I grew up in a family that was my mother, my older sister, and me. My mother was 16 when she had my sister and it always seemed that because of their closeness in age they had much more of a friendship-type relationship than mother and daughter. I came along five years later and I seemed like more of the child in the family. It was always clear to me that my sister was the favorite, almost like it was just an established fact and not something to be upset about. Especially as we got a little older and my sister became a teenager, I felt like I almost didn’t have a sister, but instead had two mothers.
I think part of that came from the fact that when we were little, my sister was always my babysitter. And with that came the reality that she was given authority over me in a way that normally only a parent would have. I grew up with the understanding that I had to obey what my sister said in the same way I had to obey what my mother said. It’s an odd family dynamic in hindsight, but it seemed perfectly normal to me at the time.
The first time I think I started to notice the unfairness of it was a rule we had regarding privacy. I was strictly forbidden from ever going into my mother’s room or my sister’s room unless I had permission. But no such rule existed about my room. Of course my mother could go into my room whenever, but that same permission was given to my sister.
I would (and did) get punished if I was ever caught going into my sister’s room, yet she was in and out of my room all the time like it was nothing. The way our house was designed, I had the smallest of the bedrooms, but I had this giant walk-in closet. My sister had a bigger room but a tiny closet. So it was decided back when I was really young that my closet would be shared and my sister would have half of it. For this reason she was in my bedroom on a daily basis.
I was a normal young boy, however, and I enjoyed doing things that were forbidden, so I often would sneak into my sister’s room when no one was around. I knew where she kept her diary and I sometimes would mess with things in her room just for the sake of doing it. And whenever I was caught I was punished.
My sister’s status as an authority figure with me meant that there was no argument. If she claimed I had been in her room, I would be punished.
My sister had this little ceramic modular rainbow thing on one of her shelves. It’s hard to describe, but each color of the rainbow was its own piece and they fit together in an arch pattern, one under the other. She always kept this in a certain position with each color pushed a little further back from the one below it. And every time I would go into her room I would push them all together flush. I’m not sure why I did it, but it was almost like my calling card, and like every time I did it I knew I was making it obvious that I’d been there, and that I’d be punished. But I did it anyway.
She’d go to my mom and say, “He touched my rainbow again,” and then I’d be punished. Usually it was a grounding of a few days.
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