The monkey made me do it

La Hermana

When not throwing me against the wall, my sister was (and is) a great friend and ally during our bizarre non-American childhood. While less that two short years apart in age, we're separated by a great big gaping chasm when it comes to personality types and appearance. She is taller and was heavier as a child, with dark brown hair and big brown eyes and a tendency to tan that often led strangers to think she was part Hispanic. I was rail-thin, more pale with long blonde hair and blue eyes. I was also horribly shy in school (I had one friend) while she had hundreds of buddies and got involved in every activity possible. She didn't really understand me at first, I was rambunctious as a child (before school smacked me down) and she was more cautious and didn't appreciate me pulling her into my adventures. Plus I was a little strange and not as predictable as her other friends.

Her favorite example is when I accidentally showed her and my mother that I had taught myself how to read. We were very young, she was in preschool and I wasn't even in any classes yet. My mom was reading to both of us using my sister's schoolbook, trying to get her to sound out the words. She got stuck on a hard one and was trying to sound it out phonetically, my mom patiently echoing "m...m...m..." I got frustrated sitting there with nobody reading, so I pointed at the word and said "MOOSE". No one knew I could read, my mom was shocked and my sister was mad that I had one-upped her. That one slip resulted in weeks of testing and subsequent years of school special classes and weirdness. Which was good, I suppose, but sometimes I wonder what life would have been like with no "moose". Regular classes, I would have not missed the sections where they taught us the Dewey Decimal System or dodgeball or how to talk to people on the bus. But I also would have missed out on the chance to learn all the specialized topics they taught us and would never have discovered my inherent nerdiness (found in the LOGO drawing competition I won, the participation in Knowledge Bowl, numerous brain teaser puzzles, construction of Rube Goldbergian devices, etc.).

High school brought about big changes for both of us, socially and physically. The wallflower sister that she had liked but not really hung out with dropped the glasses and braces and suddenly became unwittingly desirable to the male population of the school. She dropped a bunch of childhood weight along with some childhood grudges (see the "moose" thing) and decided to share her friends and indoctrinate the wallflower into the mysterious ways of high school society and dating. I went from having one friend to having a hundred. We went out to the same parties, hung in the same crowd, and in a burst of bad judgment even dated a couple of the same guys (she went to her senior prom with an ex-boyfriend of mine). It was an incredible social education, one that left me forever be grateful to her. I used to be perfectly content to stay in my tiny little world, reading ravenously and remaining invisible. She told her friends who I was on the first day of my freshman year, and from that day on they would yell my name down the hallway, leave me embarrassing notes, force me to try out for musicals and plays, and in the case of one memorable guy, pick me up and bodily slam me into the lockers and proposition me on a daily basis (he was kidding, I think). Yes, they were actors. And musicians. And taught me to enjoy friendships with emotional, expressive, strange people. Then, to BE one! I'm proud to say I did the exact same thing when my shy little brother came into high school. My friends scared the piss out of him. When she left high school, she kept me in her social circle and I partied with her through the local community college, attending their dances and hanging out with her friends. I drank wine coolers (woo!). My parents tried to stop us, but underestimated the adolescent need to pretend to be far more adult than we were ready for.

Then she fell in with the wrong crowd. I saw her less and less, she got boyfriends that were increasingly sketchy. She started dating a guy that everyone hated, who fed into the fall of her self-esteem and alienated her from her friends. One day she and I were alone in the house and I found her stash of prenatal vitamins. Thank God my parents weren't there, I cried for hours with her and she told me how she'd been struggling with her decision to keep the baby, wearing extra-tight pants to try and make herself miscarry. The evil boyfriend didn't leave right away, he stayed with her through the pregnancy and was present in the delivery room, but he wasn't really there. He had a cheating heart and left for a 17-year-old girl soon after my nephew was born (much to our relief). We stuck the birth announcements in with my graduation announcements and turned the den into a nursery. She left college and spent the first year living with my parents, loving the fact that she now had four babysitters at her beck and call. I was oddly jealous of her, she had the support of my family and our church as well as a huge network of friends. She started dating again and had more boyfriends as a single teen mom than I did as a high school senior.

Soon, the nephew was old enough for day care and we both went off to college. She would bring him to classes sometimes when the day care didn't work out. This is made the more remarkable by the knowledge that she was attending a very conservative Christian college in a difficult major and surely was on the receiving end of much judgment even without bringing evidence of her sin to class with her. Finally, a good man came into her life and saw her for the remarkable woman she is. He was someone who knew her while she was involved with the father of her child, and had always respected her even in the midst of that mess. They got married when my nephew was 2 years old and have since had two more little girls to add to the mix. Now she's continuing to amaze me, raising three rowdy kids, maintaining a house with multiple pets, and earning a Master's degree in counseling while holding down a full-time job. Sometimes I think that when we're not looking, she levitates.

posted by LadyJay @ 3:05 PM