IN THE GREAT tradition of she said, she said, here’s what one of us has said all along — that our mother liked the other one of us best. You? How did your families wrestle with the obvious? While we disagree on much of our childhood saga, I think Margaret and I would agree that our family handled it all rather — hmmm, how shall we say? — poorly, though after reading this piece, I’m not sure it wasn’t more that our family was right up there within the range of normal. Eeeek! And yours?

Sibling science is one of the more fascinating aspects of psychology, and we’ve got some here on TSP. Check it out, and bring some family facts to the holiday tables this year.

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Me, at about the age of those precious school-bus years w/Andy Hattenrash.

WHEN WE LEFT OUR HEROINES, one was standing in our parents’ bedroom, holding a photo in her 9-year-old hand. She just wanted ice cream and, as a result of that hunger, came away with a whole lot more than she was after. It would take her little sister—me—14 years to come to the same conclusion that Margaret did in that instant: that our mother was having an affair.

But what preceded that incident? Before things tilted as they did, there were nearly 10 years of existence for Margaret, including—though in no way limited to—having me arrive in her life.

There were friends, of course, some of which you heard about in my 25 Random Things list. (Margaret’s is here.) And then there were best friends.

Always a social creature, I had lots of friends, though my absolute-finito-ideal, all-time-favorite-friend was Andy Hattenrash, who in kindergarten was my very best friend in the whole world.

Andy, like me, was 5, and as far as I could tell, the only difference between us at that age that mattered was that he smoked cigars. That’s how I remember it, and how I told it back then. And I told it a lot.

Our father was a famous sportswriter, a profession that carries an equal love for the hard play of others and for telling stories. My sister and I learned early to do and value both, especially if we wanted his full attention, which was hard to get, since his schedule kept him away from home most nights as well as every Saturday. Rarely home for dinner, on those fine long nights when everyone sat down together, I’d tell an Andy story, always including his cigar, and the great joy he took from smoking it on the schoolbus. And always, everybody laughed.

Andy and I rode the same bus, which is where and when he mostly smoked, not being allowed to do so at home. And I’d sit beside him every day, kind of protectively since I was a tomboy and he wasn’t, and the kids might have picked on him if I wasn’t there, a bookend between the riff-raff in the aisle and quiet Andy, while he always rode tucked up against the window.

‘He was mute. Not totally mute, but something was wrong with Andy’s speech, and his soft sounds were hard to figure out unless you paid the real close attention.’

He might have just wanted to look out at the scene all the way home but I wouldn’t have it. I talked to him. He was mute. Not totally mute, but something was wrong with Andy’s speech, and his soft sounds were hard to figure out unless you paid the real close attention I thought it was my job to do. It’s not the slightest bit odd to me that my best friend didn’t speak. I don’t recall that he had a need to since I was so comfortable doing all the talking.

Like me, Andy was a redhead, though unlike me he was the delicate sort, the hothouse-flower variety, whose veins seemed to pulse through the gossamer skin and whose eyelashes, the color of old cellophane, did nothing, as awnings go. I was the other kind of redheaded kid.

I could locate today where Andy lived and what his living room looked like and the Vanilla cookies and warm-ish milk his mother served us on the few times I was invited to play. And that’s important to this tale—that I think I can still find the house—since Margaret swears that Andy was imaginary.

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THREE MONTHS AGO THIS WEEK, three other “sisters” and I started The Sister Project network. Some 32,000 visits and 900 comments later, we’re celebrating our baby blog by each bubbling up our readers’ favorite posts. Enjoy the most-popular, most-commented things you may have missed, below…and don’t forget to go meet my “sisters” (and bring yours along next time).

• The List That Helps With Loss, by Marion

• Side Dishes: Getting Started on Your Version of the Story

• Marion’s Memoir-Writing Series

• Margaret’s First Words to Marion: ‘Put Her Down’

• Marion’s Version, ‘Put Her Down’

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MARGARET WAS EEYORE when we were young, seeing the impossible in everything. She has grown up to be Kanga, her youthful negativity evolving into a carefulness for all things, as well as an exactness for detail, reminding us not only to take our medicine, but when to do so. Me, I was born a Tigger, and show little chance of ever growing up to be anybody else. I bounce, and when people try to get me to give up my bounce, I bounce away.

