Moving right along (this is the life on the highway), after the success of my dad’s 70th birthday blog, I thought I’d squeeze one out for my sister as well. And so I present a series of sisterly snapshots.
As a teenager I once teased my sister that I could remember a time pre-Lauren (because I knew she would hate the idea) but in reality, while I may have one or two memories of those first three years before I was a big sister, the images are so blurry that I can’t date them with certainty. By comparison, the snapshot memory of seeing my baby sister for the first time is in crisp focus (albeit with a 70s-style filter). I’d stayed at my friend Angie’s house the night she was born and when my parents fetched me I noted, with surprise, that my mum was sitting in the back of the car. I can clearly recall looking at the baby and feeling mild curiosity about this tiny person who had managed to dislodge Mummy from her usual position in the front passenger seat.
The shared library
As we grew up, when we weren’t screaming at each other (see Conflict), my sister and I were (and still are) close friends, and we had a range of games that we played together. My favourite of these remains “The Quote Game”, based on our fairly extensive shared library. One of us would quote from a novel; the other would have to name the novel. The idea was to try and catch each other out with a quote too obscure to be identified. It was tricky as we had both read our favourites numerous times.
From an early age my little sister displayed an unusual proclivity for minor injuries. When she was three and I was six, I was teaching her to long-jump over the rug in the living room when she slipped and fell nose first into the wooden leg of the settee. The damaged nose promptly began to spout blood like a fountain. At age four she fell face-first off a seesaw, breaking her front tooth in half. She continued in this vein throughout her childhood, and well into adolescence. When we were both in our teens I remember hearing a thump and a cry, followed by a sliding noise and small sobs. I came out of my bedroom to find my sister in a crumpled heap on the hallway floor. “What happened?” I asked. “I walked into the wall,” she cried. “I think I’ve broken my toe again.”
The Loved One
When I was in year 10 I studied Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. While the book is about deceased pets, my sister and I quickly adopted the term to describe whichever sister was in favour with our parents. FYI I was convinced that my parents preferred Lauren, who got away with provoking me (see Conflict: Great Fights I Have Known) because she was the younger, cuter sister.
• Property
To this day my sister loves magazines. Back then she favoured the likes of Smash Hits and Girlfriend. I liked reading these magazines too. My sister, however, felt that it wasn’t fair that I should be able to read the magazines on which she had spent her hard-earned (ahem) pocket money. Cue many tearful disputes.
• The bathroom wars of the mid-late 80s
There wasn’t enough room in our bathroom for both of us to stand in front of the mirror simultaneously but we did anyway, elbowing each other in the face as we tried to do our hair. The wars were brought to a partial end when I started doing early morning gymnastics training, requiring me to leave the house before my sister got out of bed, and a total end when I graduated from high school, started an arts degree and no longer had to get out of bed at all.
• Great fights I have known
My catch-cry, growing up, was “She provoked me!” My mother must have rued the day she explained to me what the word meant.
To my shame, however, when I think back on our most memorable blow-ups, I can only remember my own reactions and have no recollection of the aforementioned provocations that caused me to
a) throw my maths book (so thick it was almost cuboid) at my sister’s shin and
b) rip up her vintage Marilyn Monroe poster.
I remember the relief at discovering that her leg was bruised rather than broken* (in the case of the former) and heading to ShowBitz in Carillon Arcade in a state of extreme contrition to buy the biggest Marilyn poster I could find (in the case of the latter). I can only presume she did something terrible on both occasions… right?
* It was actually a miracle it made contact at all – my athletics shot-put trial that year saw me put the shot such a short distance that I was too embarrassed to record it on the house scoreboard.
Of the two of us, my sister has always been the cool one, the risk-taker, the early-adopter. Cases in point:
• At age 8 she mounted a successful campaign to have her ears pierced; within months my mother had followed suite. It took me another five years.
• Even though I was the one who was keen on gymnastics, she taught herself to backflip into the pool with ease, while I quavered at the edge.
• I had no interest in going to the Year 11 Dance and only went to the Year 12 Dance under sufferance; my sister went to every dance on offer and was invited to go to dances at other schools.
• At her 18th birthday party she introduced me to the joys of gin and tonic. I was 21.
• Just six months after I’d bravely made my first solo overseas trip to the UK, she headed off to Israel for the summer and 18 months later moved not just out of home, but to the other side of the country. I was still comfortably ensconced in my childhood bedroom.
• When Facebook became a thing, she was on it well before I’d even worked out what it was. Then she told me I should go on it. I said, no thanks. She sat me down and created my profile anyway (I later discovered she’d got my birth year wrong). Possibly she didn’t do me a favour in this instance as I am now thoroughly addicted and recently deleted the FB app from my phone in a last ditch attempt to regain some control. She, on the other hand, is all about Instagram these days and rarely uses Facebook.
