This is the biggest crock of shit that your parents will ever tell you. I heard this saying a lot as a child because I pressed the issue frequently. How could you love your children equally when they are different people entirely? Ophelia and I could not have been more opposite from each other if we tried. Ophelia has mousey brown colored hair and I have bright blonde hair. Not to mention Ophelia has always been slightly taller than I am. I stand maybe five feet tall today and Ophelia has to be at least three inches taller than that. However, where we really differed was in our personalities.

I love Ophelia dearly but we were very different people from the start. I always saw Ophelia as the favorite because she was always doing everything well. She was also always pioneering the way for me because that is the unfortunate job of older sisters. In my minds eye, I can still see Ophelia constantly getting attention from my parents for being brainier than me. She wasn’t just brainy though, she was creative and kind. She was always writing poems, reading books, and writing papers that her teachers thought were well above her writing level. For me, it was like living with Marsha fucking Brady! I even liked her sense of style. She was always wearing pink themed Disney shirts and as a growing young girl I was also into Disney themed stuff myself, however, in the sixth grade her classmates were not.

It is because of this sense of style and a myriad of other things that Ophelia was teased mercilessly as an adolescent. Things got even worse as she moved into fifth and sixth grade because as we all know that’s about when our young metabolism starts to slow down and we can no longer eat whatever we want. Ophelia put on a few pounds, but I never saw her as fat or ugly, I simply saw her as Ophelia. These few things combined with wearing super thick coke bottle glasses and hormones arriving to make her grow malformed breasts and a bad case of acne made being a 12 or 13-year-old suck pretty bad. And while Genevieve is a great lady she was of no help in the make-up, hair or fashion department; so my poor sister had to figure out how to tackle puberty all by herself.

I on the other hand, was pretty young at the time, maybe around seven or eight years old. Life was going great for me. I had just made it to the second or third grade and had convinced our parents to let us keep some kittens, which you will hear about in a few chapters. I was blonde with alabaster skin and not a blemish or mark to be seen. I was so thin that you could see all of my abdominal muscles. I was constantly out rough housing with the boys my age. I practically lived outside, like a female version of Bear Grylls. We didn't even like the same types of activities.While Ophelia was at karate classes, I was taking tumbling or swimming or [insert whatever sport I was interested in that week]. To her I’m sure I was the most irritating younger sister she could've had. Don’t worry though, my teenage years were a bit of a bummer so it all evens out.

As an adult, I've talked to Ophelia about how I felt like she had it all. I told her how cool I thought she was and how mom and dad always gave her the lion’s share of the attention. That’s when I realized how truly different Ophelia and I are as people. Ophelia recounted to me how she felt about our childhood. While Ophelia was going through all of these weird life changes and dealing with Rowen telling her all of the private details of his inner life, she was just trying to deal with kids being mean to her. She very astutely observed that from the get go we both had very different styles of coping.

Both Ophelia and I were exceptionally weird kids by anyone’s standards. Ophelia has battled with obsessive-compulsive disorder, an eating disorder, depression, and a multitude of other problems throughout her life. I am more than sure to other people we seemed awful strange. We dressed like children and would both be teased relentlessly for our weight.

I remember one night our family started arguing over the dinner table about how Ophelia wouldn’t sit down to eat.

“I can’t” she said, “You burn an extra ten calories an hour just by standing.” she regurgitated the information from some health magazine she'd recently read.

“Yeah, like that’s going to make a difference.” I teased and I was right.

Ten calories an hour is really nothing when you consume 2,000 or more calories a day. But in her mind I know that standing made all the difference. Eventually this obsession with calorie counting got the best of her and our parents had to intervene. However, for a significant period of time, I watched Ophelia wasting away to nothing as our parents tried to deny anything was going on with her weight. They denied it as a group, until the school got ahold of them to ask why she wouldn’t sit down in class. Ophelia had never gotten sent to the principal’s office for anything in her life! This was simply unheard of, and therefore it prompted an immediate response from team Beckman.

That wasn’t the only strange thing that Ophelia had become accustomed to doing though. After her inability to sit down for fear that she wasn’t burning enough calories came the spinning. Ophelia had to go to each corner of the room (North, East, South, and West) and spin around three times in a row before coming to a sitting position. I am sure that if she did this at school that people would think she was off her rocker.

To make matters worse Ophelia’s head was always inside of a book. She simply didn’t know how to converse or socialize with others in a casual manner. This was not something that I realized until Ophelia brought it up in our conservation about her being the family favorite. When she compared our social skills we looked as opposite to each other as night and day.

