I am seven years older than my sister, and I have spent those seven years in a fairly consistent position of being the more established one: more career stability, more financial stability, more of the calm that comes from having navigated a few years of adulthood that Claire hadn’t reached yet. This is not a quality I cultivated deliberately. It is simply a function of time. But I understand, looking back, that it could land on Claire as condescension, because the difference between confidence and condescension is often a matter of perception, and I was not always careful about what I was projecting.
There was a moment three years ago, before Owen, when Claire was between jobs and going through a difficult period, and she stayed at my apartment for two weeks. During those two weeks I was helpful in the way I am helpful, which is efficient and practical and oriented toward solving things. I made lists. I had thoughts about her resume. I knew someone at a company she was interested in and I arranged an introduction without asking her first, which she found out about when the person emailed her, and she was angry in a way I hadn’t fully understood until much later. She wanted me to be there, not to fix things. I did not, at the time, know how to just be there.
And there was the matter of our parents’ dynamic, which shaped both of us in ways we don’t always name clearly. After our father died, I became the functional adult, the one who handled things, the one our mother leaned on. Claire, fifteen and still in high school, was the one who needed to be protected. We fell into those roles because of circumstance and age and because there was no other obvious arrangement, but we carried them forward long past the point when they made sense. I kept handling things. Claire kept being, on some level, the person whose things were being handled.