The funny one
My sister is funny. When we were younger she could crack me up with a quirk of her lip, or a rendition of the birdie dance. These days I get my fix from her blog. Yep. She even started blogging before me (refer back to the cool one).
When we were little people were constantly remarking on how unalike we were. I was dark, she was fair. I had curly hair, hers was straight. I was into gymnastics, she loved drama (“Suddenly Seymouuuur… is standing beside youuuuu”). I refused to wear dresses, she only wore dresses. I hated my piano lessons, she loved learning the flute. You get the picture.
We still lead very different lives, but people no longer remark on how different we are because weirdly, we have become strikingly alike as adults.
• Example one
When we were both in our teens, I recorded our home answering machine message. One day I rang home and when the answering machine kicked in I thought she had answered the phone. I even greeted my own recorded voice.
• Example two
As an observant married Jewish woman, my sister covers her hair with a sheitl (wig). When she’d not long been married I asked if I could try on the wig (assuring my sister that I had recently washed my hair – she is fussy about that kind of thing). I put the wig on in front of the mirror and when I saw my reflection I screamed. My head went all tingly and spinny, and I started laughing hysterically, because it actually looked like my sister was staring back at me. Turns out we actually have almost the exact same face, just very different hair.
• Example three
When I meet friends of Lauren’s for the first time, they frequently gasp when I speak. “You’re just like Lauren!” They exclaim. “It’s like talking to Lauren! It’s Lauren… with different hair.”
In 1996 our parents went on holiday, leaving us home alone for the first time, aged 20 and 17. Before she left, mum made me look her in the eye and promise we wouldn’t have a party. I promised. As soon as we had dropped the parents at the airport we began distributing the invitations we had already designed and printed some weeks ago. The theme was “Anything that sparkles, glitters and glows”. I sewed garments for both of us – Lauren’s was a sequin halter-neck crop top (made out of a quarter metre of fabric because it was $80/metre) and mine was a sparkly lace and lamé A-line mini and matching top. As it was summer we decided to keep the party in the garden. We were proud when the party went off with no damage to home or contents… but we didn’t think about cleaning up the glitter we had sprinkled liberally over the patio. The following day the mercury hit 40 degrees centigrade and the glitter baked on to the bricks, leaving us with a sparkly patio to explain when our parents returned.
"They knew that Virginia Woolf was about to crack up again when she wrote in her diary that she and sisters 'laughed so much that the spiders ran into corners and strangled themselves in their webs. Perhaps her case was extreme but I cannot say that such laughter is unknown to me and my sisters. There is something ecstatic, brakeless, about the way we laugh together. We laugh in spasms and paroxysms. Almost anything – a glance, a word, a mimicked grimace – can act as a trigger."
- Helen Garner, "A scrapbook, an album" in True Stories (1996)
Example:
This year I attended a Passover retreat in Cairns with my parents, sister, brother-in-law and four nephews. Most nights desserts were either a buffet or a choice from a menu, but on this particular occasion, there were two desserts and they were served wedding-style, alternately. When we saw the options there was immediate consternation at our family table – one option involved chocolate, the other fruit. Who would luck out and get the fruit dessert?
The moment of truth came and both my sister and I found ourselves facing fruit-based disappointment. As the waitress departed, my four year old nephew observed my crestfallen face. “Nani*,” he said with concern. “Are you ok?”
I glanced at my sister and we both dissolved into instant and hysterical laughter. The rest of the family looked on in mild astonishment.
“You know you’ve brought up your child well,” I gasped as tears of mirth seeped from my eyes, “when he asks his aunt if she’s ok because she’s been brought the wrong dessert.”
Often, though, the triggers are much less detailed. Sometimes a one-word SMS can be enough to send us over the edge, albeit on opposite sides of the country.
*All my sister's kids call me Nani because that's what child #1 called me when he was learning how to talk (Na-ni instead of Ni-na).
Cementing her place as The Loved One, my sister got married and started reproducing relatively young. In doing so she also relieved me of any pressure on me to do these things, and for that I am grateful.
Not long after my sister's wedding, an unmarried friend whose younger sister was also getting married asked me how I’d felt as the older sister at the event. I remember answering without thinking, “It was the happiest day of my life so far.” This wasn’t hyperbole – seeing my sister marrying someone who made her so happy was absolutely joyous.
Paul and Lauren had three boys in relatively quick succession, took a bit of time to recover, and then produced a fourth boy. To talk about my nephews and the delight I take in auntyhood deserves a blog post of its own, suffice to say I am grateful beyond measure to my sister for producing them. As I once said to her, you’ve had enough children for both of us and I appreciate it.
To sum up (the serious bit)
In addition to being smart and highly entertaining, my sister is also incredibly loyal, kind, generous and compassionate. I know that she'll always have my back, just as I have hers.
I love you Loppy. Happy birthday xxx