I love this picture of my sister and I.
It was taken on the front porch of my parent’s house in the mid 60’s when the only thing on the property was the house, a crushed-stone driveway, and a set of concrete block steps that lead up to the front door.
We had just moved in to our home and it was at the peak of the summer solstice as evidenced by my bare feet and light dress. I look at this picture sometimes and I see my daughter in my sister. As my daughter approached her teens, I would pull out this photo and just stare at it. I kind of see many of us in her. It’s hard to believe that she was thirteen here.
She was much more responsible than most thirteen year olds. It has been over fifty years and my parents still live in this home. Their neighbours who had moved into their ‘just-built’ home, during that time, (a row of only five homes in the area that was reachable by dirt roads and only one bus stop located a mile away), still live next door.
Our new neighbour had not met our family yet, and went to his wife this day and said “boy, we have an awfully young mother with a baby that lives in the house next door”. As that was what it was like for both of us – being mistaken for mother and child. I was fortunate or ‘unfortunate’, however one wants to look at it, to have two mothers growing up.
They say that birth order is a key influencer, that shapes our personalities as much as parenting does. That our gender, age gap, culture, and order is very meaningful to who we become as people. Typically, firstborns are high achievers, responsible, bossy, organized, and dutiful. Middle children, are more rebellious, trusting, empathetic, peace-loving thinkers; while the youngest tend to be more easy-going, fun loving, self centered and creative.
Upon reflection in my own family, these qualities definitely hold true. Other factors that influence traits are the gaps in ages of the children, their gender and their cultural upbringing. In an Italian household for example, if there is less than a two year gap between the first and second born, and the second born is a male (which was in the case of my family) then the tendency is that the male will take on more of the first born traits. I see this now as we are older, but then my brother was definitely the more trusting, empathetic, and non-confrontational one.
In our home my sister was definitely the most responsible, organized and dutiful of the three. We shared a room in our new house. I had a crib. She had a double bed. I tell her that I remember my crib, but she doesn’t believe me, because I was 2 years old when I slept in it. I remember the position of it in the room, I remember the orange cartoon lion decal on the headboard by my head. I remember my mother coming into the room after she would put me to bed, jam a bottle in my crying mouth, and leave while I watched the crack of light in the doorway as I fell asleep.
This all makes sense to me now. My mother still was back then (and still is) such a hard-working woman. Between getting up and leaving the house at 6am everyday, working a full day, coming home and making the most awesome dinners for us (which I didn’t truly appreciate at the time) and then, entertaining the sometimes boatload of guests in our home, on any given night of the week, (our house was party central), its no wonder that there was little time for bedtime let alone any time for herself.
The very first night my sister and I shared her double bed. I had a fever. My mother was worried about me so she wanted me to sleep close to her. I remember what side of the bed I was on. I remember I wasn’t allowed to have a pillow, and I remember throwing up in her rollers.
I don’t recall her ever getting angry over it.
In this age of the bigger houses and smaller families, the whole ‘bedroom-sharing’ among siblings becomes non-existent. When you share a room with a sibling, it shapes you. You are forced to spend much more time together whether you like it or not. You are able to have more ‘whispering in the dark’ time, that you will probably never have again until you are married. You learn about borrowing, stealing and breaking. You also learn about the contradiction of the ‘sharing of privacy’. For instance, when you are a 19 year old girl who wants to go out with friends, and mom makes you take little 6 year old sister along, then little sister gets to know what the inside of a bar looks like at a rather young age.
Psychologists have long discovered that there is a huge range of sister relationships. If we ask a set of sisters – even identical twins, we will say ‘we are so different’, and we spend time telling others how different we are – just like I’m doing now, I suppose? We never got along, we always got along, we are really different, but we are really close.
Many times people define us in terms of one another. We are compared to each other. Sometimes its cute, sometimes its hurtful, and sometimes we are thankful that the opportunity to compare at all, exists.
What I have learned about myself, in a big way, comes from my sister. The whole birth order discussion is fascinating to me. Its fascinating, and its forever.
There is a quote from the musical by two sisters “Bessie and Sadie Delany” called the The Delany Sisters . Bessie said about Sadie, “Sadie doesn’t approve of me sometimes; she kind of looks at me in that big sister sort of way.”
Bessie was 101 when she said this.
Sadie was a 103.
How special is that?
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