5 The Elder Sister

Women!, why are we so hard on ourselves?, why do we hate on ourselves with all the troubles that surround us on a daily basis. My husband Mike has three sisters and two brothers. The elder sister is older than me,about three years older and i am forty five years old. I am an African and we have a deep cultural heritage that is built on respect for elders among other things. I was brought up to respect my elders and believe me,I will not dream of doing otherwise. when you are an African wife,you are expected to show respect to everyone and be submissive. I don't have a problem with the respect angle because I believe everyone deserves their respect,even a little child deserves respect. I do have a problem with the submission of a thing, why?, because I think it has lost its godly meaning and it is now been welded as an instrument of abuse and used to intimidate many African wives into a robotic life. That is,do as you are told without question. I believe with my heart that when Jesus said submission,he meant a willing surrender that recognises that there is safety,security,love,tenderness, acceptance,protection,and integrity with the one been surrendered to.

In my Christian walk,I arrived at the decision to submit to the Lordship and authority of Jesus Christ when he proved himself to me. He wooed me with his life,he wowed me with his power,he broke my hardness with his love and paved a way through my pain to my heart. So my surrender came willingly,because I knew he had integrity and with him I could find the kind of friendship I sought, I saw that with him,my life could have some meaning. I have come to see that Jesus is the kind of man who can make me feel special and still make another woman feel same too and there is no fight or quarrel, he has enough love to go round.

So back to the siblings. I was in the same school with the elder sister during my nursing and midwifery years. We were never close,and again I never went close. Even at that time,without knowing why and without the knowledge of temperaments I have now,I was constantly recoiling from her. I observed her hard stance on many issues and I turned aside,I witness her confrontational style and I was not impressed. Again, she was not and is not a monster, but I instinctively deduced even then,that if I got close to her,it would be a master servant relationship that would exist between us,because I will be seeking to please her always and she will be getting her way oblivious of my true feelings and I may find myself a pulpy mess when all is said and done. My husband tried to bring us close but I resisted. All that later transpired between us when I eventually married into the family showed me how right I was to have kept to myself. What am I saying. She too is a choleric. Please don't get me wrong. I am not saying that been a choleric is a bad thing,I am only saying that they need to work on themselves twice as hard to truly sustain the milk of human compassion. Remember that I was still so bruised from my experience in the religious group,that what I needed was a friend and not an instructor. I will forever remember vividly the day I drew a line between I and the elder sister and I had told myself that I would do all in my power and as safely as I could to maintain a sisterly relationship between us,but I would never be forced into a slave relationship all in the name of tradition or family opinion. This happened before I married my husband ,he had taken me with him to visit her and her husband in their lush apartment. She graciously served us with a delicious meal and chilled drinks. When we were through,I took the plates to the kitchen sink which by the way was overflowing with used plates and unwashed pots. I think they were the ones used for our meal preparation before our arrival. I stood by the sink and listened to the voice of Mike chatting away in the sitting room. I thought to myself,should I wash just the plates we used,should I wash the entire mess,do I just leave everything as I saw it,after all I am a guest. Truthfully,the emotion ruling me at that precise time was fear and anger.. Fear of what,I could not say. Anger because I was afraid. I mean how could I be afraid to offend. Offend who exactly?, my sister in law or my husband or my parents in law. Why should I be afraid?, I remember asking myself. If there was a healthy relationship between the elder sister and I,would we not be chatting happily as we both did the dishes.I stood there and contemplated deeply what to do. I decided I would wash the dishes we had just used and leave the remaining mess l met there and see the elder sisters reaction,I just felt something was not right and moreover,if I wanted to be of help to anyone,it should come from a place of wellness and not fear.

I mean,we were never friends,she had her class of friends she moved with,I just hung out with my very homely and down to earth friends.We had no relationship so what exactly was I trying to salvage or hang on to .The fact that I was getting married to her brother should not make me subservient to her in anyway,I am a human being and if she thought I should look up to her,then she too should know that respect is mutual and that I too had something to offer.

So I went out back to the sitting room and sat down calmly. Sure enough as if I was been set up,she had come out and gone into the kitchen,and had come out screaming at me,I mean really furious and shouting that I should go back into the kitchen and clean the place up. Oh my God!.She was actually bringing up our traditional views, that I am supposed to be submissive as a would be wife should be. I was aghast and I remember thinking to myself,so this is what I am getting into. I remember I had told her that I had nothing with cleaning up the kitchen,but the way she was taking the whole thing was wrong,that she should remember that we went to school together and were supposed to be friends,and she had shouted at me that this was not a matter of friendship, that I was marrying into her culture and I must respect and serve her.

I was so demoralised and annoyed,I remember her husband had come out and told her to calm down,that we are their guests,and she should tamper down on this cultural view she was upholding as a rule of law. she became irate at him for not taking her side and they both went back into the bedroom arguing. I was irate at my man who just sat there and did not defend me,instead he started pleading with me to let peace reign and just go and clean up the kitchen I looked at him and was pissed up,she was his younger sister for heavens sake and he could have just chided her or something but he didn't,instead,he was pleading with me to go do the dishes. I went grudgingly and cleaned up the kichen for exactly that reason,to let peace reign but more importantly to honour the husband of the elder sister who had touched me by taking an objective stand on the matter and who at that moment was receiving a backlash for this. I knew then that I had found a friend in him and over the years,he became and still is a friend. Take note that at that time,he was older than us all and if anyone should have enforced anything culture, it should have been him,but he displayed the maturity of an elderly oerson,I also believed he saw the real me and not the one his wife,the elder sister may have projected to him.Do you believe he actually came out much later and apologised to me and kept trying to make me feel comfortable again. The elder sister also came out and when she saw the kitchen cleaned up,had the guts to try to drive home the rightness of her actions and to draw me out into light conversations. well ,I had seen what I needed to and had drawn my conclusions which were;

1) the elder sister was not interested in us been friends, she wanted a master servant relatiinship.

2)my husband for some reason did not want to call her to order and as such I needed to inquire more into this and decide how that would affect my marriage to him

3)I and the elder sister would never be close

4) for my good,I should define the kind of relationship I would keep with her and live by it

5)I was not as weak as I thought I was,I was happy I could stand and assert myself even though I was left hanging by my man

6) knowing what I know,was marriage to my man worth the looming troubles.

I thought hard and long of all that had happened when my man and I got back to our apartment. My melancholic nature even started attacking me that it was all my fault,that I should have just washed the damn plates and did as I was told,but I counselled myself that it was necessary to let people know they can't treat anyone the way they liked and put it all on some religious or cultural belief. God cannot have made a mistake when He said in his word that we should love one another, He told us to love unconditionally.

Perhaps now if we are able to sincerely communicate with each other,I am sure that we will both find out that we have both changed,I have grown much stronger and she perhaps more accommodating. I really wish it could have been otherwise, ours might have been a wonderful relationship,she would have found in me a loyal friend and a sister for life.Now, I am just loving from afar,and until things change,I an keeping it that way, at times,I reach out a hand,searching,testing the ground for a meeting point where something beautiful may blossom between us.

Anything is possible.