Big Sister is a Big Deal

Lately I have felt convicted about how much mental energy I've devoted to Shannon's Love Life. Not that I have one. At all. But I'm talking about going about each day with a lens up, looking at the day through a specific dating filter, thinking a lot about how I'll be as a girlfriend next time I'm a girlfriend, who I will date, who wants to date me...

The problem is that Shannon As Girlfriend isn't real. It is a future hypothetical and being consumed by it has distracted me from the really important roles that I fill right here, right now.

Namely, Shannon As Big Sister. With the recent arrival of Nancy, I am in a unique place because for the first time ever, my geographically close nuclear family only consists of me and my two little sisters. No parents, no twin, no older sister, no brother. (Yeah, there's a lot of us.) It's me and my little sisters in Seattle.

So because this particular combination of siblings is so different, I've never felt so much like an older sister than I do now.

I am keenly aware of how many times I have messed up with them. I look back on things I've done and said, ways in which I've ignored them or straight up tried to hurt them, and it's a wonder to me that they haven't completely written me off. So this time around, I would like to do it better. Nancy and Margaret are pretty independent women, and they don't ask me to take care of them, of course, but nevertheless, just being older than them is a responsibility. A responsibility I am trying to understand better everyday.


In many ways I've 'been there, done that.' I've lived in Seattle, been to UW, encountered mean professors, lived in the dorms, I know what it means to be poor, I've had my heart broken.

I've gone through the tough stuff and yes, I could shout back advice to them as they start to navigate the same territory themselves, but I'm starting to think that being an older sister is less about "Do this, I know better" and more about waiting on the other side of a swamp with a ready hug and, "Yeah, that WAS hard. I remember how much that swamp sucked, but you did great."

It's giving advice about the Seattle bus system but realizing that she'll still probably get lost anyway. It's allowing her to be bright eyed and excited about things that you've grown cynical to. It's waking up at 1:00AM to answer a tear-filled phone call without any magic healing words, trusting that just answering the phone at all is what matters.

And none of this is hard. It's just been a matter of getting out of my own self-absorbed Shannon's Love Life drama to participate in the lives of the cool girls I get to call my sisters. And they are really awesome people. I actually like them a lot. You don't get to choose your siblings, and I could have been given boring, unintelligent, bump-on-a-log sisters and I would have to just deal with it. But NO! Margaret and Nancy are funny, crazy, brilliant people who always have opinions and ideas and things to share.

So here's to 3 Ericksons in Seattle! I am SO excited to have you both around. What a privilege.