Sister

 

There is a particular kind of sibling relationship that never quite settles. It doesn’t resolve into affection, nor does it collapse into outright hostility. Instead, it oscillates. Love with teeth. Admiration sharpened into resentment. Loyalty laced with competition. If you’re the older sibling in this arrangement, especially the older brother, you tend to notice it first. The younger sister often pretends not to.

I think my sister hated me almost as much as she loved me. Which is to say, passionately.

She grew up in my shadow. That’s the family myth, anyway. I never cast it deliberately. I wasn’t standing on a hilltop blocking the sun. I was just there first. Older. Smarter. Apparently competent. The sort of child adults smiled at and said, “He’ll go far,” which is the most dangerous sentence ever spoken within earshot of a younger sibling.

To her, I was the benchmark. The reference point. The irritating standard against which she was constantly measured, whether she asked for it or not. Teachers compared. Relatives compared. Family friends compared. Even when they weren’t comparing, she assumed they were.

I was good at things. That was my crime.

Not savant-level genius, not prodigy nonsense, just… competent across a suspiciously wide range. I could write. I could sing. I could charm adults without trying. I could draw and paint reasonably well, write and play music reasonably well, pass exams reasonably well. Which meant that from her perspective I never committed fully to anything, while still collecting praise like loose change.

She, on the other hand, had focus. Fire. Precision. She wanted to be something, not just do things. She committed early, dug in, worked hard, and resented the fact that effort didn’t always translate into applause.

So the dynamic formed early. I was the golden boy who never quite cashed in. She was the striver, the one who felt overlooked, the one who believed the universe owed her a clearer result.

We fought, of course. All siblings do. But our fights were philosophical. Existential. Less about who broke my Action Man and more about what constituted a life well lived.

She accused me of drifting. I accused her of taking everything too seriously. She called me arrogant. I called her intense. We were both right, which made things worse.

The defining moment came later, when we were both adults and the gloves came off properly.

We were sitting at a table, late afternoon, the light slanting in that way that makes conversations feel more consequential than they probably are. I was at her place because she never came to see me. I assume she’d had a bad run at work. Another disappointment. Another plan that hadn’t quite landed. She looked at me across the table with that familiar mixture of affection and fury and said, very calmly:

“Why do you fail at everything you do?”

It wasn’t shouted. That was the thing. It was delivered as a statement of fact. An observation. As if she were asking why gravity works the way it does.

I laughed. Not because it was funny, but because the alternative was to argue, and I was tired of arguing.

“I don’t,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow. The look that says, Go on then. Explain yourself.

“If I have a problem at all,” I said, “it’s being brilliant at too many things.”

She snorted. Audibly. Years of stored contempt released in a single sound.

“I mean it,” I said. “My issue isn’t failure. It’s deciding where to focus my energy.”

That annoyed her even more.

From her point of view, a life without a single, visible ladder looked like chaos. Like cowardice. Like avoidance. She had chosen paths. She had committed. She had endured. I, meanwhile, appeared to wander from interest to interest, from girl to girl, from job to job, collecting experiences without producing a neat, defensible outcome.

What she couldn’t see - or wouldn’t - was that I was doing something else entirely.

I was gathering material.

Some people choose early and build depth. Others move sideways, outward, inward, circling, absorbing. They look like they’re failing because they’re not climbing the obvious ladders. But they’re building a different structure altogether.

I didn’t decide to become a full-time writer until I was forty. By then I’d lived several lives - in many wonderful but ill-fated relationships; done jobs that made no sense on a CV; learned skills that didn’t align neatly. Failed publicly and privately. Paid attention. Listened. Stored things away.

To her, it looked like delay. To me, it was preparation.

That’s the great misunderstanding between siblings like us. One believes life is about choosing the right thing early and sticking with it. The other believes life is about collecting enough truth to say something worth saying.

She wanted proof. I wanted time.

Of course, none of this erased the affection. We still loved each other fiercely. She would defend me to anyone else. I would show up whenever she needed me. But the tension never fully dissolved. It simply matured.

As we got older, the edges have softened. She saw my work take shape. I saw her strength in surviving disappointment and heartache without becoming bitter. We stopped trying to convert each other.

She still thinks I took the long way round. I still think she judged herself too harshly. And we are both probably right.

Sibling relationships like this don’t resolve into tidy moral lessons. They remain complicated, affectionate, bruised, loyal, and unresolved. They are shaped less by who we are than by the order in which we arrived.

If you’re the older sibling, especially the one who wandered before settling, you may recognize this dynamic. The accusation of failure. The pressure to justify your path. The quiet knowledge that what looks like drift is often discernment in disguise.

And if you’re the younger sibling living in someone’s shadow, it’s worth remembering that shadows move. They lengthen, shrink, disappear entirely depending on the light. They are not fixed things.

As for me, I didn’t fail at everything I did. I just took my time deciding which story to tell.

And once I did, I finally had something worth writing about.

Keep Writing!

Rob Parnell