Favored Child
Now if she is reading this she probably has already opened up her email to tell me, "no I wasn't," but girl, you WERE.
My sister was about as close to perfect a child as you get. She was smart, charming to adults and good at everything. To the point where I never was able to accomplish anything positive that was bigger than what she did. I very often did the exact same thing that she did, but let us be honest, how interesting is that? And by the time I was getting A's in that 9th grade English class that was so hard, she was already graduating high school. When I was graduating high school she was cruising through college.
I am not diminishing what she did, my sister is one of the smartest people I have ever met. I just wish that she hadn't gone first.
The only thing I was ever good at was that I was cute. As a child I had the whole chubby cheeks, toothy smile and white-blond hair thing that many child actors have. In fact, there is a little girl modeling for the Gap that has made my mother question me more than once if she has grandchildren that I am just not telling her about.
But wouldn't you know that right when I entered my awkward phase my sister was coming out of hers (admittedly hers was much worse than mine and she suffered I know). And she was PRETTY.
I have never achieved pretty. I am twenty-five and I can safely say that I don't think I ever will. I am plain. Now I actually feel lucky to be plain. I have no horrifying features (except my skin which DEAR GOD what can I DO??) and I just look normal. Looking normal is a GOOD thing. I ride the bus every day and I know that there are a lot of people who would kill to be plain.
But plain sucks when your sister who is better than you at everything anyway turns out to be pretty.
This makes it sound like she and I are competitive and we really are not. No one is keeping score. We are too old for that. And even if we weren't, there really is no point. We are not competitive, there is no winning. I love my sister and I am so proud of her.
But she really was always the favored child. And now she is the successful child. Though to be honest, we are talking about two middle class women both of whom own their own homes and have good jobs and have never really done a damn thing wrong so nobody is a failure here.
I like my life. It is the one that I chose and it works for me. I suppose I am just jealous because everything seems to come so easily for her. She decides to move across the country to go to college and never looks back. She picks a highly competitive and intellectual field and just keeps plowing away. She looks good in pictures! No one in my family does except her. We all look red and bloated like we have been drinking and she looks like a model. It is irritating.
Nothing has ever come easily to me. Not one thing. But that could be why I am satisfied with who I have become and she seems to be struggling against something.
Maybe it isn't so easy to be the golden one.
