Cassie Sheridan |
Usually when I write these things, I don’t want to hear any noise. I am a big fan of hearing myself think and don’t want sounds of lesser intelligence to distract me. So on this particular day I was sitting down preparing to make the difficult decision between commenting on “Keeping up with the Kardashians” or something a little more academic, like the return of the monocle, when my younger sister interrupted my intellectual flow.
This is the inherent struggle of getting anything done over spring break: You are either having grown up spring break fun in (insert tropical/exotic/cosmopolitan city here), or you are somewhere with your family. I am disregarding those selfless individuals who spend their breaks on immersion service trips. They disqualify themselves by being enviable and worth emulating and thus not understanding the perpetual conundrum I suffer.
I’m referring to the problem of being an older sibling. Specifically, being an older sibling and a “role model,” while simultaneously being someone very few people should take advice from. I remember quite well the excitement I felt being 12 years old and finding out I was going to have a younger sister. All I had were brothers, an injustice I routinely made my parents aware of. As luck would have it, I was blessed with a younger sister, and now, nine years after the fact, I wish it had been a puppy.
I love her infinitely. She is a beautiful small human with a huge heart and an intellect greater than my own -- and that’s the problem. I have lived through the trials and terrors of being a teenage girl, and I definitely didn’t get through unscathed. If any of the thousands of articles being written are correct, then it is only getting harder, and that is frightening. I wouldn’t take advice from me, so how am I supposed to guide her through what are arguably the most difficult years? How will I keep her from piercing her belly button in the seventh grade bathroom or sneaking out of eighth grade classrooms to meet up with boys? How will I tell her that wearing head-to-toe Abercrombie is in fact not cute without getting yelled at in the middle of a mall? (Full disclosure: these are all things I did -- I’m sure you now understand why I am far from a good choice to guide a young soul.) I have very little figured out, and yet my role and obligation is to be a sort of sensei into the tribulations of adolescence. In this case, the blind should not lead the blind.
Yet I owe it to her. I owe it to her to help her along and make her inevitable mistakes less awful than my own. It’s terrifying to know that your decisions and misguided choices and the words you speak, sometimes great and sometimes awful, will be emulated and copied and repeated. These actions will be used as signposts and hints like some sort of horrible crumb trail, which if I had known there would be a little person following behind me picking up said crumbs I would have dropped very different ones.
It’s a new kind of awareness, the sort that makes you conscious of everything you say and do and the people you bring around and the sinking in your stomach when that innocent person asks about things you’d rather she didn’t know. You want to put earmuffs on her and blinders and let her keep playing in the woods pretending to be anything but growing up.
Every time another person labels me a role model or guide or sensei, I shudder and feel fraudulent, undeserving of such a title. Yet despite doing nothing to earn such an enormous responsibility, quite possibly the most important job I will ever have, it is mine. God, I wish it had been a puppy. Cassie Sheridan is a junior English and political science major. She can be reached at sheridan15@up.edu.
