I got an email two days ago that was from TypePad, saying I had a new comment to my blog. I opened it up and the comment said," you suck! you use to write more....what is up? do you have another interest in your life????"
As soon as I read the "you suck" part, I knew it was from my sister Dana. Dana was born 11 months and 3 weeks after me. Yep, she was an accident. She came home from the hospital on my first birthday. In my baby book (which my mom made about 3 entries in before losing interest and now the baby book is lost anyway) my mom listed on the page for my 1st birthday that my present was "a new sister". There were definitely times when I thought my life would have been much easier if I had gotten a teddy bear or doll or something.
Apparently I was caught trying to kill her by pulling her through the slats in her baby bed at some point. She made up for it by biting me approximately 1,212 times after her teeth came in. (How NOT ironic she is the mom of a renowned biter.) Being so close in age, we were almost like twins, and I remember doing everything together as small children. She was so easy to trick - "here, get in this giant suitcase and I will zip you up but I will let you out after 5 seconds" then "haha, I am going outside to play now while you are stuck in a giant suitcase." She was the one who always got in trouble; I was the devious brain behind all her escapades. "If you go color on your wall, I will color on mine." "If you jump in the pool with your clothes on even though it is February, I will jump in right after you." She would always fall for it, and then I would run tell on her. It is kind of a chicken or the egg thing with how that all worked. Did I trick her into getting into trouble because she was always beating the crap out of me or did she always beat me up because I was getting her in trouble? (I was physically kind of a wimp, anemic and scrawny and I was terrified of her physically. I could only compete with tricks and traps.) Because my parents were big on the concept of spanking, I caused Dana to get lots of spankings. In fact, Dana was ALWAYS in trouble. The stupid thing was, I would get so upset when she would be getting a spanking that I would pitch a tantrum in protest and act up so much that I would usually end up getting a spanking too.
During our high school years we were archenemies most of the time. I did take up for her to my parents when she would get in trouble, which happened frequently and no longer at my urging. At one point she was sent to live with my Dad a few towns over because she was a "discipline problem" and I wrote some of my most eloquent writing, for a melodramatic teenager, on her behalf trying to convince both parents she should get to come home. I am sure once she did get to come home we went right back to being mean to each other. Again, Dana was ALWAYS in trouble.
During college, she and I had completely different lifestyles. She was responsible and worked pretty much full-time while going to school and I was all about the partying. Many, many times I made a distressed drunken phone call in the middle of the night to my sister (I am at a party and "insert random name of current romantic interest" is being a jerk, can you come get me?) Within 20 minutes I would be standing in a parking lot somewhere and see this little white Escort station wagon come barreling in with Dana behind the wheel to rescue me. For this one brief period, Dana was NOT always in trouble.
After college we didn't stay in touch very much. She lived out of state for several years and months would go by without us even speaking. When she finally moved back to Georgia, she moved in with me, bringing her dog, who will only be referred to as "Stink Dog". I won't elaborate, I could write an entire post just on how bad that dog smelled even after coming back from the groomer, and also on his horrible painful pooping problem that had neighbors calling us worried about the distressing noises coming from the yard. Living in a teeny house with Dana, Stink Dog, and my boyfriend at the time was interesting. We had resumed our normal roles, and she was the partier and I was the responsible one. Somehow I was the only person in the house working full-time, the only one paying bills, and as far as I could tell the only one doing any cleaning up. So I made a "chore list" giving Dana and boyfriend at the time a list of tasks and the days to complete them, which was met with much laughter from both and then promptly ignored. After she moved out, we went through another period of falling out of touch.
I think when our Dad was dying we became close again, and her giving birth to Sam and Boo Boo, nephews extraordinaire, insured that she will never be able to shake me out of her life again. She is a great mom and is much more successful than I am, in terms of career and family. She lives next door to my mom and step-dad, which is really funny considering how much conflict there was between the two of them back in the days when she was ALWAYS in trouble. We disagree on lots of things, have very different tastes and interests, but she is a best friend to me. I don't know how I would have made it through the last year if I hadn't had her around. My only complaint is that she will not give me Boo Boo, but she says she needs to have one good kid at least. Sam takes after her.
Last October, at Mom's Suprise Party






