Autobio. Wk 11
Compare/Contrast

Siblings

By Carolyn C

My daughter is my firstborn. My son was born exactly thirteen months and two weeks after his sister. Like a delayed twin. Four years of diapers by the time the youngest was potty trained. Busy years. Fun years. Revealing years. They began to emerge as two distinctively different little people.

Cathy was a petite brunette child with large hazel eyes. She loved playing with dolls and acted like a little mother to her baby brother. Steve had red hair and blue eyes. He began to outgrow his sister by his ninth month. He weighed thirty pounds by the time he was a year old.

Cathy walked at nine months. Steve didn’t walk until he was thirteen months old. He could sit in one spot on the floor and tell his two year old sister what he wanted; she, being the active one, obeyed his requests. For him, I guess it was easier than learning to walk. He started talking early and never stopped. Cathy, on the other hand, was more reserved; my quiet child.

They aroused lots of questions when we were in public. “Are they twins? Are they both yours? Are they adopted? Which one is the oldest?”
In the sixties there was a popular television series called “Family Affair” where the twins, Jody and Buffy, lived with their Uncle Bill. Cathy and Steve could have been stand-ins for Buffy and Jody.

Cathy’s bedroom was cluttered; small toys carpeted the floor most of the time. She didn’t fuss over her clothes, although she always looked like a princess. Steve lined up his toy cars and pairs of shoes in neat rows. Before going to school, he changed his shirt several times until he found one that looked just right with his pants. His hair had to be parted exactly the way he wanted it. His streaks of perfectionism were coming out.
This was the way it was until they reached the age of eight or nine.

Then after the age of nine, their personalities and characteristics switched. Steve became the sloppy dresser; his hair was too long, his room was just short of being condemned by the sanitation department. One time I discovered most of my missing dishes and glasses under his bed, along with banana peels, dirty socks and smelly laundry. I dealt with this situation by keeping his bedroom door closed. It was easier. He didn’t like girls, especially his sister.

Cathy became more particular with her hair, clothes, and grades. Her bedroom looked like a showroom. She had excellent taste in decorating and clothes. She disliked her brother and gave him orders to stay out of her room and her life. They fought every day. I doubted that either one would survive beyond the age of twelve.

For Cathy’s thirteenth birthday a special dinner at her favorite hotel restaurant was planned by her father and me. The food was outstanding and a roving string quartet entertained the diners. (She played violin.) It was a very special occasion to dress up. Cathy loved to dress up. Since her brother hated his suit and other dress up clothes, he ran away, just before we were ready to leave the house. We found him hiding out at the home of a neighborhood friend. We decided to excuse him from the birthday event. It was easier. Besides sports, he loved music and everything about playing in the band, except dressing up. (He played the trumpet.)

Cathy and her girlfriends began to take notice of the opposite sex first. A new era was beginning. During their teen years, these two children of mine began to talk to each other again. In fact, I think they even liked each other, sometimes. For the first time in their lives, they were no longer the same height.

By the time they were in high school, Steve was four inches over the six foot mark. Cathy stayed a petite five foot three. They looked nothing alike. Friends didn’t believe they could be siblings. I wondered how these kids, different in so many ways, could belong to the same family. Cathy was as serious and conscientious as Steve was funny and relaxed. Cathy learned car repair from her boy friends and, in turn, helped her brother keep his VW Bug running. He didn’t share her interest in motors. Steve discovered the creative side of gourmet cooking and tried to teach his sister how to cook. She didn’t share his fascination with cooking.

Cathy, my left brained child, has held jobs in the fields of banking, real estate appraising and foreclosures. She makes lists, is organized beyond belief, has a memory for minute details, and has a talent for understanding a situation from the inside out with a high degree of common sense. Steve is totally right brained, a creative music composer and performer, arranging and producing his first CD at the age of twenty-five. He may forget to pick up his tux at the cleaners, ignore putting gas in the car, lose his wallet, and still come out of his dilemmas smiling and wondering why he drives his sister crazy. They totally frustrate each other. They operate in completely different modes.

As adults, they’ve figured out how to capitalize on their differences, appreciate their individual talents and abilities, and even enjoy each other’s company.
Fortunately, each child found a mate that complements their unique personalities.

