2000-10-16
My Sister, posted at 17:00:47
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com My sister2000-10-16 - 17:00:47
My little sister moved in with her boyfriend over the weekend. She'll be 20 on Halloween.
My sister took a lot of paths in my life that I didn't. For a while, I was high on my horse about it, and rather critical. After all, she was smart enough to go away to college and we could afford it, yet she stayed at home after graduation and went to a community college in the area. This isn't a bad idea in and of itself, but to me it demonstrated that she really didn't have any concrete goals for herself. But in the last year, she's decided that being a hairdresser is what she'd love to do. I made fun of her for it for a while - something I now regret doing (joking, for example, that I would get her a pair of golden scissors for Christmas). After being on campus for six years now and seeing freshmen come to MSU only to crash and burn, I now see my sister not going to college as quite possibly a good thing. She never got into school, and instead is now doing something she loves. She's matter-of-fact about things - she knows that being a beautician may not be what she wants to do for the rest of her life, but that it's what she's going to do now. And she may eventually go to nursing classes or something if she wants to do something different. She did not get accepted into MSU after she graduated despite a 3.4 GPA in high school and a father and brother who went there, and that killed her enthusiasm for going to college. Random note: please do not ever joke about MSU's less-than-stringent acceptance policies around me, because I'll get offended - my sister deserved to go here (and she eventually did get accepted for the January semester... but she declined).
I am a little disappointed she never got out of South Haven, but I now see that as - again - projecting my own beliefs on her. I know that moving away from home was the method in which I discovered who I am (a never-ending process, it seems). But is that necessarily true of everyone? Is it fair to expect her to do the same, or similar, things as I did? Of course not.
She's moving in with her boyfriend, who is a nice guy and a hard worker. I can now say I have a good relationship with my sister. She was a bitch for a lot of her teenage years, or at least erratically behaved, but she's matured into a thoughtful young adult. We don't have as much in common as I'd like, but I still love my sister. I wish her luck in her first real venture into adulthood. My parents are sad about it.
PS - Please don't get pregnant.