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Sisterhood is powerful...
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19 May 2002
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My older sister . . . I will call her “Tonya” because she is smart enough to find this journal if I use her real name. ;-)
She is one year and twenty-six days older than I am. She was born to my parents, who were married less than a month. She was my parents’ first child, but she wasn’t an only child. My mother had a son from a previous marriage, and my father had a son from a previous marriage. (However, we didn’t find out about Dad’s son until I was nearly out of high school.) Tonya was the second eldest by four years. She has the personality, however, of a first-born child. Heheh.
Being so close in age, my sister and I were fairly inseparable. Many people thought we were twins, though from looking at pictures, I could never ever see it. We looked nothing like each other, actually. Tonya favored my father’s side, and I favored my mother’s. She and my brother, Dan, definitely looked like siblings!
Tonya and me - I'm on left, she's on the right. |
Tonya never did anything until I did it first. She was an incredibly bright child, but she just needed encouragement, I guess. She learned her ABC’s once I did. She learned to ride a bike when I did. It’s interesting to me because at first thought, I don’t think that she’s that way anymore. When I sit and think about it, though, I can tell that, yes, she is still that way today! She is highly intelligent, but sometimes it just takes someone else doing the same thing to make her do it, too. She’s not a follower; she just needs a partner in crime!
That partner in crime was almost always me. Who else would it be? ;-) A few years after I came into the picture, our baby sister, Roslyn, was born. Poor Roslyn. The things that we did to her. We fooled Ros into believing that I was actually the older one, and that we had been pretending this whole time. Why? Do partners in crime always need a reason? At age seven or eight? I…think…not! We just liked to play with people’s minds. We were evil together, completely evil.
As I have stated in previous entries, I have little recollection of my childhood. Unfortunately, that means that it makes stories about siblings harder to do. I kind of have to start when my memory files begin.
Tonya and I shared a room most of our living-at-home lives. We shared everything, even the stinkin’ bed! Heheh. We shared our toys, our clothes, our shoes – everything. We shared our thoughts, our frustrations, and our hopes. We grew up as normally as two sisters can grow.
As most sisterly relationships go, we didn’t always get along either. When I was going through a particularly annoying phase – hindsight is 20/20, don’t ya know – we used to fight non-stop. Oh my gosh! It was awful. I’m sure that most sisters (who are in the same age-range) go through the stage in their lives where everything is a battle. Everything and everyone is a competition. Tonya and I were no different. Much of it was, I think, because we were so close in age and we did share everything – even our space. Our friends were the same, so that caused some problems, too.
"Sisters is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship."
~*Margaret Meed*~
Let’s see . . . We were both in high school. I was maybe a sophomore and she a junior. Most of our friends consisted of those we made in our church youth group. We spent a lot of our time with them – Sundays, Wednesdays, and often times at least one day on the weekend. That’s a lot of time to be spending together when you also have to live together. It paid a toll on our sibling relationship, to say the least. We were always fighting, and our friends would just kind of back away slowly.
In my defense, my sister was very self-centered. She was a junior in high school, for crying out loud! What junior isn’t? Everything was about her, her needs, and no one else’s. That is most often what made me mad at her then; I’ve always had a problem with people who couldn’t see past their own nose. Fortunately, she grew out of that!
"If you don't understand how a woman could both love her sister dearly and want to wring her neck at the same time, then you were probably an only child."
~*Linda Sunshine*~
During the summer preceding her senior year in high school, Tonya met a young man at church. She had a fair number of potential suitors, but she didn’t particularly care for any of them. This guy was different. He was very quiet and very spiritual. This relationship didn’t change her self-centeredness, but at least it was for a better reason this time: a man! I liked Dave a lot. It took a little while for me to open up to him, but once I did, I was really happy for Tonya. This man really was a great catch. He loved her; you could easily tell. He was gentle and caring, and we knew that no matter what, Tonya would be in good hands.
Tonya and I became closer and closer. The differences that we had seemed to dissipate into a genuine love and admiration between the two of us. She and I were once again confidantes. One night in October or November, I believe, after she returned from one of the many dates with David, she pulled me aside. I remember very distinctly sitting at the top of our basement stairs, just talking. She told me that they were discussing marriage, and that they would marry in June, almost a year to the day of their first date. They already had the date planned! I was so excited. Even though they had been dating just four months and she was only a senior in high school, I never had a doubt that it was a match made in Heaven – quite literally. I wasn’t to tell Mom and Dad because Dave was making the ring, and when he was finished with it, he wanted to ask Dad first for Tonya’s hand in marriage.
