreciated it until I became an adult.

A lot of my early memories of my sister are associated with the kitchen. She loved to cook and bake, and for her 16th birthday, she was given several cook books which she happily accepted. Cathy spent long, hot afternoons baking cookies and patiently kneading bread, willing it to rise, and many of the more appetising aromas that wafted through the house were the result of her experimentations. I imagine that she started doing this when my mom was baking, first using her Easy Bake oven, then graduating to the real thing. When she did, the Easy Bake was passed down to me, so it was often that when my mother and sister baked together, I was perched on a kitchen chair, coaxing a little tin pan of pie dough or miniature cookies into the cooking chamber and praying the light bulbs wouldn't burn out half-way through. Neither of them ever complained about me taking up valuable counter space with the large yellow Easy Bake, just when I'd left something in too long, and the oven would start to smell of burnt cookies and hot plastic.

If there was a big family meal to occur in our house, it was usually Cathy and my mother who got it underway, from shopping to cleaning to food prep, decorating, serving, and washing up afterward. Sometimes I got so jealous of my mother's obvious preferential treatment and desire to spend time with Cathy rather than me that I would try to force my way into such scenarios only to be frustrated when I was given some small task to carry out away from the kitchen. What I felt was how much more my mother loved her older daughter and how she merely tolerated her younger one. The truth was, of course, that I was seeing things through a child's egotistical eyes, that my sister and mother worked well together because they were very similar people, and it had nothing to do with how much anyone was loved. But when one is a child, any hint of exclusion seems so monumental, and it's only the hurt feeling one remembers, however inaccurate.

In actuality, my sister loved me to bits and never hesitated to come to my soccer games (even if it meant giving up an entire Saturday to stand in the wind and cold cheering me on), babysat me when my parents went out, helped out with my birthday parties, took me shopping when I got older and bought my all of my prom dresses, and sometimes, early in the morning and without waking anyone else, we'd go out to breakfast, just us, and talk about anything and everything. We'd camp out in the back yard in her green canvas pup tent, eating popcorn and telling ghost stories until the moon was high in the sky. Because she was so much older, she was able to do things on her own that would've required my mother's supervision, like biking up to the pool, and she usually took me along. If she was going for a bike ride, she'd perch me on the back of her bike in the child seat or later, on my own bike around the neighbourhood. If I was having a bad day and was sobbing into my pillow in my room, she'd make me a little card covered in hearts and smiley faces and slip it under my door, saying, "Hi! Wanna play Life or Monopoly? Come to my room!" and suddenly it would all be okay again. Looking back, I'm certain she would've loved more time to herself or perhaps just some peace and quiet, but as far as I know, she never complained.

I inherited a lot of her old clothes (and sometimes outright stole ones she was still wearing), including a pair of awesome platform sandals that I wore until they fell apart. I loved having her old clothes, infused with her gentle spirit, and even if they were out of date, I'd wear them anyway. She gave me a lot of her unwanted make up and jewelery, and I knew every Christmas meant a wonderful gift from her.

It may seem we were "as close as sister", but my mother swears that for ages we fought like cats and dogs. I don't remember anything beyond the usual sibling spats, but I'm certain there was a lot of name calling, hitting, and door slamming. It is true that she was quite close to my brother growing up, as they were separated by only two years, and many times they excluded me from something they were doing in their room. Also true is the sad fact that my father put a lock on my sister and my brother's room to keep me out. This happened shortly after my sister's hamster had babies, and I, thinking it would be fun, scooped them from the cage one day whilst they were at school and put them on the floor to play with them. I remember being stunned at how fast those little hamsters could move, then calling to my mother that somehow, the babies had escaped and were under Cathy's bed, and I needed help getting them back.

I'm certain my siblings complained long and loud about the need to keep me out of their rooms. It wasn't that I wanted what they had, it was more that I wanted to be a part of their worlds, and when they wouldn't let me be, I was so angry and jealous that I tended to explode in massive thunderstorms of tantrums and screams. In the mornings they'd go off to a wonderful place called "school" (which, in my childish mind, looked exactly like the Ponderosa restaurant), and I'd be left behind, alone, watching my mother clean the house and being dragged along on her errands. I resented how their lives were going and probably thought if I could be in their rooms I could, by osmosis, experience part of their lives. What I was feeling, though I couldn't put it into words at the time, was that they mattered to so many people--teachers, friends, other grown ups in the neighbourhood--whereas I was merely something to be taken care of and restrained, a duty that no one willingly undertook.

One of the worst things I can remember doing was when my sister left for college in Kentucky. She was 18, I was 11, and I felt so incredibly abandoned. My brother was hardly ever home--his high school course work was demanding and long, and he'd discovered girls--and when he was home, he was usually tired or interested in something other than spending time with a little sister. It was about that time that things began to change in our house, and the security and safety I'd always known and thought would last started to drip away. I sat down one night at my desk and wrote my sister a very angry letter which I'm ashamed to admit said horrible things, like "I hope you never come home", "We don't want you back any more", "I don't miss you in the LEAST", and the worst, "I'M GOING TO STEAL ALL YOUR CLOTHES". God only knows the effect it had on her. I do know she rang up my mother, in tears, and told her exactly what I'd written. Instead of talking to me about why I was so enraged, my father screamed at me for a full hour and sent me to my room, calling me one of the most ungrateful children that ever lived.

