Sibling Rivalry - by Darylynn Starr Rank
November, 2004

My family ran on the pie theory. Not pi, π, 3.14159, the ratio between the perimeter and the diameter on any given circle. And not pie, as in apple pie, sweet, normal and so quintessentially American. The pie they used was a circle divided up into pieces. Now there are only so many pieces in any given piece of pie. And each slice is different. “No repeats” is what that means. 

Here’s how it went. There were three sisters in my family and one cousin, a boy. He was sort of an honorary sibling. Thus he too was privy to his own piece of this particular pie.

Now my oldest sister was really beautiful,in an utterly sexy kind of way. And she was a flirt. So if we were speaking about her today, her piece of the pie would be labeled ‘hot’.  Boys fell all over themselves for her. So she was the one who had more boyfriends than she could handle.

My next sister had a mountain of friends. She was always hanging out with them. Always on the phone.  Girlfriends galore. Everybody liked her. It’s just who she was. So her pie was labeled ‘the popular one’. 

My cousin played the piano liked a dream. Even composed his own music. So, what do you think?  Of course. He was ‘the artist’.

And lo and behold, I was smart. Really smart. They’d go on about it. How well I did in school. How much I knew. When company was over my mother would say to them, “Ask her anything. She’ll know the answer.”

Does any of this sound familiar? A lot of people I know seem to have a similar past. They were narrow little slices of a specific kind of family pie, and somehow almost everyone (at the time, at least) accepted that their own wee slice was all they got to have.

So, okay. How bad could it be for me being considered smart? Or my cousin an artist. My oldest sister loved boys and they loved her back. How cool is that?

And who doesn’t want to be popular?

So what’s the catch?

Sample fight with one sister:

“You think you’re so smart.”

“Smarter than you, dimwit!”

“At least I don’t sit home alone on the weekends without a friend in sight.”

Then the two of us would disappear into our respective rooms. And cry. Her feeling like the stupidest person on the planet. Me feeling like no one in the world would ever be my friend. She was desperately jealous of my grades in school. And I of all her many friends. And those pie slices were ¬ always right there between us.

Well, we grew up. She manages quite successfully in the world of business. Turns out she has all the smarts she needs. And I have wonderfully good friends. Of course! But the little voices are always there. “You’re not as popular as she is.” And she still doesn’t feel very smart. They’ve stuck with us all these years.

The pie model is one really good way to mess up the relationship between sisters and brothers (cousins, too, actually) and to mess up our perception of ourselves. It pigeonholes us into tiny boxes and ignores the complexity and richness of human lives (even those of children). It’s incredibly quick though, and it’s so much simpler to deal with a stereotype of someone than the real person inside. Yep, really, really simple – really simple as in “not very smart”.

Take care all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

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