The Reason Why My Older Sister Is So Stingy

I think it was last Monday, when we had dinner with my parents, and I told my father that my partner and I were taking tennis classes.

Let me put this into context very quickly for you: my father is a small farmer who loved football at the beginning of his married life. He was also obliged to go to war in the 70's. Angola and Mozambique were fighting for their independence from Portugal.

He had PTSD when, at least in Portugal, no one imagined it could have a name. He's now nearly 70 years old, and he's still fit and healthy.

Back to Monday dinner, we were there, talking about our tennis class, when my father says - the sports that I most liked when I was young were football and tennis!

But besides playing beach tennis with us, he never had the chance to play real tennis.

I instantaneously thought, ok! It's never too late! And so I started planning to give him classes as a present, but of course, since we are three daughters, and since we were young we kind of have the tendency to give only him one birthday present (but I'm more and more certain that this has to stop)

So I talked to my kid sister, and she agreed with the idea, she was also really enthusiastic! The idea was to buy him everything to start, the equipment and the classes.

Yesterday, I decided to call my older sister to tell her about the idea, and the first thing she said was, "Is that going to be expensive?"

Do you know, when you forget how certain people act, just because you aren't around them every day, and you kind of tend to think that they are also growing as you are, that they are changing their relationship towards money, towards family, etc.… but in fact, this is just in your head, just like a beautiful dream!

I could be really upset and annoyed with that kind of commentary, but lately, it just makes me laugh and also sad. How can my older sister be so different from us? She has always had so much support from our parents!

This 43-year-old woman, still borrowing money from her small farmer parents, retired but still working, to buy a second car that costs more than 40000 € that doesn't fit in her garage because it is too big! So ridiculous, a garage that has space for two cars but that's always empty because the cars are just too big!

Here it is, the woman that was always our father's favorite, who always got a job thanks to her parents' friends or her parents-in-law's friends.

The woman that was always considered the most intelligent of the sisters because she was good in mathematics.

The hard-working girl that always had her father's help selling the honey that her husband steals from bees.

But maybe, maybe the honey her father has sold for years, isn't enough yet to pay a humble contribution for a present divided by three, or should I say six, because each one of us has our own boyfriend/girlfriend!

I'm always saying, even though I seem to be joking, that it is the older sister syndrome, and I have been using this as a vent, but now that I'm writing about it, I just understood that I should check online for this syndrome.

What I found out was astonishing, my sister really suffers from the oldest-chid syndrome, but so do I, and my kid sister, it turns out, and "Adler, the founder of Individual Psychology, was the first to discuss the influence of birth order on personality development." I got to know this through this excellent paper by Curtis Gustafson on The Effects of Birth Order On Personality

Curtis says:

"Firstborns are believed to be more conservative. They are viewed as leaders who follow rules. They submit to authority. They are often more ambitious than other birth order positions and also more conforming. Adler suggested that firstborns tend to be more motivated to achieve than laterborns. They are usually good at pleasing adults and behaving in socially appropriate ways. They typically adhere to rules and expect the same from others. They are also the dethroned child who must deal with the birth of a second sibling. Because of this, they work hard to stay ahead of the other siblings and keep their special place."

Curtis's paper analyzes and references more than 20 studies on the subject, I scrolled down through in search of the study that would help me explain why my sister is so stingy, but I didn't find it.

I think the reason for all her miserliness is because even without noticing consciously, something tells her that there will never be enough for her. Sure this has to do with when I was born, and probably my parents started telling her "you can't do this or that because of your sister." I can easily imagine this happening!

So the reason my sister is such a stingy person is actually ME?!

Oh, man! I wasn't prepared for that! Really!!! How am I going to look at her now?! Should I give her all my money?! Should I kill myself and my kid sister so that, she's finally free from this curse!? How am I going to handle this burden?!

But, wait a minute?! Who made me?! Yes… my parents!

Oh yes! They are the real problem here, and my older sister, by being the oldest, she's supposed to be smarter than us, and because of that, she knows that they, especially my father, he's really the one to blame!

Now I understand everything! Of course, he's the guilty one. That's why she doesn't want to spend any money on him, he's already cost her a fortune by putting more sperm to work in our mother's uterus!

This brings a whole new perspective to the thing; my sister is no longer a stingy person. My sister is on a vendetta!