Riding the Bus with my Sister 3

I have two things that I want to talk about Riding the Bus with my Sister. (By the way... Its a VERY good book, and I recommend it to all).

1) I finally found out what it is actually about.

Almost the entire time I was reading, I knew that the book was about a woman going on an adventure with her sister and becoming closer to her. But as I learned more and more about their childhood, I realized it was more than that. When they were younger, as it says in the book, their parents divorced (Actually I’m not sure if the physically divorced... at least not right away). After a while, their mom started to date again (they were living with their mom). She just kept dating and finally she started dating a man who drank and smoked so much, no one else could handle it. After a while, the kids decided they needed an escape. Their brother went to live with their dad, their older sister was old enough to fend for herself, Rachel (the author) was sent to boarding school, and Beth was left there because... (I don’t really know why... They just figured that she would be taken care of). The man and their mom disappeared with Beth, and they had apparently gotten married. After three months of not knowing where Beth was and if she was safe, she had run away and made it to a phone to call their dad for a rescue. The man had abused their mom and hurt Beth.

This whole situation left Beth understandably miserable for a while but eventually she was back to her normal flamboyant self. Near the end of the book (during a flashback) Rachel says, “When I go home for the holidays I watch Beth sleeping and wish I could forget things the way she seems to” (Simon 222). Since the situation, Rachel plunged herself into her work, made no time to have fun or be with others or even think about things. She was never truly able to recover, and this is what I realized the book is actually about: one sister helping another sister recover after all this time. Beth does not really realize that she is helping her sister; she is too busy riding her buses and obsessing over drivers. Never the less, through the whole the whole experience with her sister and the buses, Rachel learns how to recover, and this leads me into the second thing I wanted to talk about.

2) I figured out what Rachel Simon learned.

I suspected that she would learn something from this whole experience, otherwise she would not have written the book, but I did not know what the lesson was. It was most clear for me in this passage: “I wish I had the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know that difference. I wish I could learn the language of Maybe It’s Good Enough... I don’t want to think, ‘I wish she’d behave a little more appropriately today.’ I wish I could change”(Simon 229). All through her childhood, Rachel became frustrated with her sister because she did not (and did not want to) change as fast as everyone else. She realizes that by the end of the year, she is in the same situation she was last year: fulfilling her duties at work and the deal with her sister to ride the buses and visit. She is not getting any more out of life than last year. At this moment she realizes that she needs to change. She needs to let go of all of her work and enjoy life. She needs to be open to new things and forgive.

That's all.

Thanks for reading :)

Next Book: Lord of the Flies