Your Mother Taught You How to Be Sisters

You and your sister might both believe you never got along, and you each have your reasons. One of you remembers the other as spoiled, the other remembers her as jealous, and by now there are years of arguments and hurt feelings and family stories that seem to explain why the two of you have always been difficult with each other.

Part of that started before either of you had much say in it. You were learning how to be sisters at the same time you were both working out where you stood with your mother, and children notice who gets comforted and who gets blamed, who is expected to help and whose mistakes get forgiven fastest, and over time those differences change the way sisters see each other.

Parents have a different relationship with each of their children, which is ordinary enough, the trouble starts when the differences harden into descriptions of who each child is. Maybe your sister was the responsible one and you were the difficult one, maybe everyone decided you were the stronger of the two so more got asked of you. Children who hear those descriptions for years start treating each other as though they're facts, and by then neither of you is checking.

Favoritism doesn't stop working the day everybody moves out. Sisters who got compared to each other, who watched their mother take a side every time they argued, who learned that one of them would always be outnumbered in that house, don't lose any of that by getting their own addresses, they just stop seeing it every day. Leaving the childhood home doesn't erase what sisters learned about each other while they were living there.

Your mother might also have been in the middle of it more directly. She might have talked to you about your sister and then talked to your sister about you, complaining about who visited less, who helped more, whose choices she approved of, and differences in marriages and parenting and money can end up in those conversations too. Sisters start judging each other with opinions that got repeated in the family for years, and neither of them remembers where the opinion came from.

If you were the one blamed when something went wrong, your sister learned to expect you to be the problem. If she was treated as the more capable daughter, she got used to having more say in what the family decided. Neither of you sat down and agreed to any of this, you grew up in a family where it was already decided.

Those expectations get obvious in adulthood when one sister stops going along with them. One woman had been sending her mother four hundred dollars a month for six years, covering the car insurance and part of the electric, and when her own hours got cut and she stopped, her sister told her she was punishing their mother, and nobody in the family had said a word about the money before it stopped. When everybody is used to one person doing a particular job, even a reasonable change makes trouble, because everyone else has to adjust and nobody volunteered for that.

Plenty of women grew up as the black sheep, doing more of the work at home and getting blamed whenever anything went wrong, and eldest daughters especially got handed jobs that weren't a child's to do, watching the younger ones on school nights, taking the phone calls their mother didn't want to take. Sisters who grew up in different positions in the same house leave it with different accounts of what happened and of who the other one was.

Your sister might remember your mother nothing like the way you do, and she might remember you differently too, because some of what she learned about you she got from the family around her, and the same is true of what you think you know about her. Some of what you believe about each other started when you were too young to ask whether the family had it right.

None of that history excuses what's happened between the two of you as adults, your sister is responsible for how she treats you and you're responsible for how you treat her. Family history can still explain why a disagreement at forty comes with feelings much older than whatever the two of you are arguing about now.

Some sisters do start questioning the roles they grew up with, comparing memories, working out where they were treated differently, seeing each other with more information than either of them had at twelve. Sometimes they end up with a different relationship, and in other families one or both sisters stay convinced the family had it right the first time, so nothing much changes.

Your mother was one of the people who taught you what being sisters looked like, she had a hand in what each of you was expected to do, how the differences between you got explained, and often enough how you learned to read each other's behavior. You and your sister are both grown now, and neither of you has to keep to what your mother decided about the two of you when you were nine.