Everything I know about the taxonomy of sisters, you see, I learned from Winnie the Pooh.

A few memoir-writing posts ago I floated the idea of using astrology to help develop your writing. Maybe you are wrestling with a story of your sister and how you struggle with her decisions. A quick read through astrological types will jump-start your thinking  about the separate ways we respond to the same forks in the road. Is that sister of yours as impulsive as a ram, barely noticing the fork, or does she nearly get hit by the oncoming traffic as she stands there, weighing and re-weighing on her metaphorical scale the pros and cons of either lane?

Astrological types might get you moving forward, and help map out the simple, as well as the complex likes and dislikes, inclinations, tempers–in all, what ancient medicine referred to as the humors–of people. And no one explains it better than Sheilaa Hite, right here on TSP. Have you checked out her February forecasts?

Not into astrology? No problem. Popular culture is saturated with other easy archetypes from which to pilfer. For instance, the world of Peanuts is beautifully drawn, both artistically as well as along the lines of how people whack up emotionally. Who doesn’t know a Lucy or a Linus, for that matter? Though for me, the best education on types was also one of my first, puddling along with our dear friend, Pooh. Before Disney got their mitts on him, Pooh and his pals provided some of the clearest examples of personalities I can name. So read it in the original, and see if you don’t find yourself—and your sister—there in the Hundred Acre Wood.

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IHAVE SCHEDULED A TOUR OF MY CLOSET for the next time Marion visits my tiny house. Apparently she has not seen it, though her post the other day about how different we are on this score of closets would lead you to infer otherwise. This is how it is between sisters, I think: We know them so well, and yet not at all, and that’s what makes the bond and also the friction that is the unique chemistry of siblings. I have just gone upstairs to take my closet’s measurements, to try to get this straight.

My little 1880’s house boasts just one clothing closet, a 48-inch-wide afterthought I managed to tuck into one of my impossibly small rooms a few years back. With two hanging racks installed in this mere shoebox, I have a total of 8 feet of space, period.

That doesn’t mean that, as Marion has told you with complete certainty because she really is sure of it the way only a sister can be, I have just the latest year’s wardrobe models hanging there—not an extra thing. Would that it were so.

Quite to the contrary, my tape measure reveals that I devote 2 of my precious 8 feet to a stretch of Brooks Brothers shirts I wore daily under suits more than 15 years ago when I worked at Newsday newspaper. Since then they have been in their plastic bags from the cleaners, who laundered them for me each week (hanger, not box, thanks).  Why do I still have this space-hogging inventory of shirts I do not ever use? I have no idea whatsoever.

In the rest of the squeezebox that is my absurdly mini closet, more than 3 feet are likewise dedicated to clothes I don’t wear, ranging from “Would not be caught dead in but sentimental attachment involved” to “I’m too old for that cute outfit, but love remembering when I wasn’t.”

It’s hard to let go of the possibility of being young again, I say as the older sister, nearing 55. On little sister Marion’s end, I think she was saying this in her post on our comparative closets: It’s hard to let go of the image of your older sister not having it together, knowing the answers, having the secret.

And one more thing: The deluxe hand-me-downs she says she’s “on to me” about, and suspects I actually bought for her? They’re hand-me-downs. A size 6 or 8 throughout my 20s and 30s, by 40-something I shrunk. I know, it’s supposed to head in the other direction as women age, but I’m a 2 this last decade, apparently headed for old age as one of those women whose housedress she inhabits like a clanger in a bell.

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There were sunny days, too.

THE FIRST WORDS in our half-century of “She Said’s” were spoken on or about April 10, 1956, a few days after the birth of the second Roach girl, Marion, a red-haired baby of nearly 10 pounds. Her actual birth date was April 7, but her existence wasn’t remarkable until she came home from the hospital with my mother, ending my life as an only child forever. She upended my 22-month-old reign with her birth, and she has not stopped.

In the story I tell myself about the day of my first great loss (which is not the same one baby sister Marion tells), my beloved Grandmother (the original Marion), and I are at the dining room table, sewing the satin binding on something called a receiving blanket. For all the attention we are giving it and the special-sounding name it bears, it still looks like my Blankie, the one that doesn’t smell good except to me after all the hours I’ve pressed it to my nose and mouth, soothing myself, drooling and sucking on the slippery, saliva-soaked corners.

