shakespeare & company

I come from a family of six children.  Four daughters and two sons.  The eldest and the youngest both are girls, with my brothers scattered in the mix.  I am a daughter in the middle; nine years younger than my eldest sister and eight years older than my youngest sister. (God bless my mother every day)

My little sister will soon celebrate a big birthday:  40.  F o r  t  y.   Shocking really.  To all of us and no doubt to her even more.  This blue eyed blondie has an irreplaceable role in our family in the classic birth order definition of things, she’s kind of like the exclamation point for the whole family.   In fact, I think Stacy could be the icon for all Babies of the Family.  Cute, funny, zany, chatterbox, impulsive … we’ll stick to the positives, it’s her birthday after all.   When the sisters talk about her (I know I always deny it  – but the truth is we do talk about you, alot  :) we’ve decided that Stacy grew up in a different family from the rest of us.  She and my little brother both.

Sixteen years passed between the eldest sibling and the youngest, the early fifties to the late sixties.  So not only the obvious changes in our parents age and parenting experience (endurance?) but also startlingly major changes in the world during that stretch of time in particular. The television, the rise of the media and the information explosion, the material comfort of the 50’s giving way to an ever expanding materialistic consumerism, and other fundamental cultural fluxes that created a changed landscape for her childhood and life experience in general.  

I remember our first color television.  She grew up with MTV in the background.   Enough said.

This is a middle child’s deliberate and analytical way of asking: seriously, where did she come from?  (aside from the fallback theory “she was adopted” which is kind of a personal favorite :)  Years ago I wandered into Sociology 101 and was introduced to pop psychology’s concept of Birth Order Theory.  The idea that where one falls in the family line up, so to speak, can shape one’s outlook and personality.  There are many factors, however, that come into play in one’s psychological makeup aside from this single variable. Distance between births, gender of siblings, parental factors such as marital stability and/or conflict, loss of a parent and/or siblings, remarriage and blended families, economic factors, illness, to name a few.  So many other factors that it could be easy to discount the whole concept as just another trend in the school of popular psychology.  Except for one irrefutable fact: it seems to hit the nail on the head alot of the time. 

Case in point: my sister.  She is fun and funny, smart, loving and there is a palpable bump in the energy when she joins the crowd.  Classic Last Born star power.  I could also mention moodswings and a drama queen …. but why go there?  The girl is turning forty.  And this looming occasion makes one slightly :) older middle child take another look at life and this is what I see:   It is what it is.

It is what it is.  Not too poetic but accurate.  Acceptance, or more perfectly, a loving abandonment of my own will to that Will who governs everything from the planets in motion, to the number of hairs on my head.  But in spite of this high minded belief, I am continually shaking off the shock and self indulgent hurt I feel when confronted with the unpleasantness of a fair amount of daily life; be it pain, disappointment or just drudgery.  The realization that this life is passing and that this is a good thing, can give off a chill as it truly sinks in. 

There is a Mother Maybelle Carter song “I am Pilgrim” delivered in that haunting backwoods Carter family way that I admit has taken time to grow on me.  The point is that this life is a journey that we all make, essentially, by ourselves.  I bet Mother Maybelle was a First Born.  Which brings me back to my little sister. 

It is a very good thing to have someone in your life who can be relied on for a chuckle, an occasional raised eyebrow, even a well timed grimace.  “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine”.  And as a middle child, Birth Order Theory will tell you,  a merry heart is not my foremost gift.  But we all need to laugh, see the silly things, do the silly things, to fully see the goodness in this world we travel through.   Instead I was given a blonde wild child of a baby sister.  For her, laughter and silliness, drama and commotion are the raw materials of this life.   The rest of us can’t help but be drawn into her insane salad bowl world as surely as a flower turns it’s head towards the sun.   And I am grateful that she is a part of me, belongs with us.  We need her crazy ways.

Who doesn’t love a baby after all :)

Couldn’t find a video of Mother Maybelle singing “I am a Pilgrim” but this is a classic and the title kind of fits the occasion.  So, for your big birthday Sis … doubt you ran across this on MTV  :)