As their mother, I survived their monster years, gave up trying to figure them out, deserve the right to brag about their accomplishments, and just enjoy loving them.

My sister, Dolores, and I grew up in the same house, but not in the same family. There were six people in our family. In my family there was myself, my father, who made life miserable for all of us with his mood swings, cruelty, and lack of responsibility, my mom, who was a rock to lean on, a source of love, and an amazing teacher, and, there were my two brothers, Orville and Billy, my baby-sitters, playmates, best friends, and heroes. And, there was my sister, who hated me from my birth.

In my sister’s family there was her, her father, who pretty well fit the description of my father (only with Satanic overtones), her mother, who never did enough for her, and who would not intervene in the, apparently, constant torment inflicted on her by her brothers. A mother who did not understand her, and who had committed the unpardonable sin of having another child (me) And, there were her two brothers, who teased her, who didn’t understand her, and who never did enough for her, and, then, there was me. It goes without saying that I was the thorn in her side from the time I was born. I got all of the attention, I aligned myself with our evil brothers, and I was competition for our mother’s time and attention.

From an early age, I knew that my sister was a very unhappy person. I remember her crying, more than laughing. I remember that she, like my father, could go into an emotional meltdown at the drop of a hat. I remember her, constantly, going to mother to complain about something that one of her siblings was doing. And, I remember that my brothers and I spent more time than we should have trying to not do anything to set her off, although, like my father, it was pretty hard to know what was going to be an offense, in her eyes.

I didn’t really understand that we hadn’t grown up in the same family until she called me, when I was in my mid-forties, to try and mend fences between us. She apologized for having hated me all my life and explained that she had been in therapy for a few years and had come to see that my being born was not a deliberate effort, on my part, to make her life miserable, and that she now realized that most of her anger was really aimed at our father and mother, neither of whom had ever understood her and who, between the two of them, had seemed bent on ruining her life, from her early childhood on.

I indicated that I had survived her dislike of me quite well and as far as I was concerned, we didn’t need to talk about it, again. This opened the door for us to talk more (via telephone) and, eventually, begin to talk about our childhood. That’s when I found out that we had grown up in different families.

I had actually been forewarned by my brother, Bill, after he and his family had visited Dolores in 1970. He said that listening to her talk about her past was like watching a movie that he’d never seen, but someone had told him about. He recognized some of the background in the scenes, but the dialogue and events were unrecognizable. He, also, pointed out that my sister had co-opted some of the stories of my mother’s harsh and unhappy childhood and told them as having happened to her.

Other than a three week stay with her and her family, when my oldest daughter and I moved to California in 1972, Dolores and I had very little contact, from about 1960 to when she called to ask forgiveness, I did not have any personal experience with her revisionist history of our collective past. But, after that first call, we began to talk. At first, we probably talked no more than two or three times a year, and I would catch the disparity between her memories and mine, but the conversations, usually, weren’t very long and I always thought, “What the hell, it’s not worth arguing about.”

As the years went on, our calls began to get longer and she began to want to talk more about our past. Then, it became obvious to me that it was never going to make sense to argue about it because we had obviously been raised in different families.

In my family there were hard times, but I always had a wonderful mother who, even in the hardest of times, tried to find something to laugh about, and time to sing and play with us children. We had no money to buy games, so, we did the traditional card games, and my mom taught us to jump through a broom, play jacks, and pick up a dime off of the linoleum with your bare toes. She read to us and taught us to cook. She shared her enthusiasm about every new interest in her life, from astronomy to reincarnation, from geology to history, we learned it all with her.

In my family there were always my brothers who teased me and taught me. They played with me and protected me. My mother worked from the time I could remember, and my brothers cooked and cleaned and cared for my sister and I from the time they were about six or seven. They helped me learn to ride Satan, Billy’s horse, and they took me on hikes. We had ‘dirt clod fights’ in the neighbor’s plowed field, and, once, when Billy and I were playing at this and I was laughing, he accidentally got me right in the mouth and he and I, both, thought I was going to choke to death before he could clear my mouth. Then we laughed about my ‘black’ tongue and how dirty my face was. Once, in an incredibly cold winter, they persuaded me to stick my tongue to a cold shotgun barrel. It stuck; they laughed. I got over it. They were great brothers. Up until Dolores was about eleven, my brothers would, periodically, try to include her, after that they just seemed to give up on her.

