Soon I Will Be Older Than My Older Sister

From Sara :

I will try to explain the elements shown here in a way that everyone can understand. This is an open glass showcase in my house that is essentially a shrine to my late sister, Alex. I find the disorganization of the cabinet to be highly symbolic. Even after 13 months, it maintains the look of an impromptu vigil at the site of a car accident. This shows some inability to process, and inability to reconcile what happened to her. On the left side you see her various basketball trophies, and one that is holding her knit baby outfit. Not only do the trophies draw the eye up, they also represent the best time in her life before adolescence. Her most proud title was big sister. In the sibling photo on the right, you can get a sense of our dynamic. My sister was expected to be the role model, and I was unhappy to be forced to wear a dress and embrace my little brother who was a rascal. You can see the way my sister and I were holding up our baby brother. We were holding him very gingerly as if not to damage him. My mom treats him the same way. Even today, he is coddled and my mom makes him breakfast many times a week. I have always been more domestic and caretaking from my middle sister duties. As a consequence of birth order, my sister had always been dealt a worse hand than my brother and I. There is something eerie about seeing these trophies and plaques in a deep black showcase with spotlights. My sister held a well-balanced life up through high school despite our strict mom. She took on an IB diploma course load even though it is unclear if she only did it to prove my mother wrong. The central photo shown on her funeral handout is her senior portrait. In this portrait, she is wearing a star of David necklace. This symbolizes her profound devotion to family, dead or alive. She employed some drug-involved coping mechanisms to deal with the intense pressure she felt after dropping out of college and being depressed.

In “The ‘Two Cultures’ of Childhood”, the author says that “Gender segregation allows boys and girls to develop different social norms and interaction styles, and their play styles reinforce these differences” (p. 62).

I really feel that because of my closer age to my brother, I was more able to get on his level and play with him like a boy would. His life seemed so simple. He wasn’t as good of a student as my sister and I, and wasn’t forced to do Sunday school. Each of my siblings were playmates for certain purposes. I would play online games and stuffed animals with my sister in our shared room, but I could also wrestle and do something messy with my brother. Nonetheless, my siblings had a gendered childhood in a way I just didn’t. I spent a lot of time with my sister, so my brother mostly kept to himself or did male bonding and Boy Scouts with our dad. My sister grew up as the built-in babysitter. For the 2 years leading up to her death, all three of us were depressed at clinical levels. However, Alex being the oldest, my parents didn’t recognize it as a disease. She took refuge in never being single and used drugs and alcohol. During this time, suddenly I was being told to be less like her. Having a little brother, my sister and I always knew our actions impacted more than just us. There was always the weight of the world on our shoulders. We were ambitious, and my brother was not. I will point out that in the photo, there are not any loud colors or patterns. As girls, our job was to support, not stand out. This scene is just as solemn as I have felt at times. One night of a party drug turned into the loss of a 22 year old woman. Why do girls feel such pressure to be who people want them to be?

     Works Cited

 

Development of Gender Relations. The "Two Cultures" of Childhood pp. 59-63