I got an email from my mother that Nini Blinstrub died over the weekend. I got the same email from my middle sister, and then, my father. I had to flip through my memory files to recall the Nini they all knew, until I realized this was the Nini who had saved our family from the brink of dysfunction.
I remember Nini’s house, aged and woody with shelves filled with books and art draping every wall. This memory from childhood was one of my coping mechanisms, studying my surroundings with exact precision. Because when you’re a ten-year-old and tagging along with your family to an old woman’s back room for therapy, you want to feel safe.
My family had brought the Brady Bunch from the television into our house in the ’80s, except it wasn’t always as simple as asking Peter not to play ball in the house. As a family, we merged as best we could, except when it came to the range of our needs. My two stepsisters would pop in post-college, while my high school-aged sisters moved in on my stepbrother’s turf. Then there was me, the young odd ball, or as my mother always said, “the wanted oops,” five years younger than the rest. I watched while my sisters and stepbrother worked out their boundaries around borrowing clothes and sharing a car under one roof. It wasn’t until much later that the problem with witnessing all of this was revealed to me: I hadn’t learned where their needs ended and mine began. So I grew up searching for attention I never knew I needed, which is why a woman like Nini was the first step in saving me.
Nini charged at least a hundred dollars an hour to make our collective family as faultless as possible. A Dutch woman who spoke her recommendations from the back of her throat, Nini limped to and from those bookshelves for reference. I never knew that she had a fake leg or that she originated from the Netherlands, I just knew that it seemed as if one of my siblings was always driving to her office alone, or with my dad and stepmother, during a crisis. My oldest sister joked that what we really had needed was a red rotary phone in the corner that we picked up during an issue for our direct line to Nini.
