Sister game

A simple hair-do underscored for me the subtleties and longevity of sibling rivalry.
As friends complimented me with, “Nice hair.” “Like your hair-do.” I caught myself saying, “Thanks, I have been telling myself to go, but when I realized I was going to see my sister whom I haven’t seen in a long time, I had to do something – now.” Sometimes I added, “… because we will be having the sister competition – know what I mean?”
Women with sisters lit up with a smile of recognition, “oh yeah.”
The sister game is not said in so many words. It is not done with any obvious tallying of points scored, but it is played any time sisters get together.
The game goes something like this: As we warmly greet each other, we silently evaluate the other’s clothes, hair, aging process and over all health. As we politely ask about each other’s children, we mentally analyze whose kids have done better, which children’s careers were glossed over or who is doing or did a better job parenting their children.
After my visit, I summarized my foray into the sister game, “Well she always looks the best. She always wins for wearing the nicest clothes and her hair always looks great because she’s got the really thick hair that holds up and I began turning gray first. But, I usually win the thinnest – even when I am at my shockingly highest weight – not because I work at weight control, but because my genes come from our tall Indian ancestor which gives me a few more inches to hide any weight gain.”
The parenting aspect of the game is much more fickle. The score depends on who is awarding points, what aspects are most important to the judge and in which phase of life the child happens to be. Occasionally the game is played in the open as it was the day a proud mother asked her pre-schooler to tell another mother a newly memorized Mother Goose poem.
“Lucy Locket lost her pocket. Kitty Fisher found it. Nothing in it, nothing on it, but the binding round it,” the child rattled off.
Immediately the second mother turned to her child, “you can learn that, can’t you?” and began repeating the poem’s lines – pushing her own child to catch up and even out the score.
A couple small family reunions ago, I watched my brothers play the brother’s version of the sibling rivalry game.
Living on different sides of the country, they had not seen each other in quite a while. Each sized the other up quickly. Big brother had recently lost his spread around the middle. Little brother had found some of it, but by a fluke of nature – long past the time for the traditional last growth spurt – he had also grown a couple inches taller. Suddenly their heights matched, but the weights did not, and this time the usual winner needed to lose.
From hours of listening to my only daughter when one does not have sisters, close friends make great substitutes for playing the sister game.
When I mentioned the “sister game” to an acquaintance, she said, “I realized I could not win … so I worked on developing a quiet spirit instead.”
“Oh so you aim to win the personality contest,” I responded before I realized saying that meant I lost Miss Congeniality trophy for the day.
Which is why the contest is one of observation, a mental tallying of points and a silent noting of the other person’s wins – or loses – in the perpetual game of sibling rivalry.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)