And deep down I knew he was right. My emotions always came so hard and so fast, engulfing me like a tidal wave even when I was quite young, that all I could do was react, squirming inside my skin with the force of feeling, and erupt in violent outbursts. It's still that way, only now there are psychological terms for it. But I saw, at 11, that my way of dealing with the world and with my family was unbalanced and unnatural. It was then I began to despise myself for the way I was, and feeling of being Wrong first set its delicate roots into my soul.

A few weeks later I wrote Cathy another letter saying how much I missed her and wished she would come home. I got a nice letter back saying I was free to try on her left-behind clothes and watch the TV in her room as long as I was tidy and put everything back. Which I'm proud to say I did, and when she flew back for that first Christmas, I was stunned at how grown up she looked with her French-braided hair and ski jacket. She had changed so much in those three months I wondered if there still a place for me in her life.

But Cathy didn't thrive at her University, and after two years she came back home to live, and once again, I'm ashamed to say that it threw me into a tailspin of irascibility. I remember the night my parents informed me she was coming home, how I screamed with rage and tore around the house, my throat raw and clogged with emotion. I didn't want her back home. It was MY house now, and I was finally getting the attention from my parents I'd so craved. My dad roared back at me, but for once I didn't back down and cower away from his routine shouting. I swore, I raved, I threw anything I could get my hands on. I'm sure there was spanking and other forms of hitting involved, but a lot of it just a series of red flashing images now. To this day I don't know why I was so engulfed in rage when all I really wanted was for my sister to be home again.

Once she came back, life changed. I had started the hellish pit of middle school, my mom had gone back to work for first time since before she got married, my brother was gearing up for college and in his own world, and everything felt like it was shifting underneath me. Added to this were the pangs of my own wretched adolescence, and I was one miserable individual. My body was betraying me by packing on genetically determined pounds of fat, my skin was so bad that my mom took me to numerous dermatologists who could do nothing, and I realised that as everyone around me was growing up, growing slender, and growing pretty (and gaining attention from the boys), I was not. It made me very dark and hateful, and I spent countless hours in my room, crying silently and wishing I could just stop living.

Despite all the insults I had hurled at her, my sister still came to me to help. I think she felt sorry for my artless state. Our relationship became something far more two-way and supportive. She listened as I talked about the ridiculousness of high school and the pettiness of the individuals therein. She listened, endlessly, about how totally awesome my first boyfriends were and dismissed my notion that they were just dating me because they felt sorry for me. She spread acne medicine on my back when I wanted to wear a backless gown to my first prom. She and I took long Saturday drives to the beach where we lay in the scorching sand, talking about boys, our family, sex, and anything else that came up. In short, she took me away from the horrible world I'd found myself and gave me, briefly, a little peace.

Meanwhile she was working full-time at a series of soul crushing jobs and going to school at night and on Saturdays. She dated a lot, had fiances, moved in and out of my parent's house. When she got her AA from the local community college, I sat in the stands and whistled my lungs out, so proud of how hard she'd worked. And when she graduated from the University of Maryland with her Bachelor's, I cried behind my hands. It took her eight years to get her degree, and she toiled harder at it than anyone I'd ever known.

As she lead the grueling life of working full time and going to school at night, she still made me a priority, taking me shopping, bowling, to the movies, skating, out for quick lunches. When I first got my license at 21, she trustingly gave me the keys to her brand new Geo Storm to drive. When I finally escaped the hell that was high school and went away to Scotland as a missionary for a short while, she helped support me financially and wrote me letters saying how much she missed me. And when I made it to University, she drove up on weekends for a visit, helped me move in every fall, balanced my check book, and offered to buy me anything I needed. She became a friend.

We had our periods where we drifted apart, but we always came back together again. I was a bridesmaid in her wedding; she was my matron of honour, a brave thing considering a few days before my wedding she'd had gall bladder surgery. When her husband was critically ill and underwent life-saving surgery, I drove the two hours from my apartment to the subway station and took the Metro into DC for another hour to be with her as she and her inlaws waited in silence and tears for some good news from the doctors.

Sister relationships aren't an exact science. They ebb and flourish, weaken, sometimes die, sometimes strangle, and sometimes they become exactly what you need them to be. Even though we are an ocean apart and scheduling a simple phone call can take weeks, we are closer than we've ever been before. Life has dealt me some harsh blows, some painful times, especially in the last 4 years. It has not been easy with her either, with an autistic son and a daughter diagnosed with ankylosing spondilitis. But at 39 I finally feel grown up enough to tell her I love her and I'm glad we still talk to each other regularly. We talk about our kids and the challenges they throw at us. We talk about health issues, our parents, our husbands, our crazy family, and always, always she says to me, "I completely understand where you're coming from." Of course she does. She's known me since I was born.

And when we end our phone calls, it's always with, "I love you, and I'm praying for you." And this time, I mean every word.