i love my sisters

i love my sisters / words and pictures #9
 
That's a drawing of me and my two sisters from a favourite family photograph. That's me in yellow (I'm the eldest), the one in pink is Stace, the middle child, and Meg's the newborn.

It's a photograph taken shortly after Meg was born. That's Dad's big as a dinner plate farmer's hand holding her.

Stace and I are looking in through the window from outside as I don't think kids were allowed in the hospital. Stace has her little fingers held as though she can't wait to touch her new baby sister. Not sure what I was thinking. 

Mum would have taken the photo and was probably thinking something along the lines of, 'Thank Christ that's over.'
 
Those scribbly words are from a song by Juliana Hatfield called My Sister, which always makes me think about my sisters.
  
In one line of the song Juliana sings, ‘I hate my sister, she’s such a bitch.’
 
Then in the next verse, ‘I love my sister, she’s the best.’
 
These days there’s a lot of love between the three of us. Time spent with my sisters is pure gold. We make each other laugh like no one else on earth. A lifetime of in-jokes and humour that mostly makes no sense to anyone else but us. It’s a blend of crass, silly, dry and slapstick. We do a lot of laugh-crying and end up with sore mouths from smiling and strained abs from laughing.
 
Although there was love when we were kids, there was definitely plenty of hating too. It’s that particular dichotomy of sibling love. I see it in my two sons who tell me they hate each other, then spend every minute together.

Stace...
 
Most of my memories of growing up with my sisters are of Stace, since we are the closest in age.
 
I’d love to say I was a loving, protective, inclusive big sister, but that would definitely not be the whole truth. I could be a real bitch too. I can definitely imagine her singing that first lyric about me.
 
I’m not proud of the bossy big sister stuff, and I’d rather not tell you about it, but if I don’t this is going to get nauseatingly boring and cheesy, so instead I'm going to throw myself on the sword for your entertainment...

I bring you (drum roll please) some shitty things I did to my sister…
 
I convinced her to eat a pebble of sheep poo, telling her it tasted like ice-cream.
 
I threw a tissue box at her to stop her snoring (or probably just breathing loudly).
 
I kept her awake at night so she could keep an eye on one side of my bed to make sure no monsters crawled out, while I kept an eye on the other side.
 
I stole her school socks and then denied it.
 
I said mean things to her, then told her to get over it moments later when I wanted to hang out with her again.
 
And so many more things, but you get the idea.
 
We’d sometimes get physical too… Not exactly punch-ups, more like back slap-ups. One would slap the other then run for it, dreading the return slap. Then as soon as it landed, retaliation would ensue. Once in the fury of a slapathon Stace tore my big thumbnail right down the middle to the cuticle. 
 
I like to think that nail was sacrificed to absolve a lot of my shitty big sister karma.
 
But I wasn’t all bad.
 
There’s another line in Juliana’s song where she sings, ‘She’s the one that would have taken me to my first all-ages show.’
 
That was never going to happen for us since my whole family summed my music taste up in one simple word - ‘shit’. 
 
Instead I kept her safe at boozy underage house parties. One night, maybe one of the first times she had been drunk, on Southern Comfort of all disgusting things, I told the older guy she was with that if he took advantage of her I would, ‘chop his balls off’.
 
It worked. I kept her safe. 

He told her to, ‘Tell your sister she’s a bitch.’
 
So you see, being a bitch it’s all bad.

Meg...
 
Meg and I didn’t really form a loving sister bond until after we’d both finished school and left home.

Up until then all it had ever really been was provoking each other. We are complete emotional opposites. Pretty much everything I think and feel comes straight out of my mouth. Meg on the other hand is a rock, which means she always wins in the game of emotional manipulation.
 
I went for a lot of years of being quietly provoked by Meg, blowing up, getting blamed, getting frustrated, getting in more trouble for verbalising my frustration.
 
I can still remember the day all that started to change. In my memory the world glowed, and angels were singing. It was the day Mum caught Meg digging at me and she got in trouble. Oh the transcendental joy of that day.
 
So yes, Meg and I would also have done a lot of singing, ‘I hate my sister, she’s such a bitch,’ as kids.
 
But all that changed when we travelled together...
 
When I was living in London in my early 20s, Stace and Meg flew over to spend a few weeks with me. It was during that special time in life between childhood and adulthood - independence without responsibility. It's such a great recipe for fun times and we had plenty of them. 
 
