Sibling rivalry

I grew up an angry, pissed-off little kid, but only when I wasn’t a fun, creative, outgoing kid. I guess I had two settings: angry and charming.

My sister always pushed me over the edge into angry kid land. She didn’t mean to do it, it wasn’t even anything that she did, but boy oh did she trigger some crazy emotions in me.

Everyone—EVERYONE—aunts, cousins, my mom’s co-workers—everyone told me how adorable my cute little sister was. “Oh, your sister is SO cute!” All the time. They even had a tiny child’s sized wicker chair at my mom’s work, and all the ladies said, “That’s little sister’s chair! Isn’t she so CUTE in her little chair?”

That was my chair. Before it was little sister’s chair, it was my chair. But no one ever told me how cute I looked in the miniature wicker chair.

I remember that when she would get out of the chair, I would go and sit in it, hoping to get noticed and told how cute I was. I only wanted to be cute, too, like little sister. But no one ever said a peep about cute. I got stern warnings: “You’re too big for that chair, be careful or you’ll break it.”

I hated her for getting all of the petting and the cooing and the cute-ing. It made me feel invisible when she was around: “Wait! The cute one’s here; we can start talking about how cute she is! Awww!”

Instead, I made hiding places. I crawled all over the store where my mom worked, sneaking underneath the clothing racks. I made it my goal to get from one room to the next by crawling under clothes and never being detected. If I were invisible from not cute-ness, then it could be a game to test the real limits of my invisibility, right?

My ultimate destination as I crawled through the store on my hands and knees, following under trails of trellised clothing, was reaching the dressing room. The dressing room sat in the center of the store, an irrationally huge octagon with giant mirrors on three walls. I’d sneak through the store, invisible, and burst into the empty dressing room, twirling like a ballerina on a stage. The overhead lights were my spotlights, and the mirrors were my audience, as I danced and sang and pretended to be admired by throngs of mirror-Christines staring back at me.

Eventually, I had to come out of the dressing room, walking down the aisle of shoes, slowly melting out of my dream world. Eventually, I became plain old Christine again—not cute Christine or Christine and her little chair. Just invisible, ugly Christine.

I grew up hating my body and hating the way I looked. I hated that I never had the right haircut or the right clothes and that my boobs were too small and my nose was too big. And I hated that my sister glided through life on the sound or rustling gossamer, so perfect and cute, with her own chair and everything.

In our twenties, sitting at my parents’ house, I said to my sister, “You know, I was always so jealous of you.”

“God, why?” she asked, incredulous.

“All the time when we were growing up, people told me how cute you were, over and over.”

She looked amazed, “Are you serious? Everyone told me how beautiful you were!”

“What? No one ever told me that!”

“Well no one ever told me I was cute either!”

We learned that night that we shared a lifetime of disappointment in ourselves. But, starting that night, we shared a different disappointment, not the disappointment that the other was perfect but that we were flawed, but the disappointment that we hated each other all those years for something that didn’t exist, and we hated that no one had the courage to say to each of us, “You’re both beautiful girls.”