My Sister

I've just added a tag for My.Sister because there are many posts here that talk about her and some paint her in a positive light and others paint her in a negative light and there's no good way to sum up the story and reading one post in isolation is likely to be extremely misleading.

My sister is 6 1/2 years older than me. She was born the same year as Madonna, but not the same month if that helps you get an idea of her age.

She and I were both good students and we both had academic honors of various sorts. She was in the National Honor Society and I was in a Math Honor Society. 

We both were STAR Student of our graduating class. That means we each had the highest SAT score (a college entrance exam in the US) of our graduating class and we were in the top ten percent for grade point average (GPA) and it gathered each of us a National Merit Scholarship to the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia.

She did it first and had better grades and a higher SAT score, so I was like the also ran STAR Student and National Merit Scholarship winner at home. No one was impressed and besides, she accepted her scholarship to UGA and I turned mine down. Consequently, she ended up with a real career and I ended up a homemaker.

And we are similar in height and looked enough alike in youth that people sometimes mistook us for the other. When she had a baby and I went to her house and met her 4 1/2 month old for the first time, the baby grabbed a handful of my wavy hair and a handful of my sister's straight hair and looked back and forth a few times, seemingly confused by a clone of her mother with slightly different hair.

For that and other reasons, I've thought a lot about her life. I think in spite of actually being a good student, she may have cheated on her SAT, similar to the plot for a movie called Class. I've written about that elsewhere.

In the movie, the bright kid cheats because he's on scholarship at a nice private school, so he feels he needs to be certain it's in the bag. I have begun to wonder why my sister might feel desperate to get a scholarship and get the hell out of Dodge. 

I don't know, but maybe my brother sexually assaulted her first and maybe that's why he began molesting me after she moved out: He needed a replacement and I was convenient.

That could explain why she desperately wanted to make sure she got a scholarship and left home as soon as possible. She was still seventeen when she started college, a little shy of her eighteenth birthday. She wanted OUT and got out.

Please read more than one of my posts before jumping to conclusions about my sister. It's a BLOG. I expressed my thoughts du jour as things occurred to me. It's a long story told in patchwork across multiple blogs, though most of the posts are here.

It's not really intended to drag my sister. It's a use case I'm very familiar with and I wrote to illustrate points and to sort out my past and one thing led to another, which means my "position" may seem to flip flop from one post to another about my sister.

The tag is NOT currently a comprehensive list and may never be, but should HELP you find some of the most pertinent pieces.