World leaders could learn a thing or two from my mama. She had this thing she did whenever she caught her stair-step girls squabbling. The offending parties would have to sit under the kitchen table with our arms around each others’ shoulders as if we would not have much preferred choking the other party down to her knees. We were expected to stay there until Mama felt we were sincere about our fervent promises to live by her peace accord. I’m not sure so sure this taught us not to fight but we did learn not to let her catch us at it. So, there’s that.
Everyone comes up with their own parenting style. I used a lot of Mama’s theories, (sans the table method), and a few of my own. For instance, as soon as my son and daughter were old enough to understand what I was saying, I began doing everything I could to drill into them the life-long implications of their relationship. “No one else in your lives will ever know you like you two know each other,” I would tell them. “Learn to value that now.” By that time in my life I had begun to realize the uniqueness of my own sister-sister bonds.
Whether playing under Papa’s equipment shed, catching crawdads in a muddy ditch, building a fort from the cattails that lined it, or glaring at each other under the kitchen table, my sisters and I were always exploring our world together. Later, we three teenagers would test the boundaries of our world simultaneously and then cross over into marriage and mommy-hood as a group. Siblings, no relationship is quite that between kids who grow up under the same roof. My husband and I are one, but he met me when I was leaving my teen years. What he knows of the years before him is what I or someone else has told him. My children and grandchildren, why, they can’t picture me playing cowboy and Indian atop a gas tank “horse” regardless of how they try. Oh sure, our parents have known us as long as we’ve known each other, but during those all important childhood years they were busy making a living and keeping house on the peripheral of our consciousness.
My sisters know me. We’ve done life together for decades now. We’ve been friends in one accord and we’ve been grown-up versions of those kitchen table squabblers from yesteryear but we’ve been bound to each other through it all and in spite of it all.
I love you, sissies!
Shellie Rushing Tomlinson is an author and speaker known as the Belle of All Things Southern. These days she and her sisters stay in touch via text as much as anything. And the sister beat goes on…
