Facebook Friend or Foe?

I am now Facebook friends with my ex-step-sister.

I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

I was 5 and she was 6 when my mom and her dad got married. She spent the school year with her mom back East and spent summers with her dad, and by default, the rest of us. That first summer, my brother and I got lots of lectures about how we needed to be nice and make an effort to be friends because it was going to be so awkward for her. We understood.

I shared my room, my toys, and all my belongings. We showed her around the neighborhood and made sure she was always included when we played with our friends. She came to birthday parties and sleep-overs, bike riding adventures, neighborhood games of sneak at dusk, endless hours of swimming, etc.

Yet there was still so much tension.

We were each given a list of chores. When my brother & I were still busy doing our chores like mowing the lawn, cleaning the pool, washing the sheets and making the beds, when her only job was to take the sheets off the bed, we didn't understand. When I would try to be considerate and share my things with her, she would scream and throw the items at me, because they were on her side of the room. I would get in trouble for it. I walked on eggshells. When the rest of the step-family (grandma, cousins, etc) would get together for outings and sleep-overs and exclude my brother and I, we knew it, and we did not understand.

Eventually, we got tired of being nice. We knew it would be easy to rile her up, so we teased her. We went outside to play and stopped asking her to come with. We co-existed and tolerated each other, but we were never ever close or friends.

As we got older and went through junior high and high school, I constantly felt compared to her. Look how tall she is! How blonde! How pretty! How thin! How popular! How athletic! She would roll in with her Guess jeans, bikinis, and her yearbook full of photos of her with her various boyfriends, and I would voluntarily enroll in summer school and walk back and forth every day in my Mervyn's outfit, just to get out of the house. We still shared a room, but we barely spoke.

She came to live with us permanently when she was 18. My brother had gone off to college, so we didn't share a room anymore. I was a senior in high school, so I was busy with school, work, and my friends, and she did...whatever it was that she did. I didn't really care what she did. I think the feeling was mutual. You stay out of my way, I'll stay out of yours. We didn't share the same interests or friends. We weren't mean or rude, we just spent as little time as possible together. In our early 20s we both moved out and got married. We would see each other at family functions and holidays. We exchanged our meager gifts and were courteous and civil. We didn't call or get together unless we were obligated to do so. It wasn't so much that we disliked each other at that point, we were just so different and had nothing in common, and neither of us was really willing to make much of an effort.

Then, after 20 years, our parents got divorced and it was bitter and weird, and we no longer had family functions and holidays. So its been like this for about 10 years. We live about 10 minutes away, and we send each other a Christmas card with a picture of our family, but that's it.

And now we're Facebook friends, and I'm not sure if I like it or not. We're still vastly different, and we still have nothing in common, and I'm guessing she feels exactly the same way.