In Dolores’ family, she had a mother who did not understand her, a mother who left her to fend for herself in face of endless persecution, a mother who “if she wouldn’t have been so strong, our father would have stepped up and been more responsible” (I think we would have starved). She never seems to remember the senior class pictures that she “had to have” and my mom and my brother, Billy paid for, or the Senior Prom when she wanted to have a new dress for and the same two people bought it for her. With Dolores, no sacrifice made for her was ever acknowledged.

In Dolores’ family my brothers had no redeeming qualities. They had picked on her and tormented her and that was pretty well what her life was about, until she moved away. (Orville was the same brother who, when my sister got pregnant in 1957, and he was in the army, sent her an allotment check and told her to use what she needed and put some of it in the bank for him. After five years of allotment checks, when he left the army, he came home to nothing in the bank. She never forgave him for being upset. Billy was the brother who, during this same difficult time for her, paid off a set of sterling silver tableware she had bought on time payments, because she refused, hysterically, to just let it go back. He also bought clothes and things for her new baby.) My mother never owned anything silver except some silver dollars she had saved.

And then there was me. I was, apparently, born to make her life miserable and to take all of the attention away from her. And, I seemed to have succeeded.

My sister has a daughter and four sons. She bemoans that fact that they do not come visit her, and cannot understand it, considering how hard she worked to be a good mother to them. I remember it somewhat differently. When my daughter and I stayed with them, in ’72, I was horrified to find that she was, to a great degree, a carbon copy of our father; still explosive, the same outbursts of anger, and verbally abusive with all four of her children.

She, and her husband, even did the ‘adults and children are two separate species thing’, just like our father. They had cheap bread for the kids and good bread for the adults and treats in the refrigerator and cupboard for adults and cheaper things for the kids. That wasn’t happening while I was there. I didn’t consider my daughter a second-class human being and felt the same about my nieces and nephews. They were always delightfully horrified, when, left to fix them dinner, I got out whatever worked from either side of the cupboard. My mother would never have tolerated this from our dad, but, he would buy expensive (to us) little treats, and put them in the refrigerator. Mom never told us we couldn’t have them, but we knew how angry he would be if we got into them.
After all of her bemoaning what a horrible parent he had been, my sister had chosen to behave the same way.

She called me, recently, to tell me that she had had a falling-out with her daughter. She couldn’t understand why her daughter wasn’t nicer to her, considering how good of a parent she had been. I bit my tongue.

I remember a conversation that she had with her son and passed on to me. This was right after she had completed therapy and was explaining to her youngest son, Damon, that the therapist told her she had anger issues. She said, “Damon laughed and said, “Mom, you’ve been angry ever since I’ve known you.” That pretty well says it all.

My sister and I grew up in two different families.

On December 16, 1944, one day after the invasion of Mindoro Island in the Philippines—under constant suicide plane attacks—the six black stewards mates assigned to Motor Torpedo Task Unit 70.1.4 made this concrete Japanese pillbox their personal living quarters—the safest place on the island—because they were noncombatants whose only duties were to cook and wait on Navy officers. The Navy was segregated in 1944.

The shock of the Pearl Harbor attack failed to break down racial barriers in the Navy. Although three million patriotic African Americans registered for the draft in 1940, only 2,000 were found eligible to serve by local white draft boards. Strong protests by black organizations ensued and by 1942 nearly one million blacks were in Army and Navy Uniforms, but not Coast Guard.

Incredibly, a Navy manual cautioned officers not to use such terms as “nigger,” “coon,” “jigaboo,” “sambo” or “darky.” In response to a direct appeal by black leaders, Navy Secretary Frank Knox replied, “In our history we don’t take Negroes into a ship’s company.”

Ironically, the hero of the Pearl Harbor attack was a young man named Dorie Miller, a black ship’s cook third class who took over an unmanned fifty-caliber machinegun he was not trained to use and shot down at least three Japanese planes. On April 1, 1942, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander of the Pacific Fleet, pinned the Navy Cross for extraordinary courage on Miller’s uniform.

