I grew up in a family of five siblings including me. There were four of us girls and only one boy. I miss those days when fighting and bickering was all I knew! We had groups in our neighborhood and I had the privilege of leading one such group. What an honor to be given the leadership role in a tradition handed to us by our elders (ummm scrap that!!), it was actually my older neighbors who now have families who invented it. Yeah yeah so we carried it on valiantly fighting for our rights as a neighborhood gansta, that is until my mom would open the kitchen window over a steaming pot of stew and threaten to disown us and sell us to the meanest thug in our neighborhood (to this day I still don’t know who the meanest thug was!!), if we don’t come back at the count of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and there she’d go counting until the five of us were back home.
My eldest sister loved to play her role as the tattletale of the family. She thrived in reporting everything we’d done to my mom and for this we loved to hate her. We usually got the “girls don’t behave like that” lecture and no TV for the night and after that everything was fine; with my mom that is! We made sure our mom and dad never heard us quarrelling and fighting late into the night after another tattletale session by my eldest sister! They suspected but thank god they didn’t ask.
Now, we’re all grown up and my three eldest siblings have since married and have families of their own. My brother had his first child last year after eight years of marriage. My eldest sister got married and had a kid barely a year later. My second eldest sister just got married last December (in 2007) and me??? Everybody’s asking … I’ll have to clear it out with the man upstairs!
But I do miss those days!!
