My sisters are 8 and 9 years older than I am, which means that people actually ask me frequently if I was an “oopsie.” (Not that I’m the manners police, but isn’t that kind of rude?) Eventually I confronted my mom with this question and she reassured me that I was not.

“I asked your sisters if they would rather have a bunch of new toys or a little brother or sister, and they said they would much rather have a new sibling.” My sisters swear this actually happened, although whether or not my mom was already knocked up at the time, I’ll never know. Either way, I exist and my family has always treated me like I’m more exciting than a trunkful of My Little Ponies.

Having two older sisters means that for the majority of my life I got to have two walking, breathing, cut-off jeans-wearing examples of adolescence to study at all times. By the time I hit 12, I knew what was coming. I would wear mascara, talk on the phone too much, listen to The Red Hot Chili Peppers, date a guy with embarrassingly long hair, and eventually work at a shitty job so that I could afford an even shittier car.

My sisters also got married in the same year, when they were both 22, so I got to compare two different examples of what planning a wedding is like. Both involved crying over ordering custom chairs, but only one wedding boiled down into a ruptured appendix and a ruined honeymoon. The lesson learned – A good wedding has one thing: an open bar.

I should probably point out that my sisters and I get along. Despite all of us being fairly different, at our cores we’re all laid-back, somewhat wacky artistic people who really like TV. This thread kept us religiously hanging out in their bedroom every Tuesday night, watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” together while they explained to a 9-year-old me what things like “69” and “mo fo” were.

My sisters never struck me as the type of girls who had body image issues. Maybe that was because they grew up in the ‘90s, before being twiggish was so en vogue. (Try this: Watch “Dawson’s Creek” and then the new “90210.” Girls look different now. My sister Krissy came to my prom march and said, “Girls now are so pretty, it’s scary.”) Not that my sisters weren’t into looking good – they spent plenty of time applying Oxy pads to their skin and wearing belly-bearing shirts, but they never fished for compliments or got down on themselves for gaining a few pounds. Any semblance of normality I had as a teenager in the last decade (I hit 13 in 2000), I credit to them.

Now my oldest sister Jenny has two kids, which makes our family gatherings fun in a whole new way. Since I was the baby until 3 years ago, peekaboo and Pat the Bunny were not frequent occurrences at Thanksgiving. Plus, I get to study what it’s like to live in the burbs and teach kids how to pee in the potty and fight over whether or not to baptize babies in the Catholic church before having to confront any of these milestones myself. Realizing I can make my sister’s baby son stop crying makes the rest of life easier.

Basically, having two older sisters rules, because you get to have siblings, you get to learn from their experiences, and you still get treated like the baby.

–Becky Lang wanted to write about her sisters because today is her sister Jenny’s birthday, and yesterday her niece turned 3.