Women only [call each other sister] when they have called each other a lot of other things first. —Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Did I ever tell you I was blessed with the World’s Greatest Sister? All of you have sisters whom you probably love, and I’m sure they’re great, but they couldn’t possibly hold a candle to my own sister. She’s seriously the best.
I suspect reading this will warm my mother’s heart, especially since she probably worried when we were children that she was raising the World’s Most Violent Sisters. In the absence of any brothers to roughhouse with, my sister and I fought like cats and dogs. Not only with vicious words (though we used those too), but also with our hands. And our fists. And our feet. Hair pulling was involved. As was biting (though as we got older we moved away from that arguably immature move). Doors slammed. Doors slammed on each others’ hands. Doors slammed on each others’ faces. Doors slammed so hard my dad took our bedroom doors off their hinges for a spell.
We fought so hard we literally knocked holes in more than one wall in our house.
(Ironically, those holes always brought us back together as sisters. They had to. We had to unify to figure out a clever way to either patch them or hide them from our parents. The holes made us forget about whatever offense we’d had with the other. We were a regular pair of idyllic Olsen twins when holes were involved [think Olsen twins circa the cute made-for-TV detective movies, not Olsen twins circa the creepy hooker eye makeup and eating disorders and wild affairs with Heath Ledger].)
(My sister’s biggest failing in my eyes, back then, was that she wasn’t my twin. I always wanted to be a twin. I dreamt about it daily—almost as often as I dreamt of being sent away to a private boarding school in England. [Hollywood’s biggest failing in my eyes, back then and even today, is using one Lindsay Lohan twice for the remake of The Parent Trap instead of two Olsen twins once. Some wounds time cannot heal.])
So but anyway we fought. Crazily. I bet there were days my mom cried herself to sleep with worry that we would never be a happy pair, that we would hate each other until the day we died, that we would never get to have cheerful family vacations or later on in life, reunions. I can’t really say that I blame her. We were horrible to each other.
It all changed around the year we were both in the same junior high together. She was entering ninth grade and I was just starting seventh. The week before that school year started, we each got our $100 of back-to-school clothes buying money. We went shopping together and deduced, very Olsen-twin-like if you ask me, that $200 could buy more clothes that $100. We were roughly the same size (actually we weren’t at all: she had way bigger b00bs than I did and my legs were much longer than hers, but we made it work), so we pooled our money and bought twice the amount of clothes that we could both wear. It was a breakthrough.
I had a few friends of my own, but hers were older and therefore cooler, and she always let me hang out with them on weekends when they came over to our house. She never complained that I was cramping her ninth-grade style, and she even laughed at my jokes when I thought I was being hilarious and awesome. She took me under her wing and helped me run for student council, writing me a winning speech and advising me *not* to put a picture of myself on my flyers, since that was just asking to get them defaced with moustaches and blacked-out teeth. She watched out for me. It was a bonding time for us.
Of course the first time I got armpit stains on her favourite sweater or the first time she wore the Doc Martins to picture day when she KNEW I WANTED TO WEAR THE DOC MARTINS ON PICTURE DAY we were back to blows, but it was different. We were tamer. The previous passion we’d had for hurting each other had sizzled into nothing more than a formality, and over the years dissolved altogether.
I can safely say now that I would sooner hurt myself a hundred times than hurt my sister in any way.
And that is why I hope we have more than one child semi-close together. I think everyone should have a built-in friend like that.
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