How Monday's Sister Came to Be

Hello, girls! It’s Monday!

It’s gonna be a short entry from me today (maybe. We’ll see) because I’m about to head out to my local park and complete a challenge (See yesterday's post for my thoughts on Christina's punishment)!

I highly enjoyed reading everyone’s lies, especially seeing the truths that remained within those lies. Often those truths were twice as fascinating as anything else . . .

But for my just another blog entry, I feel like I owe some explanation of Kate. See, I didn’t make up anything about Kate for last week’s post. I’ve had an imaginary older sister for going on five years now. Kate was conceived in the fall of 2003, and came into fully realized being some three years later. It started like this:

My mother, as I have mentioned, is a minister, and as one of a handful of local ministers for my school district, she was periodically invited to speak at the meetings of my school’s FCA (Fellowship of Christian Athletes). She did the program for one such meeting the fall of my sophomore year. She’d found a story she wanted to tell, and that’s precisely what she did.

She introduced and then told a first-person narrative about a woman and her daughter, Katherine. I don’t remember much about the story beyond the fact that the Katherine in it was grown with two children, estranged from her mother, and loved sunflowers (I have a feeling the sunflowers were important to the overall point).

Well, somehow the people at my school missed that this was a story Mom had found and told in first person, and they instead believed that the story was a personal story, and so for the rest of the day, I had classmates asking me why they’d never heard about my sister and how they’d always thought there were just the three of us siblings.

Early in the day I would laugh and patiently explain that, no, I didn’t have an older sister, it had been a story. But as the day wore on, I finally got tired of explaining, and so I just started saying, “Oh, Kate? Yeah, she’s been around forever. She lives in Kansas, and she’s got two kids – Jeremy and Jessica, cutest little buggers you’ll ever meet. She graduated before we moved here.” And people believed me. That’s the astounding part in all this. People who had known me and my family for six years suddenly believed I had an older sister and a niece and nephew I’d just never talked about before.

The story died down over the weekend, and I’ll admit. I kinda forgot about Kate until my first semester of college. Somehow, I’d never mentioned the incident to my older brother, but during fall break of my freshman year, Kate somehow came up, and Matthew wanted an explanation. I told him the story, he thought it was hilarious, and, long story short, Kate was born that night. We discussed details of her life and family all through dinner, giving her a husband (Ken Murdoch. He’s an accountant, but he plays jazz saxophone on Wednesday nights) and a birthday (Leap Day, 1980, which is, unfortunately, two years before my parents got married . . .) and an occupation (high school English teacher who also directs plays). Her kids got firmed up ages and personalities, her high school got a name, and as soon as we got home that night, we made her a Facebook page. Which, now that I think about it, needs to be updated . . .

Jillian, Kate’s youngest, came about because the first of my generation of existent grandkids got married three years ago, and we needed a reason why she couldn’t go to the wedding. The family is moving this summer for the same reason. We’re not sure what’s going to happen when one of us siblings gets married; some huge and unexpected event, no doubt.

So, yeah. That’s Kate. It’s just like any other sibling relationship, really. We can’t keep track of her kids’ birthdays or how old they are, and we’re always forgetting her anniversary (which is actually in about a week, now that I mention it). Matthew and I are kind of collaboratively in charge of her and of deciding things about her life, and when she writes notes on Facebook, it’s one or the other of us pulling the strings. We intend, one day, to write her biography, to be called My Life as an Imaginary Sibling. We like to wait until people have gotten to know us for awhile and then casually drop Kate into conversation and see what happens.

I told you I was from a family of storytellers.

Monday out.