She had it all planned. She had been working in a very prominent bridal shop, and because she was so thin yet curvy, they often had her model the new dresses that came in. One of those dresses immediately became her dream dress. She knew that she and Dave were going to get married, so she started making payments on the dress. By the time they told Mom and Dad, Tonya was graduating early from high school. She had earned enough credits and was done at the semester break. She continued to work full-time to earn money and bought her dream wedding dress. I remember the first time that I saw it. I was absolutely amazed. The dress was satin with a lace overlay, but the lace . . . Oh my gosh. I don’t remember the name of it, but was heavy and shiny and absolutely stunning. I saw her in it and cried.
From that day, Tonya and I were nearly best of friends (Dave being her best, of course). I helped her to plan her wedding. I would be the maid of honor. Even though I was just sixteen, going on seventeen, I was very excited to be that busy! I even did much of the planning of the bridal shower.
Things were not all rosy, however. Being the person that she was, she was focused on only one thing: David. She still thought of only herself and didn’t realize what kinds of pressure were being put on me. I was the next oldest, so all the chores that she just wasn’t around to do went to me – cleaning the house, raking the lawn, dishes, etc. Although she finished school a semester early, she was still going to walk in the graduation ceremony. That meant a graduation party. Guess who got to do all of the work for said party. Yep! I did. I was not impressed. I loved her, and I was excited for her upcoming nuptials, but I was a little ticked that I had to do all the work for her graduation party. I think I was more upset because I never received a ‘thank you’ from her. It was as if she expected everyone to do everything for her. I approached her about it, but we just ended up in a huge fight! We both got over it quickly, though, because her wedding was just around the corner.
June 1986
June 2 – she turned 18
June 5 – she graduated from high school
June 7 – she got married
Tonya being married was so incredibly great. I know that she was young, but that never seemed to be too much of an issue because, as all the girls in my family, she was very mature for her age. ;-) Dave is six years older than she is, and he had been on his own for lots of years, so he was good for her. It was so natural for her. I used to go over to her house all the time and help her out with things. Our relationship was never better. Then she and Dave moved to Chicago so that he could go to Moody Bible Institute.
While she and Dave were living in Chicago, Tonya found out that she had endometriosis. One of the only non-surgical cures of this, apparently, is to have a baby. So, she and Dave worked on getting pregnant. Although I was the first to know that she was pregnant, I didn’t know about the fact that they had been working on having a child now to help ease the pain of endometriosis. They wanted children, so it was as good a time as any to start – before she wasn’t able to have them at all!
I remember when she came to tell me. All I could say was, “but you have always said that you didn’t want kids.” She looked at me and replied, “Didn’t you notice that I stopped saying that?”
Little Davey was born in September of 1989. He was the first grandchild on both sides, and he was definitely a loved little boy. Tonya and David still lived in Chicago at this time; Dave was finishing up his degree. When he graduated, they moved down to Texas so that he could attend Dallas Theological Seminary to work towards his Doctorate in Theology. (I may have worded that wrong; I’m not completely sure.) They were down there a few years before moving back up.
When Davey was four, Tonya gave birth to her second child, Clay. I loved having her back in town! Dave had started a youth ministry in our small town, so I saw her often. During this time I had moved out to New Jersey to be a nanny and come back – then I started college in a city a couple of hours away. I still saw and talked to her a lot, though, and I showered my sweet nephews with lots of love and attention.
A couple of years later, Tonya gave birth to her third son, Joe. We talked often and really became very close. I love my sister. She loves me. I get along with her husband, and her boys love their auntie. As we have gotten older, we have become more and more like those sisters that you read about – the ones that are bound by something that could never be broken.
Or so I thought. I nearly found out how wrong I was when I started dating men that weren’t born again Christians, something that is totally unacceptable in biblical terms. To read more about that, read here.
Tonya and I have been through a lot as sisters, but today we are as close as ever. Even though I don’t have any children, we seem to have more in common now, as adults, as we ever did as kids. She is such a good wife and mother. Her personality is the same, and mine is much the same, but we have both learned to glean the best out of one another. We’ve both grown up into really great people. We live a couple of thousand miles apart, but we are still so close.
"We are sisters. We will always be sisters.
Our differences may never go away, but neither, for me, will our song."
~*Elizabeth Fishel*~
How do people ever make it through life without a sister?
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