Sisterhood

I have four sisters. Here’s a story about two of them and me. I began this story as a response to Christiana White’s story and then the response got so long that I felt it deserved to be an independent story. Here’s Christiana’s story that moved me deeply:

Christiana,

This is about you not about your sister. I think you know that already. I think you know everything that I am telling you now, except for the particulars of my family. Indulge me. I am writing so I learn something, not that I teach you something. I prefer to show you, rather than tell you. I cannot tell you anything anyway.

I love her, yet I treat her like a leper, handing money out the window with the engine still running.

This line blew me away, it moved me to tears, I wept over my porridge.

This story tells who you are and this final, blasting line showed me that you are self-aware. A poignant ending to a raw, painful story. A climactic sentence of whose truth you may not yet even be fully aware.

Please leave it to the Karens of the world to tell our own stories.

Please leave it to Karen to make judgements about whether her life is okay or not.

I suggest that you avoid “friends” who make snap judgements about whether to give Karen money or not. I suggest you avoid people who dole out advice. I know I am veering very close to the edge of advice-giving here. Forgive me for my presumption. I know not yet how else to say it.

You never know what’s around the next corner. Not for you and not for her. You CAN sympathize with her and support her without co-signing her bullshit.

Listen to the quiet little voice inside not to your bombastic friends.

Don’t make the same mistake that I made, to the detriment of my infant son.

I mistook a woman’s fervour for veracity.

If I were to go back, I would check credentials better. I don’t mean academic credentials, I mean experiential credentials.

I took advice on breastfeeding from a bombastic “friend” who was terribly wrong.

Your article is dated my sister’s birthday, the sister, E, who keeps harping on about our brother and sister whose lives are, in her opinion, not going in a good direction. She and I have a sister Karen too. When I was single and earning well, I supported her in university. Now E bails her out financially from time to time and either gives her a repayment plan that is impossible to keep or “forgives” the debt leaving Karen forever beholden to her. Karen’s teeth were sometimes black which, combined with extreme weight loss, suggested that she is smoking heroin. E’s constant bitching about K and our brothers had this subtext: “Their lives are so off-the-wall but look at my nice house here in suburbia (It IS beautiful.) and my marriage and my job. See my handsome well-functioning sons. I’m better than her. I’ve hacked life. See all the evidence.”

Instead of: “This could have been me.”

E’s money comes from working in a bank; slogging from 9 to 5 for decades to benefit perpetrators of the Anglo-Irish bank scandal whose actions sucked her life’s savings down the drain overnight. She’s never actually produced anything in her life except perhaps liquidity in financial markets. Her job also involves informing clients of foreclosure and its terms.

Her self-righteousness sits ill with me.

I feel desperately uncomfortable when she criticizes our siblings.

When I was in boarding school, E used to send me a fiver or a tenner from time to time. These small cash injections meant the world to me.

However as soon as I became financially independent and assumed responsibility for my life our relationship deteriorated. Although she did like to brag about my academic progress and my celebrity friends- whose enormous value, I hasten to add, I recognized long before one became a celebrated journalist and another became a respected politician.

I will not play the role of the hapless, irresponsible little sister which is what my sister needs to feel good about our relationship. I will not submit to her cruel jibes about my too-white pasty skin, I will not allow her in her implicitness to tell me how ugly I am or how ignorant I was of our father’s drinking, or how blind I was or how more vicious my mother’s beatings of me were than the beatings she gave the other kids.

(I see it today as projection, my mother was trying to beat something out of a facet of herself; I am the spitting image of her. I am quick, like her. She surely saw herself in me. She hated this part of herself and took it out on me. But that’s another story.)

I fear that my tone is condescending and patronizing.

If so, please forgive me; that us not my intention. I could spend another couple of hours sugarcoating the pill of my truth. I choose to anticipate that you are able to see beyond the superfluity of language.

I do sympathize with your pain and your plight and the conflict between helping and enabling.

My message is this:

You may be doing your sister a grave disservice by giving her money. You know this very well already.

You may be doing your sister a disservice by taking away her pain.

There is no right or wrong here — anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar.

Your sister’s life hangs in the balance.

So does yours.

When you give her money there are consequences.

When you refuse her money there are consequences.

When you write this story there are consequences.

Your story has moved me to push away my breakfast bowl and sit pecking on my cellphone for TWO HOURS.

Your words have power. They have moved a woman on the other side of the world you have never met and probably never will- to tears and to responding. (I cry easily, almost every day and perversely, it is a great gift and a joy to me, as one-who-was-unable-to-weep for so many terrible years).

Your descriptions have power.

Your love for your sister has the power, through your words, to make responding to your story a top priority in a world clamoring for my attention.

Your life and your predicament have fully absorbed me for hours on end. Your beautiful story is significant.

Your words have POWER and your actions have consequences.

Your words struck a chord deep inside of me, far, far away. You are probably sleeping deeply yet while your words are working inside of me.

Isn’t the Internet fucking amazing?