This One's For My Sister

So.

Hi everyone.  It has been an age since we’ve been here.  The summer and fall were super busy with enormous changes.  I will tell you about my wonderful summer another time. 

This post is for my sister. 

We had a massive fight this week – like one of those fights people rarely come back from and if they do it is years before the faces face each other and the eyes see the pain caused by the words said from pain and anger and desperation – and she told me to blog about it.  She was, of course, being sarcastic, caustic, and generally “ic”y.  We both were.

So, I decided to do just that for a number of reasons; not the least of which was to hold onto my voice after fighting my whole life to have one.  But also because I have been running from this post for a long time – probably just as long as it took me to have the balls (or lack of – depending on your perspective) to be here in the first place. 

I have tried to start a new post for months.  I have drafts of beginnings that end nowhere, go nowhere, do not adequately allow for me to explore this crazy maze I have been blindly bumping up against for about five months…some for my whole life, I guess…or at least as long as I have been a sister.

Time to jump in.  So I will:

I have been a shitty sister.

I have been a shitty sister and I have had to re-calibrate the places I have dumped my frustration and pain and discomfort with pieces of me I did not understand. 

See, in September, my mom was diagnosed with small-cell somethingorotherkind of lung cancer that had spread to her bones, her liver, and her brain by the time the doctors found out she had it at all.

Yep.  Terminal.  She was given six weeks without treatment.  She went through radiation and a couple of chemo treatments and she has been fighting in hospice since early December. 

She is a fucking gladiator.

And I am an asshole.

Yeah…you know, right?  Those of you who read my first chap book and my blog posts know about the complex, difficult relationship I have had with her.  So you will have a pretty good appreciation for the deeper complexities and the bigger mess this makes of my shit…just totally spreads it around.

I had to decide if holding on to the hurts of the past were worth more to me than making a peaceful end to all of this mess. 

I wanted to hold on.  I wanted to stay angry and cold. The distance gave me safety for what was coming…the inevitable end to something I had done a really solid job of convincing myself was already over for me. 

Yeah. It wasn’t.

It really wasn’t.

Good news, though…mom and I have had the chance to talk and air out those places we didn’t go to cuz we had no need to…and I didn’t want to go for fear of more hurt. 

It was a nice moment, actually…the two of us, sitting on the floor…talking about choices we made that maybe weren’t awesome but were necessary at the time in order for both of us to survive. 

We saw each other.  I saw parts of her I knew were there but was never allowed to see cuz she was soldiering on to just get on with “it” – whatever “it” needed to be.

It was nice.

Oh, by the way, the Reluctant Daughter stuff…that is a whole other post.

Not quite ready for that one just yet.

There’s the context.

Now back to the real story – how I am a terrible sister.

I am nearly 5 years older than my sister.  There is just the two of us…and not even like the song.  I made sure of that from the day she came home from the hospital.  She chased my invisible friend Arthur away after a few weeks and that really upset me.  Strike one.

She was referred to as a “good baby” – she slept, she ate, she pooped, and she rarely cried.  A “good baby.”  I was not like that.  I cried. And cried. And cried.  She would probably say that I still am a cry baby…especially these days…she is pretty angry with me.

I dunno.  Maybe I just never got over having my parents to myself and being bitchy about sharing the important people in my life but she really annoyed me from the very beginning and as we grew up, the annoyance grew.  She would reach out to me and I would walk away until my mother made me walk back and make some kind of contact with her over and over until we were pre-teens and teens and the refrain: “she looks up to you and just wants to be like you” echoed through my skull until I wanted to bash it against any hard surface that would let me leak it out.

I wanted her to be her own person.  I was not worthy of such hero worship.  I was domineering and pushy and shut her down.  I did not want her to be like me.  I was shit. I was broken.  I was dirty, damaged, and destructive.  I wanted her to be light and strong and beautiful…like she was born to be.

I pushed her away our whole lives.  Even when we were all we had because we moved so much, I would push her away into newness and unfamiliar faces.  I would tell her to make her own friends when she would want to hang out with me when we were new to a school.  I pushed her away so often and so severely, I am certain that is why she had massive school anxiety – especially when we were new kids…every time we were new kids.

I am a terrible sister.

I needed to make sure that I could stand alone because I knew, for certain, that I was poison and anyone who got too close to me was in danger of catching what I had…whatever I thought I had…I didn’t want her to get it.

            Especially when it came to the abuse.

I had to keep her safe.  He, the “he” who raped me when I was 8 and 11 came after her…threatened to come after her the second time…when I was 11 and I told him I would kill him if he touched her. 

I would have.  I would have when she was a baby and the first abuser hung over her crib after he had molested me.  I would have after that rapist said he wanted to get her, too.  I would have stabbed him into hamburger if he touched her.  I would have gone to jail in high school for murder for all of the senior boys who told me, in great detail, what they wanted to do to my “hot little sister.”

DON’T FUCKING TOUCH MY LITTLE SISTER!

All of that sounds so heroic but it turned me into a coward.  I pushed her farther and harder away from me so that if anything happened on my watch I couldn’t feel responsible.  I wouldn’t have to feel guilty because I didn’t care.  She was a project to me. Not a person and the harder she tried to get in, the higher I built the walls until no one could get in.

It really isn’t much better today.  I still don’t let her in.  I still push her away – even though she needs me now…we need each other now.  I am still the disappointment to her, and myself (regarding her), that I have always been.  Only now it is complicated with death and shit said that cannot be unsaid.

I have really clear remembrances of dark nights in new houses.  I had a double bed because I was older.  She had a little, single bed.  She would crawl into bed with me because she was scared.  We would “tickle arms” (where you run your fingers over the soft skin on the other side of the elbow) until she fell back to sleep. 

We were all we had and soon we will be all we have again.

I am not sure if we will ever be friends.  I don’t know if that is even necessary.  I do know, though, that I have been a shitty sister.

I have been a shitty sister and I am so sorry I did not know how to be better.  I am so sorry that I am afraid to be better,  to be different, to be what she needs me to be.

I am just sorry.

And I love her.  A lot.

So I thought I would put that out there.

Cuz she told me to.