One of my friends who has been following this blog told me “I love how you acknowledge you were the boss lady.” Oh, girl. If only you knew! I laughingly told her that I took my role as eldest very seriously, and this is true. But honestly, it went waaay deeper than that.

When we were very little, when we first arrived in Alexandria immediately after mom’s divorce, I remember playing in the basement of our new house with my toddler sister, Sheesh. Mom had sent us down there while she unpacked upstairs, clearly telling us to “stay out of the boxes.” At the grand old age of four-ish, I had no clue about what was happening in mom’s world, I just knew that she was sad. When strains of Mario Lanza’s “Be My Love” began drifting down the basement stairs I knew that the crying would start soon, so I invented a game to play with my little sister which involved a lot of climbing in and out of the boxes mom had clearly told us to stay out of. To this day I don’t know if I was trying to distract us from mom’s sadness or simply being a dumb kid with a ten second attention span who forgot the warning. But I do remember thinking, “Uh-oh, she’s playing that song again. Mom is sad.”  

So, imagine my delight when I discovered that one very large box which may have been a wardrobe or held an appliance in another universe, was actually not a box at all. It was a pirate’s ship! And I, having gone sailing with my father many times when we lived in Cali, was naturally the captain. The not quite two-year old Sheesh was my crew, and the crew had to keep climbing outside the boat to take care of it and then back inside for her next instruction. That’s just the way it works, right? But it was a very large pirate ship, and Sheesh was a very small toddler, and as fate would have it we sailed right into a squall. I didn’t know it was called a squall back then, I just knew the seas became extremely rough, and at some point while either climbing out or back into the ship, my crew sustained an injury. A sort of serious one. A blood-spilling-all-over-the-deck one.

That treacherous ghost ship had turned itself back into a box (which we were supposed to stay out of) and Sheesh had fallen onto the open cardboard edge, splitting her chin wide open. Blood slushed everywhere. I started screaming for mom, who came running downstairs yelling at me “What did you DO? You were supposed to me watching your sister! How could you let this happen?!?” I don’t remember her actual words. But I remember the implicit accusations. Sissy bleeding to death in front of me was clearly my fault. I had been in charge, and I blew it.

At any rate, Mom was not about to let Sheesh bleed out, so she grabbed a towel to apply pressure to Sheesh’s chin and marched the three of us next door to meet our new neighbors. She introduced herself quickly, explained the situation and asked them to watch me, while she took Sheesh to the hospital. Turns out the next-door neighbor was a dentist, with one daughter my age and another daughter a year older. He offered to drive my shaking mom and crying sister to the hospital, and left me with his wife and daughters. I remember being torn with worry over my sister, and yet delighted that there were kids my age living next door.

In the end, it took sixteen stitches to pull Sheesh’s chin back together. Fifty years later, she still has the scar to prove it. That story has become part of our family legend, and over the years she and I have joked about it often, but I am convinced that she wasn’t the only one scarred by that event.

We only ended up staying at that house for about a year. By the time I was five-ish we had moved to that apartment building in Silver Spring, and I really was in charge – of Sheesh and our new baby sister.  Back in Alexandria, mom had a nanny looking after us. After Peeper was born, she could no longer afford either the house or a babysitter, so during the day while she was at work, I was the one who looked after us. Please don’t judge Mom by 21st century standards. Realize that she was desperate. She had to work. She had to pay the rent and feed her girls. Her family were all in Illinois and Texas. So, she had to leave us for a few hours every day. It was the early 70s. Kids grew up faster then and parents parented differently back then. So, every day she left five-year-old me in charge of my three year old and newborn sisters. I was responsible for feeding them, changing Peeper’s cloth diapers, washing them out in the toilet, and keeping the apartment intact and clean.

I know how horrible it sounds and yet I still find myself wanting to protect and defend Mom. She was the oldest in her family too. Knowing what I know today about her family’s dysfunction – which was nearly at the level of V.C. Andrews’ “Flowers in the Attic” – our childhood seems like something out of Sesame Street. The point is, Mom was also in put in charge of her siblings at a very young age. And she had three to look after: a sister and two brothers. So having me take care of just two little girls for a few hours each day probably made sense to her.  Not a perfect solution, but a solution. Besides, it was only temporary. She had already met that service manager. We were already going to Virginia Beach every weekend. She had a plan.

Unfortunately, those few hours every day were often the stuff of nightmares. My middle sister – the hapless mate who now had a scar on her chin – also had a fascination with knives. This is an affinity that has continued her entire life. She still has an impressive collection of knives in her home, both hidden and on display. Mom had to tie all the kitchen drawers shut to keep Sheesh out of them, but I had to untie one of them to get to the spoons for cereal. God help me if I forgot to tie it back up. It should be noted that, to my knowledge, Sheesh never cut herself with one of her preciouses, she just liked to leave them around where she could see them and flirt with the cutting edge.

Sheesh also developed a love for visual and tactile sensory input at a very young age. She often woke up before me, and would toddle her way into the kitchen, looking for a little snack. She’d push a chair over to the kitchen counter and climb up it, to get to the food cabinets. Then she’d start pulling out boxes and one by one dump their contents out onto the kitchen counter and floor. This way, she could see what was in the box and decide if it was something she wanted to eat. She liked the sound of the falling food and the feel of running her fingers through the cereal. Can I tell you how many times I found her, to my horror, up on the kitchen counter spilling out the boxes of cereal? Or how many times I swept up that cereal and put it back in the box so that mom wouldn’t find out?  Even now, thinking about it now gives me the shivers. Partly because the counter she stood on was right next to the stove, and partly because I realize now that we ate that cereal after I swept it up. UGH. No wonder I have trust-issues about opened food packages today!

Sheesh also loved-loved-loved baby powder. I mean, she was obsessed with it. And we had plenty, thanks to Peeper and her cloth diapers. Sheesh liked to squeeze the bottle and watch the powder poof out and settle onto every surface. Again, this horrified me. Who do you think had to clean up that mess?? Can’t you just sit over here like a normal person and watch the Electric Company with me? But, no. Sheesh kept me on my toes. And this was super important, because if mom came home to a dirty apartment, someone was going to get their ass whipped.

Do you see why I had to be so bossy?

The worse part for me was always at the end of the day, when Sheesh was supposed to be napping, and I could breathe easy for a few minutes and watch Mr. Rodger’s Neighborhood. I knew that when the closing music of MRN started playing, Ma would walk through the door, and I was no longer in charge. BUT… if Sheesh got up and I didn’t know it, she’d be in the damn bathroom playing with the powder. Our mother would come home and find the mess, and then beat the crap out of Sheesh. And that was my fault. Sheesh was and is an inherently stubborn human, and I think those beatings Ma gave her, trying to break her of those crazy habits, only stood to reinforce Sheesh’s stubbornness and my sense of failure as her protector.  To this day I love Mr. Rodgers but hate his theme music. I still get butterflies hearing those opening notes to It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

Sidenote: On some level, I think Ma did break Sheesh of her love for spilling food on the floor. To this day Sheesh abhors a “crunchy kitchen floor” and always has a broom close at hand to sweep up an offending crunch. Not recommending Ma’s methods. Just pointing out that she wasn’t completely crazy. At least not on that count.