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Sibbling's bond
Nicole Galloway Galloway 1
Mr. Clere
3/1/2007
English 111
A Sister's Bond
The bond between sisters is a sacred bond of trust and respect that should never be broken. Sadly, many adults tend to damage this special bond through favourtism, be it intentional or not. My sister and I experienced favourtism first hand through the adults that surrounded our everyday lives. I have to give credit to my mother who not once looked down upon either my sister or me. However, this praise cannot be handed so lightly to our teachers and grandmother. Both groups were known to directly and indirectly pick favourites.
My sister was borne almost 10 years my senior, with unruly red hair and piercing blue eyes. The red with blue became a stunning contrast to America's stereotype of luft haired girls with green or hazel eyes. This contrast only became more apparent as my sister got older, and her hair deepened into a managable colour and style.
She also had the aire of knowing her place, which was nowhere beneath anyone else. She held her head up with pride, and for good reason. The girl was a genius in grade school, and I'm not just saying that to brag. If memory serves, she proved to have an IQ of 140 when she was a young girl.
Indeed, my sister was all 5'2" of fiery free will, intellegence, and spunk. She carried herself well, graduated valadictorian, and has since graduated from Duke University. Yes, I have respect and adoration for my sister, but for near 20 years, there was a time I only hed a deep resentment towards her.
Recall that she is almost 10 years older than I am. This means that when I went to school, everyone knew me as her little sister. That is fine until one realizes that the teachers expect you to be like your older siblings in every way.
There was not a grade that I can remember going into and that same rejected feeling would emerge. That teachers at the schools were like clock work. At the beginning of each year, the teachers would start off by asking me how my sister was, what she was doing, and "Oh! What a student she used to be!". She was a straight "A" student, quiet, yet on the mark. These praises and compliments would run on for about half an hour. Most children would bubble with pride by this point, but I wasn't fooled.
I learned early that not all teachers realize that some children just don't test well. I also realized that I was just such a child. I wasn't slacking by any means achedemically. I simply froze up during tests. Sadly, making a high "B" or a low "A" just isn't good enough when someone succeeds a genius. Just like the clockwork I mentioned earlier, not a teacher I encountered could resist the comparison.
"You did alright. You could probably get your sister to help you study. Now she's a smart one."
And like gold, I'd sparkle my smile at their praise of my sister, knowing that the teacher meant well. Yet I never missed the slight look in their eyes that someho let me know that I wasn't achieving their expectations.
Later I would go home, and when asked how I did on my test, my mother would hug me and congratulate me. My grandmother would promptly go into a lecture on how I can do better, and that I should get my sister to help me with my homework, and...well, by that time I learned how to tune people out while they rambled on.
By the time I hit junior high, I had come to the conclusion that someone who always needed improving, obviously wasn't good enough to begin with. I admitted my defeat and stopped studying all together, not seeing a point on stressing myself if the only person who really didn't mind my short-comings was my mother.
My sister, having been a young adult at the time, would often try to talk to me, but to her distmay, young teenaged minds don't like to talk about their problems. I remember that after every attempt to talk with me ended with her shaking her head in frustration. At the time, I mistook her frustration to be directed towards me, and in truth I think some of it was. I would later learn the whole truth, and understanding I wish I had before.
During junior high, the adults stopped focusing on my grades when I generally stopped caring. Instead, my grandmother was gracious enough to focus on something else. Young teanaged girls typically gain weight and loose self confidence. The stress of that particular time was magnified when the words, "You're sister never gained weight like you" started to sound.
To think that I resented my sister for always being smarter was pale in comparison to how I thought of her when constantly reminded that I just wasn't as pretty as she was.
From patting my stomach and comparing me to a sausage, to complaining about my complection and how my sister never had those problems, my grandmother would circle around me like an ancient predator. She knew that she was putting a wedge between my sister and myself, and to this day I don't think she regrets it. She always was selfish like that.
Even in highschool, my standards in life just couldn't match up to a Duke graduate. There was always that same condensending tone when I voiced what college I wanted to go to, after the teachers and my grandmother seen my sister through college.
Truth be told, I'm not sure when the anger left me. I'm not sure when I stopped resenting the fact that no matter how hard I tried, I was never as good. I'm not even sure when I realized that my sister was not the problem.
Today, by the age of 20 years, I can now see my sister for what she really is. She's the same spit-fire from when she was a child. She knew the things that Nan would say to me, and now that I'm older, I know that's who she was really frustrated with.
My sister never looked down upon me, even when I walked away from her. Instead, she waited patiently in the hopes that I would realize just all of what had happened.
I find us now where we laugh together, we vent towards each other. 20 years later, in the one person I wanted to hate the most, I find the approval I wanted so badly as a child. I find the respect I thought I never had. And I found a friend that I came so close to losing.
She hounds me about my grades...but that's alright. She's just doing it because she loves me. She won't be as sympathetic as most people are when I make a stupid mistake. Again, that's alright, because she'll tell me what I did wrong and what I can do to fix it.
Sometimes I wish that she had sat me down when I was young and warned me about our grandmother's deception and our teacher's folly. But the, I think that had she of done that, our bond would not be as great. Instead, I find that she went through the same expectations, if not higher, and in turn we are now equals, both striving to ignore the voices of doubt from the past, only to flourish in the future.