Can you believe that the most racist PT boat officer in the 26-boat task unit—a six-foot-four-inch white Alabama University football player decided to join the six black stewards mates in their cozy and safe pillbox? He abandoned his post as second officer on a PT boat under fire and crawled into that pillbox. Of course, he was placed under arrest, sent to the rear, jailed, court-martialed, found guilty of deserting his post and kicked out of the Navy dishonorably. Hell no! The Navy evacuated this racist coward and delivered him to a mental hospital for psychiatric evaluation and treatment. The Navy saw an obvious act of cowardice as “battle fatigue” after one day of Japanese suicide plane attacks. How else could one explain this Negro-hating, white racist’s behavior?

After combat settled down on Mindoro to a nightly, single-plane bombing attack, the Seabees erected the first permanent structure—the officers’ club. Now the six stewards mates had duties to perform and moved out of the pillbox into a tent.

This event and many others are not recorded in the official history of the task unit, probably because the Alabama ensign is only one of three volunteer PT boat officers who abandoned their boats under daily kamikaze attacks. One boat had no officers and was manned entirely by enlisted men. In fact, the officer who wrote the official history of Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Thirteen to which I was attached is one of the three officers who deserted their boats under fire but were never punished.

War is hell and madness. Those whom the gods would destroy they first drive mad, and those who make war are mad. As Father Andrew Greeley pointed out in a recent Chicago Sun-Times column, presidents who start wars never end them—Truman in Korea, Johnson in Vietnam and Bush in Iraq. I found Father Greeley’s column in one of my favorite websites, www.commondreams.org. If you want to know what is really going on in our mad, mad world today, I highly recommend a daily visit to www.commondreams.org and www.truthout.org. The contrast between the news on these websites and the so-called "mainstream media" is clear and sharp.

My husband was a wus. Oh, he thought he was a big, brave he-man, but… well… maybe he just wasn’t used to dealing with people like me and my friends. When we got together in our mid-40s we each brought with us friends we had known since forever.

Soon after his 49th birthday Joel announced three things he wanted to: 1. jump out of an airplane, 2. get a tattoo, 3. get his ear pierced. He wanted to do these before he turned 50 so he could say he did them in his youth. This was before tattoos and body piercing were popular. I said, “Fine. Do it.” The expression on his face suggested that was not the desired response.

He made the announcement to his family. His father ignored him, his brother’s harrumph terminated the conversation. Joel grinned and preened. He made the announcement to his forever friends Clarke and Jean. Clarke, a third generation pilot, made it clear he saw no reason to jump out of a perfectly good plane. His silence expressed disapproval on the other topics. Joel grinned and preened. Jean scoffed and sputtered, huffed and muttered. You should have seen Mr. Peacock. With each scoff the tail feathers fanned wider. With each sputter that silly grin spread further. And with each huff Joel’s neck stretched higher until he was strutting proud with a ‘look at me this is great’ expression. I began to wonder whether the purpose of the announcement was to shock or to accomplish.

The joy of jumping from a plane escaped me, but if he wanted to be stupid far be it from me to stop him. I told him just to make sure the insurance papers were in order and remember that death benefits pay better than disability. That sucked some of the wind out of him.

I liked the idea of Joel sporting an earring and tattoo and thought they would be perfect for him, especially since he fancied that he was a pirate in a prior life. He was a California kid and liked to dress casual preferring shorts to slacks, and he often wore shoes without socks or went barefoot. His place of employment had no dress code so these adornments would be acceptable. He was a reserve police officer and tattoos and earrings were against department rules. But he served only two or three days a month, so he could hide them for that short time. I could see no obstacles.

I told Sharon, a forever friend of mine. She told Alberta, Bob and Jim. They told Tim, Matt, Patti, and others. Word spread. Sharon gave Joel the name of the tattoo parlor where she and others gone for tattoos. She lectured to make the tattoo big enough to be seen and put it someplace where it showed; otherwise there is no point in getting one. At Sharon’s annual Christmas party Joel’s upcoming ear piercing and tattoo was a major topic of conversation. Patti told stories; she had several for every occasion. Jim, Tim and Matt gave him an earring, a silver pig on account of his being a policeman. I made two earrings and gave them to him with a certificate saying I’d pay for the piercing.

