Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Enough about me -- let's talk about me.

It was lonely before I had siblings. Just me and the snowbunnies.

4 comments:

Natalie said...

My siblings still wish I just had the snowbunnies. Listening to them about our childhood you would think I was an evil dictator and not the best big sister I could be.

Marie said...

Mine too. But in my case, most of the stories are true... Of course, in the case of my youngest sibling, it was me and the middle child torturing him together, so it's really not an oldest child thing in many cases -- it's an oldER child thing.

I just Googled "snowbunny" and learned that it's black slang for a white girl who digs black men. That is not how I intended it. I meant literal bunnies made of snow. :)

Belladonna said...

I spent some quality time visiting with three of my four siblings over the holidays. It's interesting when we get together and begin to play "remember when" how different our perceptions are of the same events. I know what MY reality was and some of those experiences still powerfully shape me to this day. Strange to think they either don't remember my most key events (which they were active participants in ) at all or else remember them entirely differently.

I suppose there is no way to discern any objective "truth" of what did or did not happen, and it probably doesn't matter anyway.

I prefer my version on some things and would like to switch with theirs on some other stuff, if only it were that simple. Family dynamics can be some complicated stuff.

Marie said...

Truth does get tangled up in families. My sister and I even have a shared childhood nightmare -- I'm not sure which of us actually had the dream -- we both "remember" it vividly, but what probably happened is that the one sister told the other her nightmare in such detail that it was integrated fully into the other's memory as a firsthand experience. I'm not confident that I'm the one who had the dream, though I used to proclaim that I was -- I could be the pretender -- but I have no way of knowing for sure.

(Incidentally, the dream is about a killer washing machine. Understandable since we slept down the hall from the laundry room and the loud thumping of the unbalanced agitator was frightening even when we were awake.)