The Confessions of Two Sisters

Sometimes life has a way of throwing us into the past. As was the case  from a recent facebook post that I had written about my granddaughter, I had also added a story I remembered about my sister Diane, not realizing that I was the only family member that she had shared it with. 

 

This is the story I shared....

"I immediately thought back though the years when one of my older sisters was about 10, she was walking through our dining room and stepped on a tack. It made her so angry she put the tack in the exact same place for some other unsuspecting person to step on. Sometime later she was walking through the room and stepped on the tack again.”

This is Diane's excerpt:
                                     

"Sometimes having a good memory is a curse. Whispering one of those memories can be like shouting it from the housetops!

I never was forced to tell the above memory but it’s such a good lesson to other mean-spirited little children that it begged to be told. I think it put a stop in my life to that particular brand of meanness. I'd like to say I was never mean again but the person that wrote the above italicized paragraph has a memory good enough to refute that. I was not a nice older sister.

Let the record state though, that I was not ten years old when it happened. I wasn’t even in school yet. I think I was 4 years old and that particular memory actually follows the one where Becky and I were alone in the sewing room and I was gripping the pin cushion and a Sharps sewing needle begging her to let me practice giving vaccinations since I was going to be a nurse. I was eying her fat little arm and she was eying the Sharps sewing needle.

If I would have been successful, who knows where my nursing career would have gone. As it was I became discouraged with nursing and Becky, somehow, through mental osmosis was inoculated against the sewing virus.

Mom never found out about either of those incidents until I blabbed them in later years. If she would have known them, her story about Gramma finding little Becky wailing in the crib and me pinching her little feet would have paled in comparison."  ~Diane

Diane was not my favorite sister as we were growing up. As I read her excerpt I realized our mutual antagonism started at my birth. She is three years older so I literally pushed her off Mom's lap. When we were 10 and 13, we hated traveling in the car together. I especially hated sitting beside her. It got to the place where she would stay home if I was adamant about going and I would stay home if she was going. If I stayed home, I made her pay. I often got candy, a sweater, or one of her treasured books. As we approached our teens and Christ changed our lives we became best friends. 

As I think back to our childhood, I think of all my sisters, I have 5. The two youngest were pretty far behind, so they missed out on most of the drama. We girls shared a bedroom from as young as I can remember till each one left home. I remember Dad banging on our bedroom door, telling us to "simmer down in there or else!" I remember standing in the middle of the room in the dark at the command of my older sister, because I wouldn't stop giggling. I remember Dad or Mom clipping fingernails because they became weapons. I remember being told I was going to retarded school and would miss a very important event in our family. Little sisters are mean, older sisters are heartless.

Now as I see us all pass over that invisible line of middle age, we are friends. We have been there for each other through the death of our parents, through the illnesses of each sibling, there was a stroke, heart disease, cancer several times. We have weathered the storms together and are still walking together through valleys.  Sure we still have skirmishes but we are sisters, some things never change!!