Joel was now in a position commonly knows as stuck. He couldn’t back out. After Sharon’s lecture he decided to get a tattoo on his ankle. There it would be seen in his normal soxless attire and be easy to cover if he needed to hide it.

At the tattoo parlor we picked out a design, a little frog. The tattoo artist said it would be a long wait before she could start so I went to a nearby restaurant to get us sodas. I think she just wanted to get rid of me. The tattoo was almost finished when I returned. Joel’s face was full of pain and I’m sure he was fighting back tears. As we left he regained his composure and said few words. He followed all instructions and it healed well.

Joel showed the tattoo to his family. His father ignored it, his brother harrumphed. Joel grinned and preened. So far so good. He showed it to Clarke and Jean. They huffed and scoffed and grumped and muttered. Mr. Peacock spread his tail feathers and strutted. Mrs. Peacock enjoyed the show. Later Jean angrily asked how I could have allowed him to do it. I smiled, said I liked it, and that I was with him when he got it. She reacted as if I’d committed a major betrayal. Mrs. Peacock grinned and preened.

After the tattoo Joel became very quite about the other goals. I didn’t mind about the plane, but I wanted him to get his ear pierced. I’d have offered to do it, but figured he’d react to that the way his friends reacted to his tattoo. Joel was very vague whenever I asked when he planned to do it, but he couldn’t evade Sharon’s questioning. He tried to make a joke about not knowing which ear to pierce; she glared at him. She interacted with police officers in her job, so when he said he couldn’t do it because of the police department she bellowed, “Do you know how many officers I’ve seen with band-aids on their ears? There are ways to make it not show if you want to.” Poor Joel, he cowered. I pushed until he meekly said the tattoo had hurt so bad he couldn’t imagine the pain of an earring piercing. That was the end of the subject.

Yup, my husband was definitely a wus!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Wus: a slang term, a combination of wimp and pussy, or someone afraid to do a task. A term often used by Joel and Clarke in reference to the other when trying to dare the other to do something that he himself wouldn’t do.

“Yes, we can accept Sharon into our brand new rehabilitation program – and Medicare will foot the bill.” What a relief! Everything had been at a standstill when
Sharon completed her last outpatient therapy, but what do we do next? My 19-year-old-daughter had suffered a cardiac arrest and was in a coma for several weeks. She was doing very well, but it seemed obvious to me that while she was still making progress, she needed continued stimulation. But every program that I called had an extensive waiting list, and I was terrified that she would “plateau” and the progress would stop.

It was a stroke of luck that I noted the announcement of the opening of the Paoli Hospital’s new rehabilitation program. What made this even more exciting was that Sharon and I had just moved into a new apartment that was across the street from the Bala station of the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. My mind was racing. Sharon could get on the train here and in 10 minutes she could exit at the last stop – in Paoli, just across the street from the hospital. Wow! Maybe I could even get a part-time job and start to live my life again.

The next morning we went to Paoli to register, but were soon faced with another challenge. When I told the outpatient administrator of our plans, she said “We will not accept Sharon unless you bring her here every day and spend the day with her here. You must take her from one class to the next and you must go with her to the cafeteria to get her lunch.” My protests and pleading that Sharon could do this on her own fell on deaf ears. Nothing I said would change her mind. So, for two weeks I followed their rules and was bored to tears.

While driving home on that last Friday, we passed a Kmart, and I had an idea. We went in and I bought knitting needles and several skeins of navy blue wool. At home, I cast on stitches and knitted a few rows to start a wool scarf.

On Monday morning I drove Sharon to the hospital and I sat down in the lobby and started to knit. I worked on it all day, never leaving to be with Sharon. By Wednesday afternoon, I had about 14 feet of scarf lying on the floor. That afternoon the out-patient coordinator came over to me and asked what I was doing, and how long this scarf be when it’s finished. I asked her how Sharon was doing without my help – or hadn’t she noticed. “Oh, she’s doing fine. Now that I see that, I can see why you wanted her to take the train by herself. Yes, beginning tomorrow morning she can come in without you.” The blue scarf had served its purpose.