I have written often about my brother, and fairly often about my sister. I have to admit that Jason does take up a lot more of my headspace that demands an outlet on paper since he died.
I suppose that is natural. I’m not really sure, to be honest.
Maybe I need serious help and just think I’m making progress on my grief journey.
Either way, I tend to write more about Jason.
And truth be told, he and I got along better than Christie and I did when I was little.
My sister and I butted heads pretty much constantly as kids, but we were also close. I realize that doesn’t make much sense, but it’s the truth. I think sisters are often like that. Maybe it’s all the hormones.
As adults, I do think we have become good friends, even if we never managed it in childhood. There are actually a lot of things — important, truly life-changing things — that we will probably never agree on (never say never), but there is no reason that has to sever our bond.
My sister is one of the kindest, funniest, sincerest people I have ever met, and I love every single bit of her, even the things we are way out on opposite sides of the playing field about.
It’s a choice, isn’t it? Whether we’re going to let differing life views keep us separated from our people.
Jason and Christie were close and had a special bond, which I wrote about in my story “My” Irish Twins a while back, and their lives were a little more in sync with one another, with way fewer differences. So, I think their connection was natural and easier.
But we all grew up in the same house. We share roots. We have experiences that no one else would likely understand, regardless of whether we processed them the same way.
There is no replacing that. I don’t care how different we are. My siblings are my people. And I don’t take that lightly.
Saying I would move a mountain or fight wildcats or make waves with other people — drown them if I had to — despite that being one of my biggest fears, for my sister is an understatement of epic proportions.
I would have done the same for Jason, but there’s nowhere for that to go now. But I’m not writing about him today, am I? 😉
We grew up poor. Not homeless poor (unless you count the time we lived in a tent — maybe I’ll write about that one day), but poorer than most of the people we knew.
We had more than our parents did while they were growing up. We had more than a lot of people do, really.
I know how to count my blessings. There were so many things to be grateful for.
But it’s also okay to be real about the fact that growing up as poor as we were messed with my head.
It sucked. I hated it.
I was a weird, quirky kid who didn’t bond with people very easily, though I guess I was also more outgoing than some, since I was able to fake it with the best of them. I know even faking it is something some people can’t manage, no matter how hard they try.
I am four years younger than my sister, and five years younger than my brother, so of course, they started doing “cool” things long before I did.
Like working. Getting a paycheck.
How I longed to get a paycheck. To work and save my money, stacking it high and never spending it on things that made no sense, squirreling it away until no one could call me poor again.
Till I could stop feeling less than.
Of course, since we were poor, there were a lot of times that they helped the household with their paychecks, which also sounded good to me. I dreamed of pulling all of us up out of that.
I knew I would be the one to break that cycle. It just took determination and hard work. I was sure of it.
Dedication and staying focused would fix everything.
I wasn’t going to give in to any bad habits that would steal money from the places it belonged.
I was going to be the adultiest adult who had ever lived once I was grown.
In the meantime, though, I felt like the world was out of control. On fire. Nothing that happened around me made any sense to me.
And I couldn’t handle it.
I wanted to fly away.
What would it be like to have wings?
And Jason and Christie did, at least in my mind.
They flew away, and I didn’t have any wings.
I was stuck.
So, when they swooped back in, it meant everything.
When my sister was 16, but before she had a car of her own, she was sometimes allowed to borrow Mom’s car. (She rode with Jason a lot of the time, since he got his car first, being the oldest and all, and they also worked at the same place for a while.)
We called Mom’s car at the time the Banana Boat. It was exactly like that name might make you imagine. Huge and ugly and yellow. And brown, if you counted the fun rust spots, so I guess it was a banana that should have been made into banana bread (oh yum . . . I need to make some banana bread).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking what my parents were able to provide. I am just setting the scene. 😊
One day, when she was 16 and I was 12, my sister took me out in that Banana Boat. And we didn’t let that ugly thing put a hitch in our giddy-up — no, siree. We played the radio and very naughtily whistled at teenage guys when we drove past, and she took me shopping at the local Walmart.
New clothes. My own.
No one else I knew had ever had them on. That was rare for me. I was the youngest. Most things were passed down to me, though I did get occasional things that were new. Mom worked her butt off to make sure of that, but money only goes so far.
She helped me pick out the cutest outfit — a pink skort (do y’all remember those? I’m not sure if they were even a thing anywhere but the US, but you were hot snot if you had them in the ’90s) and a cream-colored shirt that made me feel like a teenager, which was the top-notch best when you want nothing more than to be a teenager like your siblings.
She told me I was pretty. I felt anything but pretty most days, but that day, I believed it. Because she said it was true. And she was beautiful. Vivacious and fun, with the red hair I always wished I had gotten and the life outside our house that I always dreamed of.
And I had new clothes on. Surely, for once, I was pretty.
The perspective of a 12-year-old shifts. Now, I realize that she was struggling through even bigger things during that time period than I was. As an adult, I can imagine how hard it was to be the middle child and the oldest daughter. How difficult to feel responsible for helping the household and the pressure that came with that.
But on that day, with the wind in my hair, my legs long and naked, hanging out of the cutest of cute skorts, and the radio blaring, singing my heart out with my sister, I was free.
I was important.
My sister gave me that.
My sister is my roots.
My siblings will never not be a part of my life.
I don’t care what else happens, they are part of me. And they always will be.
How could differing life choices ever sever that?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash