Sisterly Love: Myth or not?
Uploaded by Rashell on Sep 12, 2004
Your sister is a part of your essential self, an eternal presence of your heart and soul and memory. —Susan Cahill
Patricia, Jessica and Janice are my sisters and great ones at that but today I will be focusing on the rather volatile relationship that my sister Patricia and I have endured over the past nineteen years, mainly in the past nine years.
It is often said that a sibling relationship is based on that of genetic binding and a built in love, like that of ones love for their parents,, “ Loving a sister is an unconditional, narcissistic, and complicated devotion that approximates a mothers love, sisters are inescapably connected, shaped by the same two parents, the same trove of memory and experience.” (Bruno. M). With Patricia and I since we were children we have been the ones to fight the most and get along with each other the most, what I propose occurs within our relationship is that of a ‘love/hate’ relationship, although more recently one based on contempt and anger.
I wish to examine the decline in the relationship in terms of changing ideologies and social patterns along with a separation of identities. As a child I being the younger sister was in awe of Patricia my elder sister and would follow her around just trying to imitate her as best I could. Throughout my early teens and to this day I tend to compare myself to her in terms of friends, intelligence etc. “Our sisters hold up our mirrors: our images of who we are and of who we can dare to become. “(Fishel. E)
But I no longer strive to imitate her every move, I have developed a life separate from her which is difficult to comprehend since through our entire lives we have shared the same room, gone to the same school even sharing the same birth month just one year and one week apart. With Patricia’s rather volatile temper and our evolving identities fights were inevitable. As patricia once said to me , “ Rashell I feel like we’re drifting’ referring to me during the stages at university when my life began to take a different path away from my dependence on Patricia, as I gained a great deal more friends and a social life one Patricia and I couldn’t relate on. But...