Short and Sweet

I want to tell you about my relationship with my sister, Megan. 

Growing up, the only thing we shared in common was our mom. We had different fathers, different personalities, different types of friends, and different outlooks on life. The core of these differences could be summed up by this short comparative list:

Cara ------------ Megan

intense................   calm

methodical..........  unstructured

analytical............   emotional

argumentative....  agreeable

ideological..........  relational

complicated........  straightforward  

When I invited her to read my first post, she responded by telling me that she enjoyed it but couldn't understand why I had to use so many words to write it. She made the same kind of observation on my last post. She said: 

"You should have just written: Vote for McCain... Obama is stupid."

That's my sister. She cuts through the barrage of verbal excessiveness and zeros in on the central tag-line. Nothing fancy, nothing contrived, just plain and to-the-point. 

 

That's why I'm so glad she's my sister. Everybody needs a person in their life who is completely different than they are. The contrast makes you own-up to your own crap, if you let it. 

As the two of us have gotten older, our love for one another has outfaced our obvious differences and for this, I am very thankful. I have benefitted greatly from allowing her list of traits to soften the effects of mine and I think she would say that there has been some positive transference from mine to hers as well. 

Hold on, who am I kidding. What she would actually say is something like this: 

"I'm stronger... you're nicer."

And that's the truth, short and sweet.