Rose Tinted Glasses
My sister once told me that her extremely high SAT score was due to making pretty patterns on the answer sheet. She suggested to me that she had taken the test so many times she must have subconsciously picked up on something.
She has always acted like her higher test score meant she was smarter than me. She sneeringly referred to the college I attended for two years as Algonquin High, like it was a high school, not a college.
Algonquin was the name of the two-lane country road it was on back when it was Columbus College before it began calling itself Columbus State University and the city upgraded Algonquin Drive or Road or whatever to the five-lane University Avenue.
I remember my sister as the person who taught me to read when I nagged her to death for a week at age four to read me THIS book a zillion times until she was all "I'll read you a book, any OTHER book." and I insisted it had to be THIS book because I was trying to understand.
I remember her reading to me in bed until she was hoarse because I wanted to hear one more chapter.
I remember she crocheted my favorite doll clothes.
I remember she drove into town to help me finish a high school paper. I was always ill and deadlines were a huge source of stress.
The death spiral of my relationship to my sister was long and drawn out, with me making excuses and viewing her toxic behavior charitably until her dysfunctional marriages began to be a means to crap on me and my children and then I began downshifting our association.
I've written a couple of pieces elsewhere about how poorly my sister treats me.
I'm realizing she's a thoroughly awful person and there are no excuses for how badly she's treated me. Both our parents have died. She never offered me a place to stay while I was homeless though I did countless wonderful things for her.
My sister had A Real Career and wore gorgeous skirt suits to the office and seemed to have the life I wanted and imagined I was entitled to while I was a homemaker with a 1950s-style marriage tearing my hair out and reading piles of feminist literature from the library trying to figure out where I royally screwed up.
I'm beginning to wonder if she actually cheated on her SAT, which would make accepting her National Merit Scholarship fraud, and asking a lot of ugly questions about someone who seemed to be a modern career woman but got there because her "career homemaker," unaccomplished loser sister and mother invested heavily in her career success and she never had anything but contempt for us.
Mom nominally respected dad's wishes that "no wife of mine will ever work" while making hundreds of dollars a month working from home at a time when that was real money.
She worked for some very wealthy people in town, the equivalent of local "nobility." When my brother bought a trailer and the bank was shafting him on the loan terms, mom -- "the maid" by profession -- went to the bank and talked to the banker and name dropped and the terms were changed.
She defacto managed one of the smaller apartment complexes owned by one of her employers though she had no official acknowledgement and wasn't really paid for it.
One wealthy woman, I believe Mrs.Thompson, was going to make mom her official assistant but died the week after saying that.
Three years in a row, one of her wealthy employers gave her some Coca-Cola stocks at Christmas so "the maid" could have a retirement fund. Mom set up a DRIP and didn't touch it for years. Between that and stock splits, my "maid" mother at one time had a quarter of a million dollars in Coca-Cola stocks in her name alone that she earned and managed.
In her forties, mom worked 60 hours a week, 7 days a week while keeping the house more spotless than most full-time homemakers and cooking dinner from scratch every single night.
To facilitate that, her twelve year old daughter -- that would be me -- had to take over the enormous responsibility of putting the towels in the dryer in a timely fashion and sometimes adding water to the meat dish on the stove top. I'm exhausted thinking about it. Wow.
Anyway, I have a lot of questions and few answers but I think I've been snookered for more than four decades and bought it because I remembered nice things my sister did when I was a child and didn't really want to believe she was an awful person, so I supplied excuses for how she forgot or didn't mean it that way or whatever.
She lives in a four bedroom house and I'm currently homeless for the second time and she's never offered me a place to stay. I'm all out of excuses and ways to put icing on this cow pie and pretend it doesn't smell and taste like manure.
Things on this blog that imply perhaps she's a murderer or whatever: That's hearsay that wouldn't hold up in court.
This blog takes a jaundiced eye to heternormative American culture and its ugly roots behind closed doors. Part of that ugliness is that women with "successful careers" frequently get there by trodding on other women who cleaned their house or took care of their baby and may have been a blood relative.
One of the things I deeply loathe with every fiber of my being about so-called feminism is that it doesn't really promote women's rights.
It really promotes having a serious career like a man for a very privileged subset of women and it promotes a class divide where other women are still doing most of the women's work for that often ungrateful backstabbing bitch.
I helped my sister get to where she is living in a four bedroom house in the Atlanta area making more than $100k annually according to the internet the last time I googled her name.
And in exchange she ever so kindly helped me get to where I currently am: homeless for the second time and on track to die on the street.
If you are a woman like me inclined to take care of your sister after major surgery because you love her and inclined to play nanny for a month without pay because you love her, etc. a word to the wise:
Make sure you get something out of it today that makes it worth your while and don't assume it will come back to you someday and she'll be grateful and yada.
The way to bet is she will probably treat you like a lazy loser who should have pursued a real career and not her problem you don't make as much money as her.