My thirteen year old son and my ten year old daughter get along well.  They have different likes and interests and don’t fight a lot.  Their biggest squabbles are what movies to watch on family movie nights and who ate the last ice cream bar.  While I think this is great, I can’t help but think of my own childhood that was sort of like “Hunger Games” in comparison.

Looking back at my childhood, I have many fond memories.  Having two younger sisters was a lot of fun.  If I got into a fight with one sister, there was another one to take her place.  As the oldest sibling, I ruled the roost and made the laws.  I am two years senior to my middle sister P and almost 6 years older than J, the youngest.  For years, I was physically larger and taller than both of them.  Growing up with two younger sisters and two crazy parents can really sharpen a girl’s sense of humor and survival skills.  We fought about all kinds of things…not just movies or ice cream.  I don’t know when we started to joke about each other mercilessly or play pranks on each other…but it hasn’t stopped.

As a teenager, my room was covered with 80’s celebrities…JFK Jr., Duran Duran, the Soloflex guy.  I subscribed to Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and watched Elsa Klench on Style.  I was just sooo cool.  One day I came to my room to find that there were mustaches on several of my posters.  That was call for extreme action.  I marched to J’s room and beat up Mingy, her favorite pillow.

For some strange reason, we were obsessed with lip balm in the 80’s.  Blistex in those round canisters was all the rage.  Keeping interlopers from my Blistex was practically a full time job.  I used my Blistex in a uniform and clockwise fashion, it was always clean and of course perfect.  My sister J’s Blistex had an upside cone design.  My sister P’s container always had fuzz, random bits of mystery flakes and looked like it was stabbed with a toothpick.  If I didn’t hide my Blistex, I would find that one of them had dug a nail into the middle of the canister!

 

 

Secret video taping was also a constant danger in my house.  My sister J would place a cam corder on top of the fridge just to tape us with morning face and bed heads.  And forget about sleeping happily on tour buses while on vacation.  She made sure to take multiple shots of me dozing with my mouth open and my head in an angle that gave me two chins.

My sisters also had a collection of fake bugs.  I remember pulling back my comforter and finding a line of fake ants on my pillow.  I also let out a blood curdling scream when I found a large plastic spider in my dresser drawer.

Before you feel too sorry for me, I was not so innocent growing up.  I loved imitating my sisters, making up terrible nicknames and shaming them just for fun.  Luckily, as adults, the pranks have died down.  However, my sister J sent me a picture that my son had texted her.  It was a picture of me asleep on the sofa with mouth wide open and my head at an angle that allowed my chin to double!