What are we receiving with this blanket? Is this a birthday or Christmas, and will there be gifts?

DADDY HAS GONE to get Mommy at the hospital. They are bringing “the baby” home, but it’s all a jumble, this talk about “the baby.”  My beloved doll Betsy Wetsy is the baby, and I look after her. I am the baby. One trace of memory remains clear: I am the smallest but most important person in the picture, and I am happy to leave it at that.

But then the car pulls up and in walks Mommy, carrying something. Everybody is making the sounds and faces they have previously reserved for me at this swaddled, unseen thing in Mommy’s arms. I want them to go back outside; to have a do-over. I want to sew again quietly with Grandma.

But Mommy walks right through, heading directly toward the staircase, and that was it. Enter me, Margaret, stage right, crossing to the foot of the enclosed staircase, where Mommy and bundle are ascending.

“PUT HER DOWN,” I say, being quite clear about my feelings some 20 years before any therapy began. “PUT HER DOWN.” (You can read Marion’s version, which has the same quote, but includes words like “adorable” and “bouncy.”)

That day I was no longer an only child. That day I became a sister, and those were my opening remarks on the subject. (Perhaps you have your own such tale to tell in the comments?)

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Some days, Margaret was downright friendly.

HOLD ON, SISTERS. You can’t think that you can take on Dooce’s bundle-to-be without me. Second sisters? Little sisters? I’ve kind of got this one covered. As anyone who blogs or reads one knows by now, the story of Leta, daughter of dooce (dot com), sounds like nothing so much as a cyber-update of mythic proportions because it is. My TSP sisters Paige and Anastasia—along with thousands of other online readers—are pacing the virtual waiting-room floor in expectation of the birth of the second daughter of uber-blogger, Heather B. Armstrong, wondering all along the e-way how things will go when Leta gets a little sister. For Margaret and me (big sister, little sister, in that order) it all started, as these things do, at the beginning.

Margaret’s first words about me were spat at our mother, when the then 2-year-old Margaret, viewing her adorable, bouncy, red-haired, at-that-moment-babe-in-arms being transported over the family’s threshold, shattered the idyllic moment by demanding, “Put her down.”

A gauntlet, I picked it up and ran with it as soon as I could understand the insult and, at least in sentiment, that remained the ragged currency we exchanged for years. But here’s the catch: To say we didn’t get along is to reduce that most complex of arrangements—sisterhood—to pablum.

We didn’t appear to get along. And there’s the difference. What we didn’t get along about was all the small stuff. On most of the big stuff we agreed, and will always agree—but who cares about the big stuff when you’re little?  By big stuff I mean loyalty, politics, public service—that kind of big stuff.

To Dooce we say be glad, since sisters born close together make great copy. You can read all about it on this blog, or in our picks on our fiction list, and we, in turn, look forward to reading all about it on your blog. So baby-mama, take the epidural, and don’t expect the little things to go well. Instead point your girls toward the bigger picture and maybe, just maybe, they’ll grow up to blog together happily ever after.

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NEXT TIME YOU get your feathers ruffled about where you stand in some pecking order, keep in mind that while you may have spent thousands in therapy on this topic, and others have racked in untold millions writing and selling books that define your prescribed sorry circumstances to you, remember that the guy who authored the idea of who pecks who, when, where, and why, was talking about nothing more than, yup, chickens.

But before you stop payment on that most recent $150 check to your shrink, read on. It will make you feel better.

It was Norwegian zoologist-psychologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe who, when studying how hens socially organized themselves, found himself needing to say it with words, and lacking the compound phrases to describe what he’d witnessed came up with what translates into “peck order.” On this side of the pond, University of Chicago zoologist W.C. Allee explained it all to us, transposing the whole thing in a rather off-handed comment he made about “women’s clubs, faculty groups, family groups or churches.”

According to William Safire’s marvelous book, Safire’s Political Dictionary, from there it was a skip and a leap from Aldous Huxley to Margaret Mead to W.H. Auden to me and you using the phrase in a popular culture kind of way to prescribe just who gets the shiny red bicycle under the tree, who gets the banged-up wheels in the garage, and who goes to therapy first.

Ah, chickens. How they come home to roost.

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