Welcome to the Upside of Downhill, Sister Jen!

Sister Jen is not a nun. She’s my sister. And today’s her birthday. Happy Birthday, Sister Jen!

Though she’s younger than I am, I look up to her. To be literal, she’s 1.5 inches taller than I am, and sometimes she wears high heals or stilts (okay, not really stilts).

More idiomatically, she’s an impressive person: smart, kind in a gruff way, funny, and unpretentious. Her credentials show that she is smart: she was a Morehead Scholar at The University of North Carolina, has a law degree, and is a vice-president for a Wall Street investment banking firm.

I notice her smarts more intimately, however. Last year at the beach, when my siblings, my parents and I were discussing later in life issues, my dad argued that the house was in good shape for my parents as they grew older. As usual, I argued with his every point. Sister Jen accepted his desire to stay in the house, and said, “Okay, if you’re going to stay there, you’re going to need to do some work to make it safe.”

She’d used the magic word: “work.” Dad was going to have to rise from his retirement on the couch and get work done on the house, something he’s always resisted. When my parents returned to Raleigh that summer, they started researching retirement housing, put money down on a place being built, and will move in August.

Sister Jen might like you to believe she’s not kind, but her gruffness is all fluff. She’s also been generous with me over the years. When Sister Jen fell on asphalt and was  helicoptered to the nearest trauma center for emergency brain surgery, I didn’t visit her in Florida because I thought I’d wait until she needed help at her home in New York. (This was before my own brain surgery, in the days when I might have been helpful.) When she returned to New York, she healed more quickly than anyone thought she would, and I never visited. When I had brain surgery a couple of years later, she came for a week to help, and when I tried to apologize for my own failure to show up years before, she waved off the apology. (Perhaps this is my way of apologizing again.)

Hmmm. Well, I guess her gruffness isn’t all fluff. Sometimes she’s gruff when someone tries to take advantage of her, particularly because she’s a woman. The year following my brain surgery, we had dinner as a family, and Sister Jen rose to get herself some ice-cream. I asked her to get me some, too. Dad said, “Hey, how about some of that for me, too, Girl.”

Jen retorted, “ She’s had brain surgery. I’m getting her ice-cream. You can get your own.”

When she was working at a different investment banking firm her first year out of college, her boss called her in to fire her. She fired back at him that she hadn’t been hired to go get coffee for the men and that the place had a glass ceiling. She left that meeting with a promotion.

One of my favorite aspects of Sister Jen is how funny she is. A few years ago, she was sitting at Little Brother Matt’s home, his youngest child G in her lap. Sister Jen said to G, “My nieces and nephews on the other side of the family call me ‘Auntie Cool.’ I think you should have a nickname for me. What should it be?”

Without missing a beat, G said, “Why are your teeth so yellow? We should call you ‘Auntie Yellow Teeth.” (G inherited SJ’s sense of humor.)

An hour or so later, SJ got up to leave, and Little Brother Matt asked why she had to go so early. “I’m going home to bleach my teeth,” she told us all, laughing and looking softly down at G.

Sister Jen and her husband still live in their six-bedroom home, their fourth child leaving the nest this fall. The home has a carriage house, swimming pool, tennis court, and lawn that served as a playfield when we were all younger. She has money in these times when money is so glamorized, but her cool seems separate from her money. For example, she was the first mom in her area to have an ipod perpetually around her neck. This is the kind of cool she is: not pretentious, but hip.

Today, Sister Jen is not just fifty, but in her fifties. I’m guessing she’ll age like Maxine, that grumpy woman on the greeting cards, who says things like, “Everyone is entitled to MY opinion.” She’s smart, kind, funny, and down-to-earth. I love all those things about her. I especially love that she’s my sister.