Parenting: I always wanted a sister, until I had two daughters

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I ALWAYS WANTED a sister. As a child, I was wildly jealous of my friends who had older sisters. Not younger sisters; they seemed like a right nuisance, but people with older sisters might as well have lived with literal celebrities.

They looked somewhat like us, only they were infinitely cooler, with perfect hair, better clothes, incredible taste in music and entire bedrooms filled with exciting and forbidden things that we had no business rooting through.

Unfortunately for the older sisters, being caught rifling through their rooms and getting a chase off them was every bit as fun as finding something that we shouldn’t have.

They also had incredibly cool friends, who were also at celebrity status and were equally as irritated by our existence. We would stand awkwardly in doorways or lurk outside locked bedrooms trying to overhear snippets of their conversation.

They always had the best gossip. Even if it was just a 15-year-old talking about having beef with a teacher, they sounded incredibly sophisticated. We would clone ourselves off them, their hair, the slang they used, even the way they rolled their eyes.

I always felt girls with sisters had a head start in life. Not just with the hand-me-downs, but by living with someone who was walking the path ahead of them. They got to see what was coming down the line; they watched someone live it.

They had a built-in guide for secondary school, boys, homework and heartbreak, and they also had a second wardrobe and makeup bag to search. Granted, they also caught some WWE-level beat downs when they were caught borrowing, but this just seemed to be an unavoidable occupational hazard.

Even now I still envy my friends with sisters. They go for brunch and nights away together; their trips now often include lovely little nieces and nephews with whom they have the closest bonds. It’s all so wholesome and heartwarming. It’s just like having a built-in best friend who is with you for life.

Naturally, when I had two daughters just 18 months apart, I thought I had gifted them exactly that. I beamed with pride introducing them to each other. ‘Look!’ I said to my older daughter, ‘this is your sister!’

She glanced at the baby for a millisecond before turning to me and telling me to ‘put baba in bin’.

In her defence, she didn’t see why I would have added anything to our otherwise perfectly functioning unit. Everything to this point revolved around her, so adding a second child to the mix felt like an unnecessary and frankly reckless decision on my part.

Even now, 16 years later, she still tells me that I should have put her sister in the bin the first time I asked. She didn’t see my vision.

I pictured them having a toy selection to rival Smyth’s, because they were so close in age they had almost always been interested in the same things.

Well, let me tell you that I could not have been more wrong. Not only did we need two of everything because they absolutely refused to share, the eldest also became increasingly irritated if her sister even dared to like the same things as her. After realising that we were not going to ban her younger sister from liking the same things she did, she decided that manipulation was a far better tactic.

She somehow managed to convince her sister that purple, not pink, was her favourite colour. Then she took it further and convinced her that Anna was the better Disney princess, not Elsa. It would have been impressive if it wasn’t so terrifying.

There was an established hierarchy in every game they played. The older one was always the teacher, her sister the bold student. She was always the princess, and her sister the maid. She was Rapunzel, her sister was the lizard.

She spent an entire summer as a bride after a cousin gifted her an old Communion dress, and drew a moustache on her sister, the groom, every single day. The funny thing was that I don’t even think her sister minded. She was just happy to be included.

I held out hope that they would become best friends as they got older. They are only a year apart in school, and have multiple overlaps in teachers and friends. And while they do get along sometimes, they also have some of the worst fights I have ever witnessed.

They wind each other up to levels I have never seen before. They know each other’s weaknesses and insecurities, and think nothing of hurling them as grenades during any kind of disagreement. They say things to each other that I would genuinely never recover from.

The younger one eventually realised that her sister was made of fire itself, and she was never going to win a fight if she tried to meet it. Instead, she covered the fire with a blanket of guilt, putting her head down mid-argument and walking sadly up the stairs.

This was particularly effective, and usually resulted in the older one racing up the stairs after five minutes to apologise. I feel the need to add at this point that most of the rows are caused by the younger one, and her never-ending need to annoy her sister. She regularly pipes up with ‘innocent’ questions such as ‘did you mean to do that with your makeup?’ right as the older one is about to leave the house.

And they don’t just insult each other; they also conduct what I can only describe as psychological warfare. We had a recent ‘event’ where the younger one borrowed a hairbrush without asking. This wouldn’t normally be the end of the world, but she then went and did a slick back hairstyle, which obviously involves a disgusting amount of greasy product being left on the brush.

Her older sister was so annoyed by this that she took her sister’s favourite new bronzer and flung it under her bed, somewhere she never thought to look when searching for it. It actually took her months to find, at which point she burst into tears because she thought she was losing her mind. She immediately threatened to cut her sister’s hair while she slept, which meant that no one in the house actually slept for the next week.

Eventually, she took the more mature route and just dumped a full bag of sugar into her sister’s bed, which was possibly the most inconvenient and irritating thing she could have thought to do.

Never one to be outdone, the older one went on to cut small holes in the pockets of her sister’s trousers. Small enough to look accidental, but big enough that her house key, AirPods and lip gloss end up on the pavement on a daily basis.

Honestly, it’s diabolical. They will have the most awful fights, where they shout horrible things at each other before slamming bedroom doors and wailing. My heart breaks, thinking they will never forgive one another, that they will be estranged as adults. Then one of them will pop her head around the door and ask the other one to go for food, and they’ll both head off together, all smiles and laughter.

I don’t have a sister, so I can’t say if this is normal behaviour. It seems far more ‘Hunger Games’ than ‘Little Women’ from where I’m standing. All I can say is that I no longer wish for a sister of my own. In all honesty, I don’t think I would have survived it.

Margaret Lynch is a mother of two and a parenting columnist with The Journal.

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