You know that house of many rooms, many familiar, easy, happy to welcome people in, let them look around and then the passageway dark and a hand on the door stopped, no, not that one, you can’t go in there? Those are the rooms I want to open up. There is one that I’m standing outside today and it makes me sick to think of turning the handle. It’s marked sisters.
I have three but there is one who dominates. I am the youngest of all of them but there is one who appeared master to me. Even this, which will not throw her to the lions, which is about my perception, feels betraying, as if she will rise up and curse me though she never did that, she always said she was looking out for me. I was her doll, I trailed after her, she loves me deeply, she held the keys to our father. She was glamourous, beautiful, blonde, popular, funny. I was dependent on her for reading the room, knowing what to say, how to act, do it right. Upsetting her was the worst thing ever, to fall out of favour I would scramble over hot coals to get it back again. She was my world. I looked to her for everything. And then one day I wrote a book about our father, his upbringing, the fight between his mother and her sister and when it came to publishing it my sister said don’t do it. I know why. I understand but it was the first time in our relationship when I held something in my hands more precious than her. And so I published it and she and I didn’t speak for a very long time. It broke something that needed breaking. It was a drawing of breath after decades of holding it. I didn’t die. From this distance I’ve a clearer view of what all that was about, not the fight over the book but the dynamic of our relationship that was. And this post which began in my head about insecurities – that’s what I thought I was going to write about today - it led from an easy sunny room where everyone is welcome down a dark passageway, a hand reaching out to a door, the sight made my throat catch. Because my insecurities which appear fifteen times a day as certainty I’ve upset someone were born and nurtured in that room. The spiderweb line twanged, the vibration tickling the air in the shuttered space where she sits, the fear that I have lost her favour, that I am lost without her. I remind myself twenty times a day as I trace the line that she was a child, too. She was a child.
How beautiful. Two children, doing the best they can for each other.... thank you for sharing
Two places moved me so much in this piece: "I was her doll" and "I didn’t die." I had to pause and take a breath. So good.