If you are born different from all others around you, your highway through life is guaranteed to be littered with broken glass, especially if you are a girl.
I know, because the girl is my sister.
What others take for granted, you still desire, she has found out a thousand times.
Because society traditionally has tilted toward men, boys born different, through the force of their masculinity, can more easily hurdle the barriers, especially the social ones.
The subject arose because this afternoon, my sister is enduring an almost intolerable patch in her later life.
Alone, which is the worse part. I just learned of it in our daily call this morning, news she had carefully masked for weeks as her despair invisibly mounted.
Just Ask Her?
She always has been The Good Sport in our family, the one who did for others until her hands bled, and until her bank account pleaded for mercy and beyond. If you needed $10 and she only had $5 until payday, she would borrow five and hand over exactly what you needed with an authentic smile.
Car payments and other financial obligations were missed because she couldn’t resist those in need.
Better than any of us, she absorbed and has lived the values Mom and Pop gave us. Many of the values were realistic. Others, well-intended, should have remained embedded in family folklore and left to wither.
More than any of my siblings, she deserved at least occasional glances of good fortune, which has managed to evade her life almost entirely. Metaphorically, the inopportune flat tire has haunted her.
Always smiling, always genuine, always generous, she would hug and celebrate with others on grand occasions, then fade toward the doorway alone, because she was born different.
You Are Lucky
She grew up a happy girl, born into the middle of a large, exceedingly boisterous, emotional family whose faith never wavered in the notion that God was the answer to every question.
Oh, there may be bumps ahead. But look at all of the people on the planet who are so much less fortunate. Besides, you have so many people who love you. Think about Walter down the street who is so sharply deformed. Or your Aunt Lizzy who has been bedridden since the war began.
Imagery of Walter and Lizzy, or even sympathy for them, long had been forgotten when my sister came of dating age.
If you are past 25 years old, you probably will agree that even the most vicious bite life can take out of you is manageable if you have the support of a faithful companion.
My sister doesn’t, unless you want to count her two dog friends.
She is at an age where most of her friends are retired. She probably should be plumping onto a worn couch, bouncing along with grandchildren on either side instead of needing to imitate a 20-year-old.
Because she was born different, dating, in the normal course of growing up, was a longed-for pastime that eluded her, a yearned-for concept reserved for others, for the unattractive girls, for the bulgy girls, for the coarse girls, for all other girls. Just not my sister.
What is like to kiss a boy? Just a boy from the neighborhood, a casual guy who takes you to the movies and isn’t ready for marriage but just kind of likes you? Her friends, some sensitive, some not, filled her attractive head with moonstruck feelings that washed over them — golden lightheadedness that my sister never would know.
God, how she wanted to know those feelings.
In her 20s, she participated in the weddings of girlfriends. At that still-hopeful time, she almost but not quite had convinced herself she still would walk down the middle aisle someday.
Once there was a fellow, a wisp of promise that followed the path of all ephemeral clouds. He went away.
At this moment, a blacker, rather frightening, cloud dangles above her lovely head.
Sometime in the coming days, reflect for perhaps five seconds about her. Maybe the waves of positivity will reach her.
