So it seems that my [middle] sister, Crystal, is talking to me again. She says that she was never not talking to me. Funny how that period of silence (including not returning calls I made to her, Instant Messages I sent her while she was online,and e-mails, by and large) followed a conversation we had about two weeks ago in which we disagreed, fervently, about the family dynamic in our house during our growing up years.

It is not uncommon for siblings to have varying perceptions about the experience of growing up in the same house, I know, but it bears mentioning that my middle sib and I are 10 years apart, so that further extends the disconnect and adds texture and nuance to the situation. Then again, my youngest sister and I are 12 years apart, and she and I see things very similarly...

In any case, Crystal and my mother share the Revisionist Historian gene. They both need to minimize and undermine the violence and abuse that was so prevalent in our house because they perceive it to be disloyal...or something...to acknowledge what our father was capable of. But, more than that, I don't think either of them can bear to perceive the situation for what it was, because of what it would suggest about them to themselves.

Or maybe I am just arrogant. Who's to say that my perception is the absolutely correct one?

Essentially, we've called a truce (I never saw our argument as anything but an airing of views, not a relationship deal-breaker, anyway). She simply wants to avoid certain topics. I see it this way. She's 22. And when I was 22 I couldn't imagine ever feeling any differently about anything than I did then. My opinions were fixed and solid and had been reached through critical reasoning and extensive analysis. I had things figured out and was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

As the eldest child of a fragmented family the greatest service I can provide for my sisters is to be an anchor for them. To be the one waiting at the end when they come out on the other side of their difficulties, their folly, their madness.

And I'm strong enough to have one or both of them ignore me in anger for a time if it comes to that, because I want so much to be the one who always tells them the truth, even if it cuts them to the quick at first. I'm not just speaking about the truth about our family, according to me.

Sometimes my sisters, being 20 and 22, make awful choices--do things I wish they wouldn't, and I want to save them from humiliation, from pain, from getting taken in by sheisters. I beg them to listen to me because I know, because I've made all those errors myself. I want to tell them that from 32 some things that you do in your 20s will still haunt you. Oh, but at their ages, and long beyond, I'm afraid, I was hellbent on having my own way, and I've come out all right.

So I'm working on trusting God with their lives,knowing that he cares for them so much more than I do, loves them more violently than I ever could.