In Scotland we had a lot of fun imitating the Scottish ‘ch’ sound, which is a bit like clearing your throat. We stayed close to the town of Pitlochry. We said it a lot, unnecessarily, just so we could make the most of that ‘ch’. We also started every sentence with 'Och' just to make each other laugh. Scottish is such a fun accent to imitate.  
 
The place we stayed was pretty incredible. Kind of like a huge mansion looking out over a loch - another fun to say Scottish word. Our grandma Dot arranged it for us through her timeshare.

The place had bikes so we rugged up and used them to lap the loch, break into abandoned castles and explore the frost covered fantasy landscape.

In the evenings I'd do the big sister thing and cook dinner (see, not a bitch), while Stace and Meg updated their travel diaries. (We all joke a lot about that.) We drank wine, said things just to make each other laugh, and had plenty of cigarette breaks on the glassed-in balcony - which we opened completely to the crisp Scottish night with the heater blaring... Until we found out we had to pay for power usage. 
 
Then we hit Europe...
 
My memories of that trip are happy but sporadic. Here’s what I’ve got, in no particular chronological order…
 
Assembling a gourmet picnic dinner in our hostel room in Siena, of freshly made street pizza, a bottle of red, and a side salad made with our pocketknives. 
 
An overnight train from Rome to Nice. We were seated in one of those six-person compartments. We would have had it all to ourselves except for a creepy Italian guy who started masturbating in the middle of the night.
 
Meg was asleep right beside him. I started yelling at him, 'Basta! Basta! Disgustoso!' And whatever other Italian words I could muster in my protective big sister fury. He was pretty casual about it, and it took quite a lot of my sketchy Italian to put him off his game.
 
Sounds pretty horrible doesn’t it? But some of our most hilarious in-jokes come from that night.
  
In Paris we found a great little jazz club, then had to yell from the cobblestone street to be let in to our hostel in the early hours.
 
We almost missed a flight from Barcelona to can't remember where. We raced through the airport as our final call was announced over the speaker system in Catalan. We were full of nervous giggles when we made it onto that plane.
 
In Andalucía (southern region of Spain) we discovered there were almost never speed limits. So we took the opportunity to drive our little hire-car fast. 
 
In Seville, we learnt the hard way that arriving in a new town during siesta with empty tummies is a really bad idea.
 
We came very close to murdering each other, then just in the nick of time found a restaurant willing to make us a tortilla de patatas - a delicious Spanish staple. That thing tasted so good seasoned with our hunger, that we all offered our hands in marriage. 
 
In Rome we took a late train into the central, Piazza San Pietro for New Year's Eve. We were still underground in the Metropolitana tunnels when the clocks struck midnight and the beginning of 2001. Everyone cheered, laughed and hugged. Corks from champagne bottles hit the top of the domed tunnel, and everyone chanted, 'Felice anno nuovo!'
 
We all pressed forward and up in a festive rush to get up the stairs to the piazza to bring in the new year with the Romans. 
 
There’s a photo of the three of us on this night. We are snuggled together with coats and scarves and big happy smiles. Meg has a bottle of red tucked under one arm and we all have plastic cups full of it. 
 
People kept asking for some, and Meg kept repeat a very firm, 'No!' (Say that in your head with a clipped Italian accent so that the ‘o’ becomes a really short, sharp exclamation for the ‘N’.)

You might assume that bossy big sister me would be the ringleader of the three of us, but no, it is Meg. She is the calm, contained head honcho without a doubt. 
 
If you’ve got a crisis, call Meg. 

She will handle it. All of it. And she’ll even come up with some cheeky, dry humour to keep everyone laughing.  
 
Stace is the sensitive, incredibly kind one. She will wrap you in sympathy and understanding, make you feel like the centre of the universe, then bust out the cleverest one-liners ever.
 
I, on the other hand will be completely useless to you in a crisis. I will first go into shock, you will have to look after me, then I will overdramatise the whole thing and you’ll have to calm me down. But once we get through all that I’ll be able to tell the story so that we can turn it all into a great big joke to enjoy for years to come. And I will not let the truth get in the way.

...So anyway, that is how I learnt to love my sisters, and hopefully they also learnt that I'm not such a bitch after all. 
   
Leonie x