You want to be just like me...

When I was young, my eldest sister (ES) used to say, "You always want to be just like me!" Or "Quit copying me!"

As a young child, I thought my ES was amazing. She was smart and funny and popular. She was really pretty. In a world where our mother would routine have psychotic breaks and our father was depressed/silent unless he was violent, ES stood out as the pinnacle of all things awesome.

The sister that resides between my ES and myself is, and always, was insane.

She loathed me.

In her experience of our family, my mother went insane because of me. This is her reality to this day.

So her loathing makes some kind of sense. I was her younger, stupid, ugly, deformed, lazy, mean, selfish younger sister.

She got good grades, was a cheerleader, had boyfriends, and was constantly surrounded by everything cool. She was so cool that when our father took her to purchase a used car, she picked a super amazing green Pinto with an incredible speaker system. It even had a tape cassette player!! She would tool around town blasting the Eagles or Elton John.

You're probably getting the picture about how cool she was.

By the time she was in high school, she would say "You just want to be in (fill in the blank) because I am in (fill in the blank)."

It didn't really matter what the blank was filled with. In her mind, from that day forward, the reason I wanted to do nearly everything was because she had done it first.

Of course, she was the eldest, which meant that she did everything first. She drove and walked and rode bikes. I was "ES's little sister" to every teacher in every classroom.

If I did something different, such as taking French, she would say, "You only took French because I took Spanish."

What she didn't know, care to know, or could conceive of is that I experienced real horror when I was ten years old. I no longer remembered

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