She was larger than life. A goddess of courage and virtue, intellect and strength. In the eyes of my mother, her martyred baby sister could do no wrong.
I grew up living with her name, and failing in my attempts to live up to her legacy. My bedtime stories were tales of her adventures, my lullabies were audio recordings of her many interviews and radio serials. Images of her with various dignitaries and celebrities covered the walls of my childhood home, where there were none of me.
The expectations for me to follow in her hallowed footsteps were so great even Gandhi, Amelia Earhart and Einstein combined would struggle to meet the demands of my patron saint. There were the constant raised eyebrows, and shrugged shoulders, and the ubiquitous pursed lips of disappointment.
That’s why every university I applied to was as far away from home as possible. I took to using my middle name in class so teachers would hopefully overlook my familial obligations.
In my final year of college, a forced history project found me deep in the dusty stacks at the genealogy library, perusing brittle microfiche newspapers. Articles there were not included in the many scrapbooks I memorized in my early years. They told of an all too human woman. Flawed, but driven. A person I could have called friend.
I sat in disbelief, overcome by the reality behind the legend. I resented a folk hero, a mythological creature no one could emulate. Had I known the unvarnished truth, I could have embraced my role as namesake. Now, I’m left with the mystery of why my mother raised her sister to such a lofty, and exaggerated pedestal, and why she expected me to claw my way up to her feet.
Thin spiral notebook 
the last line of this was perfection.
it’s strange when we lose someone young (or not so) that we honor that memory by idolizing them. I won’t go into that here, but this story is all too real and complex. How do we honor a memory but also live with who that person truly was?
Jessie is right, this is the start of a very intriguing story, hoping you keep writing it.
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I agree with the other comments – this is excellent!. Great character sketches, intriguing backstory dangled but not explained yet. Well done!
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I think we do this for a lot of people in our lives – celebrity and not. We place them on pedestals that we forget about what makes them distinctly human. I agree with some of the other commenters that this would be interesting to expand on.
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This is so moving. I wonder how that discovery changed the path of the narrator? LM x
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I especially loved the line “claw my way up to her feet” implying that it is a cause that can never be won, she can never be as good as. Well done
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I like Jessie and angela’s comments. This is a great start to a larger piece and the martyr element makes it have deep context and backstory possibilities. I loved it.
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People have such a tendency to do that, to martyr the past in some way. I’m sure it doesn’t start as such, but it can be crippling to those living in the present. I’d love to see this expanded, the mother-daughter relationship explored now that the daughter knows the truth.
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Strange how the dead can have such an effect on the living. Very good, very sad, piece.
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Well done you. This makes me want to know (and read) more.
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This could be the introduction to such a cool novel, in which the main character explores her mother’s relationship with her younger sister, her own relationship with her legacy, and the flawed woman who was presented in another way.
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