I Love Her, I Love Her Not, I Love Her

...(She's My Sister)!

Sister Sledge used to sing, "We are family." As teenagers my sisters and I sang the lyrics with them.

"We are family, I have all my sisters with me.
All the people around us they say, can they be that close?
Just let me say for the record,
We're giving love in a family dose."

Sisters everywhere swear by these lyrics all the time-well, most of the time, okay, sometimes anyway. Webster defines a sister as "a female human being having the same parents as another person." If you've been blessed with a sister, then you know "a female human being" would be one of the nicer things you've called her.

The late Charles M. Schultz, creator of the Peanuts gang, once said, "Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life." This from the man who gave us Lucy, as near perfect an example of the big sister as literature will ever produce. Like most big sisters, Lucy invested herself fully in the role. In one of Mr. Schultz's earlier strips, Feb 1954, we see her watching a clock as the minute hands advance. On the hour she screams "BEDTIME!" at Linus, her little brother, who promptly flips in mid-air from the force of her announcement. I'm with you, Linus-been there, lived that.

If you have a sister maybe you remember marking boundaries. My sisters and I lived in Boundary World. We divided the backseat into imaginary thirds, and heaven help the trespasser. We marked boundaries in our bedroom, also. One of my sisters and I shared a double bed, in much the same way two small fighting fish would share an aquarium.

As we grew older, the property we valued changed, but we continued to define our boundaries. Now, it was hands off whatever boy someone "saw" first. This was a fatally flawed system, for most of the time the sister and I closest in age were together; we "saw" our targets at the same time. Then it became a matter of, who was he looking at first? Several good prospects got away while we were trying to decide who was looking at whom first. And then there were the battle lines we drew around our clothes-- boundaries drawn in red. Wearing your sister's favorite jeans without permission was a crime worthy of death; but since getting permission was close to impossible--a girl had to prioritize. Look great for your date and risk her wrath-or wear your own stupid jeans. My teenagers would say, "duh?!"

"Families are about learning to overcome emotional torture." I love this quote by Matt Groeing, it speaks to sisterhood's greatest weapon: mental abuse. Nothing is off limits here. Find their insecurities and exploit them to your advantage. Be it their toes or their rears, their nose or their ears, when growing up with sisters-it's all fair game.

Side by side you live with this person, this irritating, aggravation, obnoxious person. And then, you grow up. Little things remind you of the childhood you shared. A memory of late night giggle attacks returns, rare nights when you forgot to fight and lay in bed laughing at nothing and everything. The memory is pleasant, so you stir the pot and others float to the top. You have to smile when you remember that as mean as your sister was to you-she reserved her fiercest anger for your enemies. Growing up with sisters is like living with the mob. Sure, they're rough, but it's nice to have 'em around when someone calls you out.

You can't pretend with sisters either. They know you in a way no one else does. Often, childhood memories of parents are fuzzy and warm, but slightly out of focus. For a great part of my growing up years, my parents were busy with the enormous day-to-day responsibilities of raising a family. My father provided for me; my sisters played with me. My mom gave us our bath; my sisters splashed soap in my eyes. When I recall my childhood, my sisters are the main characters-my parents, the directors. Even my husband, with whom I also share a past, knows me only as the girl I was when we met, and the person I have become during our lives together. My sisters have the total picture; they remember when I wore hoot-owl glasses and corrective shoes.

As sisters, we even define ourselves by ourselves. I am the baby; (my sisters would say the spoiled one, which proves they still lie.) We think of our middle sister as the peacemaker, and the eldest as the rebel. Our roles are comfortable; we've been typecast for life. When grown up sisters get together you can almost strip away the conversation and see the little girls they used to be.

I was an adult before I began to value the special relationships I have with my sisters. If you have a sister and you haven't arrived there, I hope you will soon. The old proverb, blood is thicker than water--they were talking about sister blood. Life with a sister can be a complicated, competitive, stormy experience--that evolves into a wonderful friendship.

Maybe you have a great relationship with your sister; maybe there are times when you continue to war with her. The fact remains, you can't escape shared history. In spite of everything you love about her, and everything you don't, she lived with you through the experiences that made you who you are. And that is why you can say, "I love her, I love her not, I love her...she's my sister."