My Wicked Stepsister

 Stepsisters often get a bad rap. Think of poor Cinderella, dealing with not one but two of them, both ugly, selfish and vain. Think of poor Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein), whose stepsister Claire Clairmont was rumoured to have had an affair with Shelley’s famous husband, Percy the poet. Just a couple of months ago US gossip magazine Newsweek featured a breathless tale of a poor woman whose dream wedding venue was ‘stolen’ by her wicked stepsister. But I’m here to tell a different tale about these much-maligned siblings.

I was about four years old when I first met my four new step-sibs. My widowed mother would soon be marrying their divorced father. As far as I was concerned, this just meant there were four more fun kids to play with on weekends and during school holidays. And Jen - the same age as me - was the fun-nest of them all.

Jen was confident, inventive and hilarious – qualities that seemed to be lacking in shy young Sian. She showed me how to collect seed pods and use them to make witches’ spells. She approached other kids on the beach and made instant new friends for us. And when we both started piano lessons with my musical mother, Jen and I learnt to play four-handed duets together.

When we were about ten, we made pretend radio programs, recording ourselves on cassettes doing interviews and reading the news. A couple of years later she invited me to join her basketball team, where I discovered that being the tallest girl in the gang wasn’t such a liability after all. In our early teens, Jen (a blue-eyed beauty) had no problem flirting with the popular boys or choosing cool clothes to wear. I looked on with admiration - and envy.

We both loved reading novels and writing in our journals. I loved visiting her place because I got to swim in her backyard pool. Maybe she loved visiting my place because she got to see her darling Dad.  

But it wasn’t always smooth sailing. We were fiercely competitive, and sometimes it ended in tears. Who would get to keep the piano music for Paul McCartney’s song ‘Yesterday’ that we were both learning? Who would get to sit in the front seat of the car if Dad was driving us somewhere? Jen usually won these battles; I usually sulked for a while. Then we’d forgive each other and go back to sharing our secret lists of boy-crushes with each other.

Those cassette ‘radio shows’ turned out to be a form of predictive play. We both ended up working in the media – Jen presented the TV news, and I did radio interviews. We loved our jobs, and we were gutted when, about ten years apart, they both came to an end. I fell first, and Jen was my staunchest ally, offering to help me find other work, reminding me about my other skills and interests. And in turn, when she was looking for new directions, I reminded her she had always been a really good writer, and now might be the time to invest in that talent. Soon we were both working on books.

Jen married the love of her life and had two gorgeous kids. There, our paths diverged. I struggled with infertility and miscarriages, and never had the children I’d longed for. It was Jen who first encouraged me to write about those experiences, Jen who scheduled our workshopping sessions where the first chapters of my second memoir began to emerge.

And it’s been Jen who has intuited the challenges of getting through Christmas Day each year when you’re the only member of a large extended family without a family of your own. ‘Christmas is all about the kids’, people love to say. They’re right. Why buy a tree when there are no children to look for presents under it?

For a while now Jen has been inviting me to her place each Christmas Day. It’s always a rollicking big party with the step-sibs and their kids, and our darling Dad. Jen feeds me a huge Christmas dinner, even catering for my tedious food intolerances. She fills my champagne glass and encourages me to sing loud carols. She understands when I go quiet for a bit, remembering my beloved mum who taught us both to play the piano all those years ago. Then she tells me a joke and pours me another glass of bubbles, and I remember how lucky I am to have this wicked joke-telling stepsister in my life.

This column was first published in The Big Issue in November 2023.