Last night, I went to sleep to the sound of my two children making brownies together in the kitchen. They were actually in the same room together participating in a joint activity! I thought my heart would burst. Now, when I had last passed through the room, Matthew was saying that the task was nearly impossible because Emily was simply intolerable to work with and far too bossy. Emily was claiming that Matthew thought she was incapable of making even the simplest baking decisions while she was, in fact, somewhat of a master baker. STILL, they were in the same room and brownies were being made. I count it as a real win. For most of their lives, they have fought like a pair of wildebeests in the African desert.
I have never really been able to figure out why they fought so much. Matthew has always been pure boy. He put on a Bob the Builder tool belt, sported a cowboy hat, and carried a super-charged Nerf gun from a very young age. Emily wore a princess dress at all times while home, and normally had on high heels. There was really no reason for them to have any interaction. They did not have to share toys. They didn’t like any of the same things. They had their own bedrooms. Yet, they were drawn to each other for the sole reason of fighting. Matthew would go outside and find a particularly dead bird and delight in placing it on one of Emily’s princess tea plates. I can literally still hear the shrieking. I think it pierced my brain. Emily would destroy Matthew’s Lego buildings to make a school for her Barbies. Barbies went flying across the basement. “Just stay away from each other,” I can remember myself saying. “Don’t even look at each other.” I had obviously read that one in a book on parenting.
In the back of my head, I always knew that I probably had it coming to me though. My sister, Tyra, and I spent most of our childhood years pestering one another. My mother, who was an only child, would always say, “I can’t understand why you two fight like this. I would have given anything to have had a sister when I was growing up.” I can remember thinking that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. Being an only child meant having everything for yourself with no sharing- clearly that was a far superior existence. My mom always went on and on about us getting along. That just wasn’t in the cards when we were young. We were both far too annoying.
Tyra is younger than I am by three years. I do not remember a time when she was not around to remind me that she is three years younger than I am. She was very irritating from a young age- one could almost call her a prodigy. She was a tiny little child, but she had the energy of ten thousand buzzing little hummingbirds. You know how hummingbirds just dart around and never seem to land anywhere? That’s exactly how Tyra was. She was in constant motion. Compare that to me. I was a potato who could read. Everything I liked to do was quiet and still. She would bounce tennis balls off the house outside my bedroom. She would sit in the hall, leaning against my door. She would pick up the other phone when I was talking to my friends. I screamed and yelled, but it never stopped her. She was the ultimate little sister stalker.
Tyra was much less girlie than I was. I loved to play with Barbies and I had lots of them and lots of accessories. Whenever Tyra got a Barbie, she wanted to play hairstylist. She got out her scissors and gave the Barbie a little trim that eventually ended as a scalping. After about five bald Barbies, Tyra was told by Mom that if she cut off one more Barbie’s hair, she would never get another Barbie. Clearly, there was only one solution. She had to start trimming the hair on MY Barbies. She was pretty clever about it though. She knew that Mom would see Barbie hair if she put it in the trash can or left it on the floor. (This next part still makes me laugh so hard!) So, for whatever reason, she decided that the best possible storage option for the Barbie hair would be the lunch money envelopes Mom used for school. So, Tyra took an envelope out of the box, put in the Barbie hair, and put the envelope back into the box.
I am sure that I immediately noticed the bald Barbie and threw a major squealing fit. I do remember that Tyra cut the hair on many of my Barbies. She had a little hair cutting thing going for a while. She even cut the hair on my favorite Dorothy Hamlin Barbie. (How many of you are old enough to remember that classic?) But no one ever stopped to wonder where she had put the hair, until one day when my mom received a phone call from Tyra’s second grade teacher. It seemed that when the teacher had torn open Tyra’s lunch money envelope that morning to shake out her money, money was not the only thing that spilled onto her desk blotter. A bunch of blond hair had also scattered across her desk when she opened the envelope. The teacher wanted to know if my mom knew why there was hair in the envelope. My mom was quite horrified, but she had no idea where the hair had come from and she could not explain why she had not seen it, except that it was early and she had not had much coffee. Needless to say, Tyra had some explaining to do at 3:00 PM. That is when we found out about the Barbie hair. I don’t remember if she got in trouble, but I’m sure she didn’t. Her crimes against me normally went unpunished, as my screaming was considered punishment enough.
Tyra had a sleepover birthday party one year when she was in first or second grade. She had three or four little girls over and they went swimming and had cake and did little party games. I am sure the games involved running and balls and sweating outside. I was in fourth or fifth grade at the time. I found the whole thing very annoying. It was bad enough to have one younger sister at home bothering me, but a whole party of them was just unbearable. I was downstairs watching TV, trying to stay away from them, and they were upstairs running around whispering and giggling. I could hear doors opening and closing and it seemed like their footsteps were going in the direction of my bedroom. I ran up there to see what they could possibly be doing in my room. Tyra had taken my newly acquired training bras and spread them out on the bed for all of her friends to admire. I was completely mortified. Potatoes are very private, particularly in the undergarment department.
When we were kids, we went to the 5-H Ranch quite often. We would load up the car, buy bags of food, and drive through the animal park to feed the zebras, giraffes, ostriches, and whatever else came our way. This was the early 1980s, so safety features in cars were not as advanced as they are now. The kids just kind of hopped around inside the cars like jumping beans. (Not me- I never hopped.) We had a station wagon and Tyra would literally leap from the front seat to the middle seat to the back seat and back again for the entire duration of a car trip. On this particular occasion, we were in a car with just two rows of seats. When we started the route, Tyra was in the front seat between my mom and dad. Both of my parents had bags of food and they were feeding the animals. I was in the backseat by myself. I am sure I had my windows closed. I can’t imagine that I was allowing buffalo snouts in my personal space, even at the age of nine. Some animal came up to my mom’s window and scared Tyra. I think it was an ostrich. It was something with a long neck, because Tyra thought it was getting too close to her spot in the middle. She made a leap to the backseat, where I was. That was all fine and dandy, except that she was holding a full can of Coke when she made this leap. The sticky, sweet, brown liquid made a perfect arch and landed right on top of my head and poured down from my head to my toes. It didn’t land on the car seat or the carpet. It all landed right on my hair, my glasses, and my clothes. At first, I was too shocked to say or do anything. I just sat there. I guess Tyra thought I was okay with it, so she eased back into her seat and started to look at the animals out her window as if nothing had happened. Once the initial shock was over, I was able to let out a nice, long scream. Unfortunately, I was still an hour from home in syrupy, sticky clothes.
As for my crime against Tyra, I did the one thing that made her the very maddest. I ignored her. There is nothing that makes a little sister more upset than having the big sister completely ignore her. I would not respond when she called my name, I would not answer when she banged on my door, and I would draw a line down the center of the back seat in the car. It made her so mad. And sad.
As the years went by, Tyra and I eventually did stop fighting. It really took us both moving out to do it. Now I cannot imagine my life without a sister to share it. We still fuss a little, but it’s all in good fun. I’m a little sad that Emily doesn’t have a sister to share her life with, but I think she and Matthew will be close. And Emily and Alex (Tyra’s daughter) act a lot like sisters. They have always taken vacations together and had all of their holidays together. They can argue just like sisters. There’s nothing like having a sister. She’s your built-in best friend. It just takes you a while to realize it!
