My Sister’s Keeper

First let me say, I love my sister S so much. She’s 8 years younger than me though she’ll still seem cute to me, even when she’s 70. Sure, we still get in fights. Especially this little doozie for my 40th. There are 2 more installments before that one, should you want to read the whole ordeal.

But she has tested me, especially when she was a child. I was stuck babysitting her ALL THE TIME. There are times she has scared the shit out of me. Sure, these don’t sound like freakable moments to any adult but put a child (me) in the situation and you are at a loss as to what to do. Below are the 4 top times my sister has scared the shit out of me.

The List

Pyrotechnic Sister

My family had an Italian restaurant and my mother was the book keeper. Each week all the employee time cards would come home for my mom to tally up the hours worked and write checks appropriately. Our kitchen doubled as her office and shit always laid around…including the time cards. Paperwork would lay on the microwave, the hutch and the stove top.

As an 11 year old, I had just finished up my daily Mickey Mouse workout routine that consisted of just watching the kids on tv workout for the entire 30 minutes….in a blue leotard. I turned the corner of the kitchen to find my 3 year old, red-headed sister (that’s not an insult, she really is red-headed) had slid a chair over to the oven and was now lighting a time card on fire.

Instinctively I smacked her hand and grabbed her like a bomb was about to go off. The time card fell into on to the stove top and extinguished quickly.

Driving Sister

Since my mother hated to cook, we would eat out almost every night then drive by the restaurant to check to see how busy we were. If we were overly busy, my mom would pull in, leave us in the “conversion” van and help out till the rush was over. Aside from going through the car wash, this was the second most boring thing I had to endure as a child.

“Girls, watch t.v. I need to help your father.”

The t.v. my mother was referring to was the van t.v. that was black and white, 6″x6″ and picked up 1-2 channels: the bible beating station and on a good night, NBC.

During our Home Alone moments in the van, S always liked to pretend to drive and by doing this, taunt me. She would wiggle her little 4 year old body up onto the driver’s seat and begin to steer the wheel. She would turn the windshield wipers on and off as well as the left and right signals.

One night she got brave and put the van into driving. I was sitting in the middle seats watching Tammy Fay when I felt us begin to move forward. I looked out the window to see the back of the restaurant move slowly.

I turned to my middle sister G whom I thought may have a plan. She was already jumping out the side, saving number 1. I had no idea how to drive a car, I was 12! I figured I would reverse the situation and just pull the handle down that she had just pulled up. This began to reverse us.

Thank God, G ran into the restaurant and grabbed my mother. She jumped in, slammed on the breaks and began to scream at no one in particular.

Alcoholic Sister

My sister is famous for the amount of time she spent on the can as a child. G and I would take turns, taking her to restaurant bathrooms because we knew a 20 minute sit-in was not uncommon. She wouldn’t even do anything. She would just sit on the toilet, swinging her little preschooler leg back and forth, reveling in the torture that accompanied these long waits.

One day, S went to the bathroom at home yet she didn’t come out, even after the standard 20 minutes. I knocked on the door and she didn’t answer. I opened it to find she had drank 1/3 bottle of nail polish remover!

Luckily my parents were home so we rushed her to the hospital. They didn’t need to pump her stomach, she was just going to be “a bit tipsy” as the Doctor put it.

Pearl Lodging Sister

This is possibly the #1 scare this child gave me growing up simply because of all the nightmare scenarios I was envisioning in my head. She stuck a pearl up her nose and not an adorable, baby, pearl of the sea kind but a massive, fake pearl that could easily have been found on one of Madonna’s necklaces or rosaries.

She was probably 2-ish. I scooped her up and ran across the street to my best friend’s mother. My hands shook as I envisioned it going up her airway, down to her lungs and choking her or something. I stuck my finger up her nose trying to get it out but in reality only pushing it further up. Her nose even began to bleed.

With the calmness of a surgeon, my friend’s mom extracted the pearl. To this day, I still don’t know how she did it. And I really don’t care.

So yes, those are the 4 moments that stick out easily. I’m so glad she lived to be an adult! So tell me, did you have siblings that drove you to drink nail polish remover?