Sibling Rivalry
By: Jacque White Kochak
Tags: Sisters, Family, Sibling Rivalry, Writing, Siblings

Sibling Rivalry

As a busy mother who wrote on the side, I was pretty proud of myself—until my high-achieving sister came to visit.

The joke in my family is that I always wanted a white picket fence. Translated, that means I wanted a life of ordered domesticity, with a well-kept home and well-behaved children. I was completely out of step with the aspirations laid on me by others. I was smart. I was supposed to do something. You know, ride the crest of the wave of second-wave feminism and make my Daddy proud.

Instead, I popped out five babies in seven years and settled down in a tidy Cape Cod in New York City’s northern suburbs. I was fascinated by my children, and a friend told me I was the only woman she knew who seemed actually to be fulfilled by motherhood. I kept writing, though, so I was pretty proud of myself. As contributing editor for a national trade magazine, I interviewed company execs while nursing a newborn, my older children playing safely with a teenaged babysitter up the street. I got up at 5 a.m., while the tykes slept, to write articles.

The next morning, my husband woke me up, looking puzzled. “Why were you crying in your sleep?” he asked.

Proud, that is, until my high-achieving sister came to visit. The day she arrived, I furiously cleaned to get ready. I was wearing a maroon sweater vest, buttoned up the front, and I idly wondered if it made me look too boxy, like one of those middle-aged women with thick torsos and thin legs. We settled in to chat, catching up. Then I went downstairs to my little basement office to check my clunky old answering machine, the kind we used to have before voice messages.

I hit the button to get my messages, pleased because my father had called earlier, when I had run out for a few minutes. Kat picked up, however, not realizing the answering machine was running, recording every word. Their conversation was taped. “How’s everything? How’s Jacque?” Daddy asked.

They chatted, and it wasn’t flattering. I don’t remember everything that was said, except my sister’s words, “I don’t know what she does all day.”

I was stunned. I had five children under the age of 10. Two attended speech therapy twice a week. One was dyslexic and struggled in the early grades; I traced letters on her back to help her learn the alphabet, and drew pictures on flash cards to help her remember letter sounds. My daughter attended a parochial school, so I provided transportation to the public school twice a week for reading help. I took my children to ballet lessons and soccer practice. I was a mother, that’s how I stayed busy. And I was a closet writer, too.

Upstairs in the kitchen, I confronted my sister. White-faced, she said, “Don’t listen to the rest of the conversation.” So of course I did, and heard my sister excoriate my looks, describing how I had gained weight and how the maroon sweater was so unflattering. I could almost see Daddy shaking his head in disgust, because he was always very critical of women’s looks.

I felt I had existed in my sister Kat’s shadow for a long time, going back to high school. By that time, my chubby little sister had grown up to be tall and busty, with big eyes, full lips, brains and a lot of charm. While I was painfully thin and angular in high school, her prepubescent pudginess had melted away into soft, full curves. I was tongue-tied and very nearly an elective mute; she was charming and flirtatious, the belle of the ball wherever she went.

My sister was smart and knew what she wanted, and later confessed that she faked the easy social banter, like an actress. That was a skill I didn’t learn until much later. As a result, I often seemed aloof. That, combined with my modicum of good looks, led to my being branded as a “snob” in high school, when our rivalry was most intense. That perception of me was made worse by the fact that I refused to wear my glasses, so I didn’t recognize people when we passed in the high school hallways.

My little sister, 18 months younger than me, looked and acted older and more sophisticated than me. We shared the same intense insecurity, though. As a preschooler Kat was such an inveterate thumb-sucker that my mother took to painting that appendage with all kinds of foul-tasting potions. By the time Kelly was in high school she had stopped sucking her thumb, but now obsessively picked at the skin around her fingernails, sometimes leaving them bleeding.

That insecurity led my sister to marry a brutal man. Trained as an occupational therapist, Kat lived with him in Wyoming, where he supposedly went to school while she supported the family. He had dropped out without telling her, though, and spent his days smoking pot with friends. When she finally left him, Kat secured a job as the director of a battered women’s shelter in another state. Sadly, she got the job based on personal experience as much as professional expertise.

I was lucky; I had the luxury of focusing on my children. Forced to work to support her two sons, my sister was fierce in her support of the women in her care. When she remarried — to a police officer, an atavistic attempt to grab at safety — she began to gain attention for her work. She was the star, the one who lived up to Daddy’s expectations. I was the drudge, the dowdy housewife who no woman could or should possibly aspire to be.

My sister’s gift for figuring out how to get what she wanted or needed was allowed to flourish once she was no longer scrabbling to pay the bills. Her social skills made her a brilliant fundraiser for the cause of battered women. Once, I asked her why she spent so much money to get an expensive haircut when she could get the same cut for much less.

“That’s where the women with money go to get their hair cut, and that’s where I meet them and become friends with them,” she explained. I could see her point, and marveled at her skill.

I said nothing further to my sister after listening to her taped assessment of my life that day, and we had a pleasant visit. In fact, I still love her and I am her biggest fan.

I said nothing to my father, either, or to my husband. The next morning, though, my husband woke me up, looking puzzled.

“Why were you crying in your sleep?” he asked.