Sibling inheritance (first written May 2015)

My kids don’t play outside like I did with my sister. They don’t have a big garden like we did, which felt, in my fifth summer like a bounteous universe surrounded by chalk cliffs and rolling Kent countryside, ablush with fragrant roses and  earthy vegetable patch. They don’t pluck lavender and concoct potions and dig up bugs and plant them in vaults where they withered and died, to be watered, later with our tears.

They’ll never discover, either, a curled up hedgehog under an oak tree that we poked sticks, running hand in hand to fetch Daddy, our first brush with death, and perhaps the last time I truly loved my sister. That day, amid the honeysuckle, my father carried me on his shoulders, asking me about friends in my new class at school. We giggled as I made up silly names for them, but later, we got shouted at for peeing in a bucket rather than climbing the stairs to the bathroom. Although that wasn’t the real reason he shouted. It never is.

Perhaps it was her idea, perhaps it was mine. We were still, back then, in cohoots, confident of the shared affection of our parents, and flourishing in our safe middle class, Home Counties upbringing that felt so nice and normal. Soon enough we’d begin a game of one upmanship that would end  our relationship in tears.

We’d already suffered our first great tragedy – my mother leaving home. I remember it fresh as the newly turned earth from my grandfather’s dug up potatoes. He moved back in with Nanny to look after us after mum was gone. She was always sharper with me than with Katie, seen as the naughty one against Katie’s butter-wouldn’t-melt façade; but Granddad had my back, drip feeding me Fisherman’s Friends from a neverending back-pocket supply that covered the scent of his frugal, henpecked smokes.

I barely remember her back then, my mother that is – a waft of perfume and cigarette smoke, a flash of lipstick, a calm handover to our childminder, Hazel, a snatched echo of knowing how that kind of  nonplussed love felt.

But I remember her leaving. Red faced and tantruming, locked in by a door handle to high to reach. My parents livid downstairs, a car engine. When I woke she was gone and that was that.

But it wasn’t that day that damaged us. It was what came after.

The backwards and forwarding, playing us off against one another in a game of divide and conquer that caused the first frictions to appear, like the scars I clawed in Katie’s hands, goaded until I lashed out, to tell and get attention, while I would inevitably be punished. Like the black eye she made worse with make up when my dad finally lashed out at her as an angry teen.

Neither parent could accept that we loved the other, because of how much they hated each other. They purchased our affection with holidays and things, without paying the least heed to the growing dissatisfaction we had with each other. They did not notice how we fought for their attention. Over time, the splits grew wider as favouritism was used as a weapon to punish us.

I was the one who Dad kicked out in the end – I missed my mum too much and he hated it, and how much I looked like her. But I had his soul: trust replaced by mistrust, love, by bitterness, like the lyrics of a song.  It would take a lifetime to rebuild. And Katie had Dad’s stubbornness but also Mum’s obfuscation, her charming way of spinning her own truth to get exactly what she wanted. Although perhaps, in inheriting her creativity, I gained the ability to tell my own version of the truth too.

What I didn’t get was her infinite selfishness, the ability to look the other way while I was bullied by my step dad, because she also allowed him to bully her. The selfishness that found convenience in my enterprise when I became a dancer to pay my way to freedom, and absolve her of any further need to support me, financially, or emotionally.

But while I struggled to escape, Katie at last basked in the undivided attention of my father, revelling in the ability to fuck up her exams, and still get uni paid for, while I aced mine and did not. Later, she wangled a wedding with a man no one was sure about. Eighteen months later they split and then, marrying again as much for convenience as the need to prove something to her ex, that was subsidised too.

I paid for my own wedding to the only person who’d never let me down, which my father didn’t attend, and mum rocked up from the U.S. the day before, now hitched to yet another ill-considered choice. So I managed to become free by anchoring myself to someone a lot more stable than me or anyone else in my life, although still mentally chained to the traumas of my upbringing, for all it was superficially well-to-do: the things and the holidays at least making me dissatisfied enough to be poor that, for a while, I was prepared to suffer to be rich. Luckily, I found something more valuable. Commitment.

With wealth and opportunity comes power, the power to escape situations that you must otherwise bear. And that is what my parents had, the power to escape: each other, us, their old lives – my father, his parents’ poverty, my mother, Canada and ultimately, herself.

In the end, Mum crashed and burned, returning two husbands and two continents later with nowhere to go, so Katie took her in. But this was no altruistic gesture. No, she’d taken Dad, so she had to take Mum too, and she got her, lock stock and barrel – buying a house together from the spoils of their dead relationships, assets locked in until she herself dies.

Pregnant now, Katie also gets wall to wall childcare while all the while, Mum abroad, Dad estranged, I managed my children alone. And although I was never given the chance to look after Mum in her old age, these days I don’t feel able to give much more than she gave me in my youth. Lest I sound like a complainer, I’m upset, betrayed, even; let down, but I’m used to it. But they have to live with each other, now, and that’s how they will get their just desserts.

Perhaps it’s perfect that, together, they’ve sold my children’s future from under their feet, who won’t see anything from their grandmother now until they are likely grandparents themselves. But then, my own grandparents had nothing but love to offer (by which, of course, I mean consistency and predictability) and I miss them the more for that. And by making their own way, my children will have less freedom to fuck up their own lives than my parents had to fuck up theirs, raking up so much misery and animosity in the meantime that they did a number on mine as well. So by expecting nothing from them, even when it affects my children much more than me, it might actually work out better for us all in the long run. But at least I’ve been proved right about the importance of fairness to my own children, so they never have to feel like this about me.

Though I’m still dealing with the tangles of my past, I need to be wary of handing down my own childhood traumas to my kids, by spending more time dwelling on them than living in the here and now, or by fighting their battles for them when the wounds they incur themselves might actually save them from themselves.

I can look back one single golden summer’s day when my sister was still my ally rather than my enemy, and in the end I can’t blame her, because in fighting for our parents’ love, and now, squabbling pettily over their money, we’ve ended up fighting ourselves and alienating them. And it’s us that has to live with that. In the meantime, my sister and her children get a big garden and me and my children will not. It’s likely they never will – at least, not while it counts for anything.  They have a postage stamp and are grateful for it, for all they can use it for little more than a game of chess. In the end, that’s all that matters, even though it’s they who are teaching me how to play.