Someone to look up too

I grew up in a small town in Germany, more precisely in a tiny village called Oberhaching near Munich. 

My parents have been married for ages, they are the kind of couple that are hard to find these days. My mom lays out my dads clothes every morning and she gets up with him, to have a cup of coffee in the morning before he goes to work and she crawls back to bed just for a another hour or two. Until he calls her, to wake her up or to hear what she is doing. Then he comes home, they have dinner at seven and then they watch TV together. Every night, and every day for more then twenty years. Sounds boring to you, well that's sad. Because to me, that just sounds like the kind of marriage I would want to have.

I look up to my parents for having managed to find each other in this crazy world, where one out of two marriages falls apart and where none of us believe in soulmates anymore.

But there is another person I look up to. My older sister. Seven years older than me, almost eight.

When I was still little I was so impressed by her. My parents trusted her completely and for good reasons. I thought she had the perfect relationship, the perfect boyfriend, the perfect friends and the perfect grades. All in all, the perfect life. But as all of us, she experienced setbacks. But funny enough, that just made me look up to her even more. Because she never gave up, always followed through with what she thought was right. She never listened to anyone but herself, not even to my parents. And they can be quite convincing and sometimes they can seem mean, even though I know they love us from the bottom of there heart and want to protect us. 

I have always been jealous of her, she had all I ever wanted. And to be honest, she still does. I am the rebel of the family, or at least I used to be. I wanted to go out and party when I wasn't supposed to and I never managed to make a man stick to me for long enough... but my sister found her true love, her soulmate. When you see them together, you just know, this is how it is supposed to be. And I envy her so much, you can't imagine... on my way of finding something at least half as beautiful as what she has, I have gone over a few boyfriends, some of which I am not very proud of. 

But I am not the romantic one of the family. It even seems like I am not the one that has family, house with garden and fence, written in her future. I am the career-oriented one. I travel around the world because that's what you do when you are in the hospitality business. I have crazy working hours, and I even do some overtime to impress the boss. I study like crazy, top of my class, because this job is what I want to do. I want to be a business woman. I want to be the general manager of the big hotels of this world.

So I look up to my sister, and I envy her, because she has, what I gave up when I started my insaningly-expensive hospitality management studies... a steady partner to love. A home. 

And crazy enough, I had to open a blog to tell her that, because we were not raised to spill our feelings out on a table... we were raised to be strong! 

And I will be strong, because I want my family to be proud of me. Maybe they won't be proud of me because I managed to raise a family, but they should at least be proud of me for what I'll become.