Don't mess with the family

My Sister is perhaps the greatest sister anyone could ever have.  For the most part, we didn't fight.  My sister always looked out for me and protected me.  She was always there for me as "the big sister"  She knew how to put the toy surprise together at the bottom of the cereal box.  She blazed the trail ahead of me.  I often thought about what it must have been like for her because there was no "big sister" to show her.  The buck stopped with her.  My childhood memories are full of her.  We sat in New Mexico bunk beds playing this "pizza board" game.  We told each other our secrets.  She taught me how to use a curling iron, what to say to a boy, helped me to study for tests.  She was loving and kind.  When I had an audition, I found a good luck note in my viola case.  She drove a long way to see me in a play.  When we were really little, in Pennsylvania, we waited together at a bus stop every morning.  And every morning this boy would tease his sister in the cruelest manner telling everyone that she wet the bed.  Everyone except my sister and me would laugh at the little girl.  The scary thing for me was that I had the worst bed wetting problem when I was a kid.  Yet, even though this was the topic of conversation every morning at our bus stop---my sister never ever said a word about my problem.  Eventually, I would grow out of it.  But, my sister never ever told a living soul.  That's just how she was.  She always had my back.  Later, when we were older she had my back too.  

She once beat the tar out of my step mother right on our driveway.  First, you have to know my sister is not a thug.  In fact, my sister grew up to be a rocket scientist--literally.  Her's was more a case of righteous indignation.  On that particular day, my step- mother was yelling at me and beating me (as she was prone to do.  My favorite was when she would rip my hair out in fistfuls while it was still wrapped around a roller. ) My step-mother was a special kind of evil but that is a subject for another blog.  My sister was home from college, and playing basketball on the driveway with me when my step mother started in.  My sister gave her a warning to stop beating me.  She promised if she didn't ----she would give her what she was doing to me.   Never missing a chance to escalate things to the dangerous and insane, my step-mother didn't stop.  My sister came at her so fast and so furious that it was like a cobra strike, powerful, efficient and lethal.  After years of physical and emotional abuse from that woman, it was the greatest day of my life.  It was as if moses himself told the pharaoh to let my people go.  Needless to say that was the end of my sister's visit.  But later that night, as I sat across the table from my step-mother,  I wondered where she had got so many bruises on her arm.  I thought, "Man, she must be really clumsy ---and then I realized with a delighted spark that by golly that's what my sister did to her in my defense."  It was a thing of beauty.  My sister was always my family in that way.  Family is such a wonderful and special thing.  It is the center of all my happiness.  My husband, the most sainted man on the face of the earth is my greatest happiness.  And my children, fill my life with joy everyday (and an endless amount of work). My son is possibly the funniest person on the planet--and so thoughtful.  Some afternoons, my father will answer his phone right in the middle of his busy work day to talk to me.  I get so much joy talking to him and laughing with him.  I love the way my father puts words together to relay a story.  He is a word-smith.  He can put you right there in the story with not one wasted or unnecessary word.    Maybe that is why family is under such an attack because the adversary knows this is central to our happiness. 

When I lived in the South Valley of Albuquerque (an extremely rough place), our schools were full of gangs.  I grew up with Happy Holmes, 18th street and Vadios Dirt Rd gangs.  It wasn't fun to say the least.  But even all of us lost, struggling, fearful kids knew the value of family.  We would form families to stay protected within the gang system.  Kids would have fake marriage ceremonies and designate parents (other kids) and aunts and uncles.  We all had a "family and extended family."  It is how we saved ourselves and each other on the dangerous school campus and neighborhoods.  You always had someone around who was "family" and they had your back.  And your family members instantly loved you and were loyal to you.  As I have grown older, I have realized how incredibly clever  we children were to devise such a system.  I think it really proves how we have an ingrained knowledge of the divinity of family---even as children, we know it is something special, something worth having.