So My Sister Got Married Yesterday

December 12, 2013

“So my sister got married yesterday.”

I thought as I sat in front of my dresser with a small tub of cotton and acetone, dabbing the liquid on my fingernails as I slowly began to remove the remaining traces of the pale pink nail polish my lola’s nurse had painstakingly painted on the keratin wads of my phalanges just a day before the wedding.  I was drowsy, having ingested a rather strong antibiotic in a pre-emptive bid to counter an impending fever, and had fallen asleep as she began to work on my fingers in an effort to hide the mud and and dirt which had left ugly brown stains under my nails.  I was not about to let the sickness - and the horrid sight of brown stains - get in the way of a wedding my mother and I had been working on for the past eight months.  With Yolanda stirring a frenzy just a month before the big day that my only sister was scheduled to tie the knot, our work went on quadruple time.  All of a sudden, there was a need to divide our efforts between distributing invitations, making last minute AVPs and finalizing the wedding menu with supervising the repair of the church where she was to be married and replanting its yard which was completely overrun with fallen trees and patches of mud.

The church where my sister was to be married two days after typhoon
Haiyan (Yolanda) hit the Philippines.  The trusses on the right
side were licked clean of the gavlanized roofing sheets.  A tree
fell on the left side of the church, causing the steel trusses to
curl like noodles.  

The church's front yard was overrun with fallen trees.

I did not quite understand what or how to feel.  After all, my sister and I practically had been living somewhat apart the past couple of years so there was no need for a dry run, so to speak.  Besides, she was now all set to live in a house just a few minutes away from ours and that necessarily did not seem to spell “never seeing her again.”  But undeniably, things were indeed going to be different.  Our longtime cook was telling me it was going to be awkward leaving her place on the table blank and that, she said, made her feel quite sad.  I munched on my cookie as we talked, still trying to understand what she was trying to say.  The house was certainly going to feel more roomy and sound less noisy.  But this was the way it was meant to be, I thought.  That’s what my dad often told us when we were children, that we were all someday going to fly the coop and look for our own places to nest.  It just so happened that she went ahead and did it first, a stark contrast from our world where it was I who usually made the initial step. 

The strong smell of acetone was making my nose twitch as I replaced the cap.  I began to notice the usual white film develop on my fingernails and proceeded to scratch them off with one nail tip like snow from a car’s dashboard, watching almost-microscopic flakes flutter into the vinyl floor of the room we used to share as children.  My sister, the rambunctious, cheery, naughty, silly member of the family, was now officially off the singles chart.  That most likely meant that my days as “the one who made things happen for her” - in my mom’s words - were finally over.  Now that was a relief, in some sense.  From another perspective, it left me with a pair of pants that suddenly felt a little looser.  

My sister and I, much like a lot of siblings in the history of mankind, never got along every time.  Sometimes, we would get along fine.  Other times, we would be sneaking jabs or pinches at each other.  We fought like feline and canine and, in one instance during the days of black-and-white TV with just four channels, she was so angry with me when I refused to switch to a show she wanted that she sank her incisors on my belly, resulting in one of my most traumatic of wounds and the most persistent of scars.  With us, there was always eventual screaming and kicking after a rather peaceful episode of play.

Despite our penchant for always getting on each other’s throats, our parents had carved out our roles early on - she was to be the baby and I, as the “ngangang,” (my sister’s mispronunciation of the Ilonggo word “manang” becuase of an early speech impediment) was to be the one looking out for her.

It surely was not an easy task growing up, especially when I was always outdoors climbing mountains and trees with the bigger kids and she was always too little to grab the nearest branch or too slow to catch up with all the running.  When we started doing children’s choir together, I had to make sure I did not leave her behind.  In Sunday School, I had to walk to her classroom to check on her every so often because she was scared of her teacher for reasons only she could give.  In school, I would do a huge bulk of her writing assignments or check her work.  Often, she would tell me how one classmate would pick a fight with her so that in the afternoon, I would find myself hovering over that poor classmate like a Ringwraith, big sister style.  We both hated being compared to the other, although that never became an issue between us.  People would brand us with labels and there was always the expectation that one of us was going to be like the other.  But with my sister and me, that was never going to happen.  Early on, we both knew we were meant to do different things. 

In college, she joined me in Manila and our mother was surprised to see she had packed so a little in a bag that was about as big as a carry-on.  Mom asked her about the things she needed like extra jeans, towels, shirts and other things.  She nonchalantly answered, “I’ll just borrow from Manang.”  This she said, despite the fact that she knew I deeply despised her closet raiding.  I kept a sharp eye out for guys who were interested in her and did not keep my reins in telling her off that a guy she liked who most probably liked her too was seriously bad news.  When she came home one day with her heart broken, all I could really do was listen to her as she talked while looking mournfully out the window and offer to swing by 7-Eleven for a towering cone of ice cream.

Eventually, when we both went to law school, I would do her groceries, pick her up from her dorm every weekend and, sometimes, reformat her computer.  I still screened her suitors and would tell her when I did not like one or the other.  I had, however, slowly taken a backseat as I noticed she could do a lot of things on her own already.  That felt good, knowing that she was slowly growing up and taking charge.  Oftentimes, she would do some things which I felt were not right, inadequate or up to my standards.  She would then quickly retort, “Well, you let me do that didn’t you?  If you don’t like how I did it, you should have done the work yourself.”  She was right in some aspect of that statement.  I had to give her a bit of leeway if I let her take the wheel because, in the event that she made a wrong turn, she would learn from that a lot faster.

“So my sister got married yesterday.”

What did that exactly mean?  I had finished rubbing the stubborn remnant of the nail polish from my fingers and threw the cotton wads into the trash bin.  Probably that meant letting go and letting someone else do the job - of being the one who looked out for her, the one who made things happen.  That thought made me smile.  Because despite the fact that in my eyes, my sister still needed a lot of work, especially in terms of her cooking, I knew she could take on the job of being homemaker, wife and mother very well.  

Maid of (Dis)Honor duties during my sister's wedding.

That is, until today, when she told me she would need help setting up her router and Wi-Fi.  Then I remembered what she told me one day when I was finalizing the souvenirs for her wedding: “Manang, when I have kids, can I leave them with you?”

I twiddle my thumbs at the thought.