“I hand her the cigarette and she takes a drag, lets the smoke out through her nose. It rises like an injured cloud and smells like something mysterious. I can\u2019t wait to do that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When a child has siblings a decade older, she gets a glimpse of what might come her way someday. In my family, a sibling that much older served not as a playmate but as an impromptu stand-in for inattentive parents. My family was large and our parents had lost their way, so I watched my older siblings for the clues to survival, saw them accept things as they were. My older siblings played various roles in my life but all of them had a sharper, less-compromising take on the troubles in our family. They couldn\u2019t offer any escape but each had his own way of offering some small respite\u2014a hidden candy, a hand-me-down blouse, a lame excuse for the promises not kept. My sister Alice was a master at finding ways to sidestep difficulties and never tired of helping the rest of us do the same. She expected no credit for being a safe harbor. Her help was instinctive. But she knew there were circumstances I had to accept, troubles that wouldn\u2019t go away. We could look away, and she often did, but I had to find a way to cope. I still try to see obstacles the way she did: troubling but inevitably comical, scary but unlikely to last. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/pitheadchapel.com\/along-for-the-ride\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “I hand her the cigarette and she takes a drag, lets the smoke out through her nose. It rises like an injured cloud and smells like something mysterious. I can\u2019t wait to do that.” When a child has siblings a decade older, she gets a glimpse of what might come her way someday. In my…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":794,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yayserver.com\/maryannmcguigan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}