When Facebook added Sibling Day to their long list of reasons to post on their social media site, I knew it was time to tell all.
You might imagine my siblings are cowering as though a bomb is about to drop near them. You don’t know my siblings. They are preparing their own bombs to send my way.
Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash
Today’s post will have to do with my sister. She’s eight years younger and my first impressions of her were not good. When she arrived home from the hospital after her birth, I was at school. All day, going through my classes, I imagined coming home to a cute, round-cheeked Gerber baby. Instead, there was this useless red little thing lying on my parents’ bed. What was this good for?
Ah, but I found out!
By the time she was four, I had the perfect subject for my experiments. Don’t be thinking needles in her ankles or any weird science. My method was aimed at making her smarter. More well-rounded. Better equipped.
It started with subliminal learning. I wanted to know if that stuff worked. Well, at four, my sister was the perfect subject because she fell asleep before I did. Plus, she knew next to nothing so any new learning would be obvious. And she was conveniently close by.
So, when she’d fall asleep, I’d whisper a fact to her over and over. I needed to find out if she learned while she slept. I chose a list of the order of the planets. Because everyone should know those, right?
To this day, she still knows the order of the planets. So do I, for that matter. She doesn’t thank me much for this amazing feat, though.
Subliminal learning worked so well that I started teaching her new words I was learning. Like the meaning of annihilate.
I heard it in history class and wanted her, too, to know the meaning of total obliteration.
She had nightmares after that.
Speaking of nightmares, when I had a literature class studying Edgar Allan Poe, I figured she ought to hear some of those stories. The Tell-Tale Heart, with the murdered heart pounding under the floorboards, kind of affected her.
She didn’t care much for The Cask of Amontillado either. We didn’t use the term freaked out in those days, but you get the idea.
She was five by then. You’d think she could handle it. As if I thought about how it would affect her.
The day came when she was not so open to being educated. Who’d figure that she’d like posters of Donnie Osmond over stories from the American Revolution? Pictures of cute boy singers began popping up on our bedroom walls.
And she got stubborn. We shared a room and one night I, in my great wisdom and older-sisterism, told her to shut off the light since her side of the bed was closer to the light switch. She refused. I offered practical advice like, “I’m not doing it.” She out and out refused.
And then she fell asleep. The choice was clear: sleep with the light on and win the argument. Or give in. I shut off the light.
She got defensive, too. I liked to call her sweet names like Squirt or Kidlet or Dork. One day I said, “You’re a Silly Willy.”
After all the educational nuggets I had shared with her, after all the intelligence I had groomed, after all the Edgar Allan Poe….. That girl reared back and glared at me.
“Don’t call me names, you Big Ape.”
