MUSINGS AND MISHAPS

Author: Lindsey Whitton

I have been surrounded by girls my entire life. My family is mainly defined and fueled by estrogen — 86 percent of my immediate family members are women. My poor father is surrounded by three generations of feisty, intelligent and sometimes completely frustrating females.

Lately, adolescent girls and their potential for manipulative behavior have been receiving lots of high-profile press. A cover story in The New York Times Magazine recently queried, "How Mean Are They?" The teenage girls profiled went beyond mean to scary. A new book explores the "extraordinary intimacy and bewildering cruelty" of young girls' shifting alliances, and is entitled "Best Friends, Worst Enemies." Girls, practically from birth on, are light-years ahead of their male counterparts in terms of being socially aware, and sometimes this translates into a misuse of power.

The stings and poison arrows of early adolescence, painful as they are, can serve to shape and strengthen. But for some, the intense pain reverberates and crushes. I look at so many girls and wonder how they are going to make it through the tumultuous pre-teen and teenage years. I think back on the fights, the grudges, the painful gossip, the silent treatment and the petty resentment that can simmer among young girls. For me, when I was that age, the unconditional friendship and support of my sisters was one real constant.

I am the oldest of four sisters. My relationships with my sisters have the fun, the support and the goofiness of best friendships without any of the serious pain or chasms.

Together, we can be stereotypical girlie-girls; we can make my dad roll his eyes and we can giggle for hours. We wear pastels happily and, until the age of 10, sported gigantic hair bows. We like to shop and talk on the phone. We drive around singing every song on the radio with the windows rolled down. We lie out in lawn chairs in the back yard passing magazines down the row.

We can fight without it meaning anything, and we can commiserate when one of us has decided that our parents "are being absolutely and completely unreasonable." We are formidable if one of us has suffered, forming an invisible but invincible shield around the wounded party. We are all completely different and if we hadn't adopted a lot of the same mannerisms and phrases, not to mention all inheriting the same blonde hair and blue eyes, you might not even know that we were related.

I don't really have any definitive answers as to why we get along so well or why none of us will ever be heard uttering the phrase, "I hate my sister!" I can imagine, however, that some of it has to do with luck and some has to do with how we were raised. We are lucky that we have diverse talents, which minimizes dangerous competition. We are also lucky that we fall into two convenient age groupings (the Big Girls — three years apart and then a gap before the Little Girls, who are also three years apart.)

Our parents have encouraged each of us to discover and pursue our own interests and talents. I pursued writing and foreign travel, another sister is a very talented junior skier with a Vermont state championship to her credit. Another sister plays soccer and figure skates. My parents also insisted on a lot of family time, usually without huge complaints because we had a gaggle of built in buddies.

Before you start gagging about my family's Lily Pulitzer-brand sweetness-and-light, I have to admit that we can reveal our dark sides. We can become jealous, we steal each other's favorite sweaters and forget to return them, we obsess about totally random and insignificant slights … in other words, we reveal our manipulative sides and my father runs for the hills. But the storm never lasts long.

I know people, however, who don't like their sisters at all, or who assume that differences among siblings spell incompatibility. Some sisters view each other as annoying, live-in manifestations of the teenage girl-problems waiting for them at school, further magnified because resentments can't be cloaked under a cloud of recess smiles.

I always thought that someday I wanted lots of daughters, but now I am more apprehensive. I wonder if I will be able to foster an environment where girls can thrive and learn to love and rely on one another rather than argue and compete.

Maybe lots of little boys would be easier — more trips to the emergency room, but at least boys forgive and forget!

Last week, as I spent seven hours alone in my car in order to spend two hours surprising my sister on her 16th birthday, I thought about the phrase my mother used to always recite when we would squabble, "Friends come and go, but a sister is forever." Sometimes, if you're lucky, I thought, and the long drive was suddenly worth it because a sister waited at the other end.