The Patient Wait

The Patient Wait

On July 2, 1997, I became a big sister. Unfortunately, no one ever fully explained to me the possibility of a baby brother.  In a family of three girls, my sisters and I naturally assumed we would only ever have sisters, so our brother came as quite the surprise. My sisters soon overcame their initial shock, but I remained stubbornly convinced that, logically, my brother would become a girl.  After years of taking care of my cherished baby dolls, barbies, polly pockets, and various other dolls, I knew that not only could I handle a baby sister, but I deserved one. Over the next few years, I patiently waited for my brother to magically transform into a girl. While awaiting this change, I took matters into my own hands. I always fervently wished for a sister to dress up, so I used all the plastic necklaces and glittery bracelets at my disposal to dress up my toddler brother, usually with a bribe of candy for him. In the evening, with everyone home, I paraded him around the living room, proud of my handiwork. Although as a child I never questioned my actions, while recently thinking about Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I thought of my childhood desire for a baby sister. Confused, I wondered why I now remembered that family story that had gone unmentioned for several years. However, the more I analyzed my fixation on a sister, the more I compared myself with the story’s irrational narrator who focuses so intently on an old man’s evil eye that he allows his obsession to control him until he loses his grasp on reality and becomes mad. Fortunately, I never committed murder nor would I say I developed an obsession with the idea of a younger sister, but I allowed my desire for one to prevent me from accepting reality. For a few years, I remained blissfully in denial, awaiting the day when my sister would arrive. At around age five, I finally accepted what my parents always insisted upon— my brother would remain a boy and I would never have a younger sister. Luckily for my family, instead of going mad, like the narrator, when I realized the error of my ways, I embraced my younger brother and the importance of my role as a big sister to him. I never needed a sister to dress; I just wanted to act as the older sibling and I never opened myself up to the possibility that I could hold such a role with either a sister or brother. Perhaps we all have something in our life that consumes us for a time and controls our actions. For the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” it manifests itself in an eye, for me, in my wish for a younger sister.