Ophelia continued her comparison during our most recent conversation about this issue, explaining further how differently we dealt with negative feedback. As a kid I did plenty of weird things too! For instance, I almost exclusively had animal friends. So much so that in kindergarten I wrote a story about a cat, my friend, in the neighborhood getting hit by a car. I even drew a picture of the dead cat, the street, the car, and the garbage can where Rowen and I deposited my friends’ now lifeless body. All the while there was no reference to my friend being a cat other than a very badly drawn picture of the dead cat in the street and the stick figures of Rowen and I weeping next to her. What an overexaggeration, Rowen didn't cry for anything. It was me blubbering at this loss of precious life. Needless to say this story warranted a call from the school and my parents then had to explain to me that pets couldn't possibly be friends. The best part was that this wasn’t even my cat! This was just a cat in the neighborhood that happened to let me pet it frequently enough that I felt it warranted friendship status!

I was also obsessed with ice-skating and roller blading, which I was good at as a kid. When I was eight or nine all I wanted for Easter was a green velvet figure skating dress and when I got it I was so excited! I would put that velvet figure skating outfit on and I would rollerblade through our apartment complex without a care in the world. I will even take it a step further and entrust you with the weirdest of my behaviors, which I still have the urge to partake in today. I have always loved singing and I'm not to bad at it. As a way to relieve my stress, I used to take my Walkman, disc player, MP3 player, or ipod with me and walk up and down the canal singing at the top of my lungs. The vast majority of the time I did this because I was angry, bored, irritated, or sad about something. I was the kind of kid that needed to be alone to contemplate my thoughts and reactions to what was going on in my life. Trust me this was and still is considered weird behavior but the difference between Ophelia and I is that I just didn’t care what other people thought.

Ophelia wasn’t able to handle these criticisms from other people because she wanted to be liked by everyone. Ophelia so desperately sought out the approval of her fellow peers that she would do anything, become anyone, and mold herself into whoever they wanted or needed her to be in that moment. As a result, Ophelia still has trouble saying “No” to people. To this day Ophelia is one of those people who will change her personality to match yours. I remember when I figured this out and I was devastated because I loved her just the way she was. She didn’t have to cuss around me to be cool. She could read her books and listen to whatever music she liked because these were her interests and not someone else’s. I respected that.

Looking back to the past I think that was the main difference between Ophelia and myself. I wasn’t trying to be the version of myself that other people wanted because if they didn’t like me for whom I was then it was their loss and not mine. Maybe that seems like a conceited or harsh way of looking at the subject, but the truth is that I'm a pretty interesting lady. You probably are an interesting person too, just by virtue of being yourself! I mean, I have a personality that you either like or you hate and that is perfectly fine with me. If you don’t like me then it’s your business and you can gladly keep your distance. How is this any different than me staying away from people and influences that I don’t want to be around? It isn’t and therefore I feel no shame in announcing that these people were missing out on one hell of a personality. I owned my crazy personality. I wish that I could go back and make Ophelia take ownership of her personality too. I wish that I could tell her that no one put a gun to my head and made me like figure skating, rollerblading, or singing. These were all a bunch of things that I loved to do because they made me happy and they weren’t supposed to make other people happy.

Also, truthfully who gives a shit if other people don’t like who you are? The real question Ophelia should have been asking is “Do I like who I am? Is this who I want to be?” How many of those kids that we grew up with today does she talk to? How many of the kids that you grew up with do you talk to on a regular basis? I would venture a guess at less than one percent.

As we got older we drifted even farther apart personality-wise. Ophelia was really into looking beautiful. She would cake on make-up to try and hide her acne and wear provocative clothing because she seemed to base her self-worth off of what boys thought of her. She was into girly things like dating, going to the mall, hanging out with large groups of her girl friends, and rebelling against my parents. I was into sports, never wearing make-up, letting my hair airdry, being wlld and free, school, singing, acting, skateboarding, rollerblading, and music. Trying to make myself look attractive to anyone wasn't really on my list of priorities.

I was developing into a bigger tomboy everyday because I saw what being a big girly-girl was doing to my family and it wasn’t good. It led to a lot of fights, grudge-matches, and parental disappointments. Most of all of these two roads that diverged in the woods of my life, being a girly-girl appeared the more treacherous of paths and would only lead Ophelia to a life of self-destruction. So I chose the road less traveled and became the woman I am today, which was also full of perils but at the time seemed like it would be easier. Trust me when I say that it was equally difficult.

The point is, when I look at my childhood I realize that it was easy for my parents not to love us equally because we weren’t the same. Ophelia may have gotten more attention, which I equated to more love, but it was only because she needed more guidance. It was because Ophelia and her friends played mean pranks on me that I was able to quickly discern who I was, who I wanted to be, what I liked, and what made me happy. It was because my older sister paved the way for me that I was able to develop my own personality and for that I cannot thank her enough. Lastly, as an adult I see now that more attention doesn't equal more love. They cannot be compared because they are two different concepts.

So when you think your parents are playing favorites know that they are, but that they also cannot help themselves. Rowen gravitated towards me because we were like-minded and Genevieve gravitated towards Ophelia for the same reasons. This isn’t anything to be upset about, it's just something that we can look back and laugh about.