Flippant Flamingo #1

Like most little sisters, I was a nosy little pest. My older sister, C, and I were constantly fighting- I wanted to be a part of her group of friends, be cool like her, hang out with all these high school guys that were friends of my brother, B, and thought of her as the little sister. I was just the munchkin that got in the way, or could be coerced to bring them food. Of course, by the time I was in middle school, my brother was in college, and when I was a freshman in high school, they were both attending college. I had spent most of my 14 years before entering high school trying to do exactly two things-- be like my brother and sister, and prove to everyone else I wasn’t like my brother and sister.

The funny thing is, I didn’t really know them. Sure, I lived with them before they left for school, but they were both their own clan that didn’t want me around. I spent more time with mom and dad. More and more my view of those two became caricatures- pictures with a few characteristics highlighted, exaggerated, and the rest slightly blurry memories of good times and bad.

One day in the summer between freshmen and sophomore years in high school, I was cleaning out one of the many random storage drawers in our house, and found a binder and a pile of papers. With nothing else in particular to do that day, I sat down to read. It turned out to be a collection of both of my siblings writings- a few essays B had written throughout his years in school, and almost all of Cs freshmen composition pieces.

The first page scared me. It began with a line about The Boxcar, a hangout place that I had just very recently been allowed into. It told what, to me, was a very intimate story of friends and family and moments in time that had happened in this place that I was excluded from. That one essay, just a page or two long, taught me more about my brother than I had ever thought possible. Suddenly, I was able to look through his eyes at what I had only seen selfishly. I read through paper after paper, about events and places and experiences that had shaped them. I had been there for some of them. Others, I hadn’t even known were happening. I saw all of these moments in new, and almost unbelievable ways.

As I was reading, I could feel the caricatures melting away, being replaced with pictures that were three-dimensional, complex, and almost beyond my understanding. In that day, those four hours of reading, I learned more about my family than I had in the last fourteen years. I had begun to understand not only why they were who they were, but that it was alright for me to define myself as more than not them. That day taught me that I could be myself, and not be afraid of it.

That binder and stack of papers, that book that only my family owns, was the most influential reading I could have ever asked for. It changed not only how I acted and thought and saw the world at that moment, but continues to do so today.