lips of an angel

This is a tale of two sisters and their sisterly love.

My sister has become very temperamental and moody lately…her mood swing can rise from one end of the pendulum to the other end in the blink of an eye. Toggling between indifferent and worry, I normally switch to the indifferent mode. Why you may ask? After all she is my flesh and blood considering we share the same parents.

I cannot cope with adolescent and raging hormones again I suppose…my own was torrential with a mind of its own, and now to cope with my sister’s? I’d probably say pass, thanks but no thanks. Everyone has to grow up and learn at some point of time in their lives, I guess she’d need to pay her dues when the time comes.

She’s been surfing a lot in the daytime and come nighttime, she’d turn into an owl, burning the midnight oil into the wee hours of the morning. I guess it’s due to her SPM stress…I cannot ask her about SPM without feeling the shudders and getting the jitters myself. Often, seeing how her books and notes pile up sky high on the desk reminded me of my own SPM days…

Honestly I don’t know how I made it for SPM and then STPM…those harrowing years of studying just to pass the exams and make it into the local university. I mean, high school years were fun, in fact the best time of my life. But not the studying bit.

My best friend was saying how she used to dread her mum asking if she had finished studying for her exams. I echoed her sentiments and said that’s why I rather not ask how my sister is progressing with her revision. There is little benefit to push her over, on a more extreme scale, constant reminder and nagging might end up pushing her over the ledge. Whatever that was within my locus of control, I have done it. My only hope is, she will do her best, and God will do the rest.

Time to time, I would tell her that it’s alright if she didn’t score straight A’s though it would be great to have a string of A’s up her sleeves. That would certainly help in her scholarship applications. But the learning point was to try your best so that you’d not have any regrets. Even if the exam results were less than desirable but knowing that she has tried her best, as a sister, what more could I ask for from her? And at the very least, she’d be able to move on with her life knowing that it’s perfectly fine to make mistakes and be less than perfect in scores, so long she has tried her best.

To me, the failure does not lie in not getting a string of A’s, rather the failure lies in not trying hard enough…I hope she has the common understanding as me. That way she’d be able to study with less pressure hopefully. While Robert Kiyosaki wrote that report card is not synonymous to bank statement, but we live in the harsh and realistic world where paper qualifications still matters and would most likely matter till the end of time. Why? Simply because a couple of distinctions and merits would be used as the basis to judge you before you are being accepted as a slave to the company…a tool to measure how well you have studied in all your growing up years.

Grades are important, but it’s not everything in a person. Today there are also talks about IQ and EQ and how many intellects fail to survive in the cold corporate world because they lack the EQ to thaw and break the ice with the others.

So that’s that in terms of academic achievements and my sister and her upcoming SPM.

I was also telling my best friend that I felt so old despite my age. I felt so old because I begin to realize that I could relate to so much in life…understanding it. You know you’re growing up (not necessarily old) when you are able to understand the cards you are dealt in life and you begin to know how to play your cards well.

Being a brat myself, I have always taken my sister for granted. At the slightest thing, I would flare and scream at her. However, lately, she’d retaliate and talk back to me, as though giving me a dose of my own medicine. It annoyed me to end when she did that, I felt like I was being challenged as the elder sister. Then during one of my stoning hours, I must have reached the ultimate state of enlightenment because I suddenly understood her resentment for being screamed at.

I suppose it’s demeaning and demoralizing to constantly be barked at…just because I misuse my position as the elder sister…she responds better when I talk to her nicely. Just like how I’d like to have a safe environment to make mistakes, she should be entitled the same too. And of course, there’s the pride issue as well. I would not like it if my sister treats me like an idiot and scream at me all the time…

Well, if my parents didn’t “produce” her and bring her into this world, I’d still be the only child and the loneliness will surely kill me. So it’s a good thing having her around, I better treasure and cherish her more.