Sisterhood by Mary Thompson ? Fine Lines - Creative Writing Journal

Before we were friends, my older sister always called me ?a little snot.? The word still makes me cringe. Snot? What an awful bodily excretion to be nicknamed for. As a little kid, I never understood why she felt that way about me. Was I really such a bad sister to have? I might have been a little rambunctious and overdramatic, and yes, I wanted to wear the same clothes that she did and have my hair tied up the same way that hers was, but did I annoy her so much that she felt the need to label me as a disgusting piece of biohazard that accompanies illness and bad nose-picking habits?

My sister?s first baby is now three years old and is, as everyone claims, just like me in that she is full of ornery spunk and doesn?t slow down for a minute. My sister adores her and is proud that she resembles me in personality. When my niece gets to be a little too ornery, her mother simply calls out her name, sternly, and then waits until she settles down or wears herself out. It is never with anger or annoyance, but with an experienced, loving patience. ?

I remember one Christmas Eve at my grandma?s house, all of the older cousins were playing Trivial Pursuit, the decades-old board game that was the only form of entertainment my grandma had kept since her own kids had grown up and moved away. Though they were all still too young to actually know any of the answers, they had fun just taking ridiculously wild guesses and making up their own rules to win. I wanted so badly to join in the game, to laugh and be silly, to be one of the older, fun cousins I admired. When I asked my sister if I could play, too, or at least be on a team with her, she ignored me. I asked again, again, and again, until she told me that I was too young to know any answers and no one wanted to play with such a whiney little snot, anyway.

After her wedding, my sister moved five hours away, where her husband?s family lives. For the first time in her life, she had really, permanently, moved out of our house and away from our family. Speaking to her on the phone, I try to keep her updated on all that is going on with our family: my older brother and his wife moving into their new apartment, my little brother?s high school football games, and my plan to go to California in the spring to meet my boyfriend?s family. I avoid subjects that deal with the boys and me, spending any time together to let her believe that she has not missed out on anything since she moved away. She doesn?t like to be left out.

When my mother stopped trying to pick out my clothes and left the morning chore up to me, I ignored the rules of fashion and blended the line between acceptable outfits for girls and those for boys. Because my brother?s athletic shorts and t-shirts were always included and because I always slicked my hair back into a low ponytail at my neck, it was easy for others to confuse me with a pre-pubescent boy. My family?s thick eyebrows, which I did not know how to properly pluck, didn?t help much either. Meanwhile, my sister was a high school student who followed all the latest trends with big hoop earrings, choker necklaces, midriff-revealing cameo tank tops, and overly distressed bootleg denims. When I came out of my bedroom in the mornings before school, she never failed to pick at the areas of my wardrobe of which I felt most insecure, like the shorts that hung loosely off my hipless frame and the helpless mess my hair became the more I refused to brush it through. I was becoming more and more aware of who in our family was the ugly sister.

The summer before she was pregnant, my sister refused to go shopping with me. By this time, I had figured out how to properly dress myself like a girl and was becoming a pretty stylish shopper. But when I wanted to share this new interest with my sister, she merely scoffed at my taste in fashion. I wasn?t offended, though, because I knew she was simply hiding her own insecurities. She had recently shied away from wearing clothes that showed off her womanly curves and fell into the habit of throwing on the same loose-fitting t-shirts and jeans. Though I never had the nerve to tell her, I thought it was silly. She might have weighed a little bit more than she did in high school, but she was still the most beautiful girl I knew.

At times when, as a kid, my giddy restlessness offended or annoyed my sister far beyond toleration, I would catch her scowling at me, her eyes so full of contempt that I wanted to shrink smaller and smaller until, gladly, I was gone from her sight. I still get the chills when I think of the sudden frigidity that would overwhelm the air between us at those moments, how quickly I had stopped wanting to do everything with her, wanting to be just like her, and began instead to fear her stifling glare of disapproval.

I often find it difficult to make eye contact with her when we get together for holidays or other family occasions. Instead, I watch her two kids play with toys on the living room floor while we chat in the kitchen at our parents? house. I listen to her talk about her first experiences as a mother, both the joys and the pains, and admire the warmth in her voice, the same kind of warmth that our mother always conveys when she speaks. She says that she can?t wait until I get married and have a family so that our kids can grow up together, just like we did with our cousins. Sometimes, I think we must remember our childhood together very differently.

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Mary Thompson is a student at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.?

Source: http://finelines.org/?p=951

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