My Big Sister

At Women’s Conference I had a combination of up too late and up too early and a bad bed.

I was tired.

On Friday morning Marianne and Katie and I went to the Creamery on 9th to grab breakfast. I was too tired to decide what I wanted for breakfast. I finally gave up and followed Marianne around and purchased every single thing she did. Then I put it all in her bag for her to carry for me.

Sometimes in moments of weakness and exhaustion you fall back into the familiar.

I’ll never know if she was the leader and I was the follower because those were our personalities or because of our birth order. Nature v. nuture.

Marianne was my older sister in every sense of the word. She was my example, always at least half a foot taller than me. A leader. An achiever. My advocate. When in public, she comfortably took a step forward to speak for both of us and I comfortably took a step back. She made everything more entertaining. She wrote skits for us to perform for our parents on holidays, she planned big parties with her many friends, she always let me tag along.

She made everything fair. She devised a Federal Land Bank when we played Monopoly so no one would completely fail. She divided up babysitting and cleaning and dishes jobs.

She was a leader.

I would have sooner hated my own self than hate her but sometimes I hated being her younger sister. She excelled at everything. She was ambitious and bright, charismatic and worked hard. She was the lead in the school play, the drummer in the band, the star of the basketball team and the smartest one in each of her classes.

I…wasn’t.

My parents assured me different from Marianne was OK; was good. I rarely believed them.

I did love being her sidekick though. I took the wheel when she put on her make-up on the way to seminary. We sang a lot of country music really loudly in our 1969 Chevy Impala. We shared clothes and opinions and secrets and were together through waitress jobs and car crashes.

It was a desolate day when she went to college and a worse day when she left for her mission.

If I wasn’t Marianne’s sister, who was I? If she wasn’t here to follow, where would I go?

Shortly before she left for her mission, our dad was diagnosed with cancer. In the days after she left, our parents were in Salt Lake City, our dad in the hospital and I was the oldest at home, taking care of my siblings. Marianne was inaccessible like she’d never been. It was just me.

And I survived it.

And I guess I gradually grew up. I had a better idea of who I was. As much as I’ll always need her, I had an identity apart.

And it’s a good thing because within a few years I was in New Haven, CT and she was in the middle of sagebrush with no phone service.

It wasn’t long before she had a phone and we were each other’s lifelines. We talked about our babies, motherhood and Everything Under the Sun. What to Expect the First Year and Parent’s Magazine were our sources of all information and I can’t imagine surviving teaching my children to sleep through the night and be potty trained without Marianne on the other end of the phone.

Somehow we’re on the same ground now. It’s not that I’ve caught up to her, she is still an achiever and I aspire to her great heights but I’m me and she’s Marianne. And that’s great.

I’ll always be grateful to my big sister. By trying (and failing) to be her, I learned to be me and by watching her advocate for and protect me, I learned I was worth standing up for.

Today’s her birthday. I love you Marianne!