For my guardians
All three of them
I actually abhor the idea of writing a memoir. Even if I grow to be famous and successful, living in a gated community with two cats and a backpack full of clandestine adventures, I've always thought I'd not have much to say about it. I'm too verbose to be good at tying stories up in neat little bows, and not nearly confident enough to present the deepest parts of my soul to the world as though I won't be crumpled by any and all criticism. And, in any case, the rearview mirror tends to be rose-colored, with memories I hardly remember becoming aggrandized and melodramatic.
But, here I am. And I'm starting to fear I've always been a little too melodramatic.
The first diary I ever kept was given to me by my sister. She was petrified I would grow into a "socially inept idiot" (I can hardly blame her: I once cheerfully told a complete stranger my email password), so she would carefully craft five-question quizzes and To-Do lists in a pink spiral notebook with Little Miss Chatterbox written in loopy cursive on the cover. That small journal became an extension of my right arm; I refused to even brush my teeth unless my sister's authoritative script instructed me to do so.
My sister scheduled events into each day, keeping me occupied for hours: she taught me how to ride a bike, running behind me as I pedaled unevenly. She told me bedtime stories, showed me how to dine "like a connoisseur", hid money under my pillowcase whenever I lost a tooth, and made sure I learned cursive and typing when it was announced my elementary school would teach us neither. And every night, I would dutifully sit beside her in our shared bed and detail the day in green glitter for my little journal. My mother often finds these pages while cleaning around the house; she seems to believe in ex-post-facto punishment, and so she chastises me for spelling lettuce as "lutus" and berates my father for refusing to buy me frozen yogurt (a crime for which I accused him of being "a liar and a meanie").
The second diary I kept was a hardcover college-ruled notebook with a bald eagle plastered on the cover. During our fourth-grade field trip to Lansing, my mother had given me twenty dollars to spend at the gift shop. I kept the bills in a small coin purse, feeling oh so adult as I counted out the ones to hand to the cashier -- I proudly brought home the aforementioned notebook, a keychain, a small American flag, and exactly one cent of change, and my sister was furious.
"You weren't actually supposed to spend all twenty dollars," she informed me matter-of-factly. "It's extra." She sighed, as though I had failed an instrumental test, then doubled down on her instruction: she refused to let me read the fifth Harry Potter novel until I had read the first four twice; she taught me how to seal envelopes without licking them; and when it became trendy to drink lemon water, she would wake up before me every morning in the summer and squeeze lemons into our water filter, then shrug innocently when I wondered aloud why the water tasted different.
Now, I'm here, writing in my fifth diary (this blog), and I'm starting to notice the blatant irony in my title as the "Mom Friend" amongst my friends. After all, all the advice I liberally lather over my friends' problems comes from my sister. And frankly, it's very easy to be the Mom Friend when you have one extra parent.
But I digress; my point here is that I always knew I'd begin my imaginary memoir with a prologue about my sister, not just because she taught me the value of words, but also because she has this complex where she refuses to appreciate anything that has garnered widespread acclaim. Olivia Rodrigo and Ed Sheeran will never earn her stamp of approval, and for fear of her caustic nitpicking, I haven't shown her my writing in a long time (not that I'm suggesting my writing has garnered widespread acclaim). So I'm hoping that, in this fictional project, if I mention her on a page or two, I'll finally pass this test of hers. Fingers crossed.
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