More Proof that the World is Ending

My sister now has a Facebook account. While you may not think that this is strange, let me put it into context. It would sort of be like finding out that your mother has been a CIA agent for the last 25 years, or that your 85 year-old grandmother is a swinger.

Endings/Beginnings, part three (see parts one and two)

What does a father say when his 18-year-old daughter announces that she is planning to move in with her boyfriend, a man of 31 or 32 years? On the one hand, he probably wishes that he was the man hooking up with a young woman. On the other, this is his daughter. I guess to preserve family harmony, my dad didn't forbid it, not that he could. "She'd do it anyway," he said to me. And, he was right.

For me, it was a chance to get my own room, and so I was overjoyed when she moved out and I could escape from the room I shared with my brother. My parents awarded me the room, even though I was younger. It was a prize for staying is school while my brother dropped out at age 15

I try to imagine how my sister must have felt when she discovered her boyfriend's secret life, 14 years down the road. He always left early for work, managing some sort of poorly-functioning renovation business, where I once earned a pittance for a summer of labour. He always arrived home very late. It translated to a mere five or six hours of sleep each night. What my sister learned is that much of his time away was spent with his other common-law wife.

He had two places to sleep and eat and shower. His had two lives, opposite, and yet bizarrely the same. He bought two identical Christmas presents each year. I suppose it was easier to remember what he gave if he just bought the same thing twice. He'd buy two bathrobes, two bottles of perfume, two pairs of slippers, two push-up bras, probably in different sizes.

And then she met the women, described as T's wife, a title she claimed for herself. Soon, my sister learned that there were three mortgages on her house; that this woman's father held the third; that a lawyer had perjured herself to implicate my sister; that this women - the other wife - had embezzled money from her own father; that the business was a thin operation, barely holding on, but with big dreams it could never hope to achieve; that someone else held a mortgage on the restaurant and T was just a figurehead owner, not the real man, hardly a man at all.

My sister lost the house. She didn't get a cent from the sale after foreclosure. And who knows where he is now. Part of me wants that information; a part does not.

To be continued ...

Technorati Tags: family, relationships

Troublesome Turd (a true story)

Imagine my mother (if you can), hair in curlers, wielding a plunger like some sort of impromptu shepherd's staff, rounding up her four children and herding them into the bathroom for a bizarre family meeting. There we stood around the toilet, five of us looking down into the bowl at the most enormous "dropping" I had ever seen. It was impressive. As someone who loved the Guinness Book of World Records, my immediate thought was to call up those guys and have them bring either a ruler or a scale to get the stats on that baby. I was sure we would be famous very soon. I was almost going to suggest that mother get her camera, but I realized that she was angry.

She was angry, not because the culprit didn't flush the toilet after doing his/her business, but because it was so big, it wouldn't go down the toilet. She proved her point by repeatedly flushing the toilet. It spun around and around and never went anywhere. She aimed the plunger at each of us, demanding to know who did it. Who dropped that huge turd that was far too big to flush? I wondered if she was going to hack at it with something as we watched, but she just kept demanding to know who did it.

My eldest brother, I suppose because he was the eldest and a boy, got the blame, despite his protestations. From that day, I viewed my brother as some sort of super pooper (wasn't that an ABBA song?) We were released from the smelly room and I gather my mother used the plunger to batter that turd into small enough pieces that it would go down. I was left thinking that she was a bit unfair to us. After all, who among us can regulate the size of our movements? I'd wager that few of us can, and ever fewer would admit to having the talent.

About five years ago, my sister made a confession to me. She said, somewhat gleefully and through bursts of laughter, that she was the one who did it. With one sentence, she turned everything upside down. She destroyed that image of my brother as a mythical pooper and she made me re-evaluate girls. It took me a while to process the information. I thought she should tell my mother, but then she has probably forgotten about the whole thing by now.

Technorati Tags: poop, family history, sister, brother, mother

Lessons from my Sister

This post is kind of an interlude between Portrait of my Brother as a Young Man and a yet-to-be-written post, Portrait of my Other Brother as a Young Man. Without her, I am not sure when I would have learned three essential life skills. She taught me:

1) to blow bubbles (with bubble gum)
2) to snap (the sound produced by rapid movement of a finger from the thumb tip to the base of the thumb)
3) to whistle

And, she showed me a tampon long before I even knew what menstruation was - although I never had any use for one, being a guy. One night, when she was babysitting my brother (the one you already know about) and me, she submerged it in water so that we could see it grow.

Let's see, what else? I had my first cigarette with her. Smoking didn't take, but my brother (the one you already know about) became addicted almost immediately and, as a pre-teen, was given the nickname "Puffer."

For my 16th birthday she, along with her boyfriend, presented me a book as a gift, the only time, it should be noted, that she ever gave me a book. It was: Xaviera's Supersex: Her Personal Techniques for Total Lovemaking by Xaviera Hollander. It's like the Joy of Sex without the class.

This is all true.

Technorati Tags: sister, family history