I’ve always found it so strange how my sister and I lived under the same roof, were raised by the same people and yet we came out completely different. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that siblings need to be carbon copies of each other. However, typically people who grow up under the same roof at the very least have similar beliefs, similar personalities. She and I are what you would call ” polar opposites”, ” night and day” and all those other cliched terms used to describe exactly how opposite we are.
We don’t even have the same childhood memories, which blows me away every time I think about it. Her interpretation of my father, our family and the events of our shared lives is so far from where I am, it’s actually a little frightening. What’s even more frightening to me is the ease in which my sister shrugs off my telling of our history as an “exaggeration” and/or ” fabrication”, depending on how harsh she feels like being towards me when this topic comes up. She is constantly telling me that I can’t let a few bad memories negate all the “good times” we had with dad. I want to tell her that I can’t let a few cookie cutter moments negate all the shit that went down. I mean, I’m sure Jeffrey Dhamer had his redeeming qualities ( as we all do) but a few pieces of goodness didn’t make him any less fucked up, any less a cannibal, any less a predator, any less a killer. Now, I’m not suggesting that my father is just like Dhamer. I’m just trying to point out that you can’t deny what’s already there.
My sister is and has always been very fast and very busy. She speeds when she drives. She walks three steps at a time. When she talks I’m lucky if I can catch every other word that she says. In high school she was very academically and extracurricularly active. She was a cheerleader. She was on the traveling debate team. She was in drama club ( the only club I participated in), before school choir ( a club that met one hour before school started, a big fat hell no for me), she wrote for the school paper and the yearbook, she was even part of the Israeli Culture Club even though she was not Jewish. She was in all accelerated classes and on the Dean’s list every semester. When she wasn’t busy with school activities she was hanging out with her friends and going to parties. Everyone in every grade knew who my sister was. Though I don’t think she was considered “popular”. She just happened to have her hand in so many things it was impossible not to know who she was. Her life after high school was no different. She immediately moved out of the house to go to college, she enrolled in the maximum amount of credits she could possibly take, she joined a bunch of clubs on campus and has always been full steam ahead. After she graduated with her bachelors, she didn’t miss a beat. She immediately got a job on campus and enrolled in the maximum amount of graduate credits she could take. On top of working on campus as a professor’s assistant, she is also an R/A and gives private music lessons. She is so packed with stuff that I’m lucky if she returns my phone calls within a week. Now for the most part, I think it is admirable that she is so driven. However, at the same time I find myself wondering if being involved in so much is good for her. I’m inclined to think that it has become something of a survival tactic for her. As long as she stays busy and focused on school and work and on her social life, the less time she has to think about or even acknowledge the pain that she insists she doesn’t have. I wonder if the reasons our memories don’t match up is because she was never really there to see what I saw in the first place. By staying out of the house all the time, she protected herself from the dysfunction and trauma that waited there.
Your sister sounds like me. Scary stuff.