this was written from the prompt-frozen. you never know where it will take you- from frozen food to family dinners to raising siblings. enjoy and thanks for reading!
Frozen. Frozen food. Frozen tv dinners. It used to be a treat. A treat of my childhood to choose my Stouffer's meal of tuna casserole or lasagna that we baked in the oven. Before the luxury of the microwave. The luxury to make anything in under a few minutes. Frozen food was a treat. Tv dinners were a treat. Going out to eat was the exception to the rule of my family. We ate the homemade meals put in front of us each evening. No grimaces. No ask for anything else. You got what you got. And you crossed your fingers nothing would spill and no one might choke or get upset. But we still sat down together.
Together and eventually when I got old enough I had to always call and let them know the status- would I be coming home or not. Or not. Dinnertime was interesting. While I became a teenager- my hair puff in the front of my hair became deflated, my glasses turned into mini lenses that fit in my eyes and the my braces fell away. I was the focus of dinner. The dinner time once kind of a peaceful time until the toddler antics of my brother then the lull and my teenage years crashed into our dinner table. For some reason in the tension of the push and pull of a teenager wanting to be a adult- is where the conflicts of power, struggle, and independence came to a head. God damn it my father would yell after I had pushed his button so long that he couldn’t take it. I left the dinner table of my own choice and my own banishment more often than not. It was something that happened around the oak table with white legs me and my brother on one side-my dad and stepmom on the other. The adults v. the kids. That fueled the fire. I started it more often than not. We fought over privileges and politics and me not being grounded. The unfairness of my ability to creatively think and negotiate. This went on until I left, left for college.
But by the time I returned, the limelight was now my brother’s- he was in the one-man show of rebellion- he shot high. High in ways no one dreamt. My role had changed to the motherly older sister who was trying to help my parents. I should have sat on their side. But no longer I was the focus. My brother never listened. He went to the beat of his own drum. Pounding in a beat so irregular and loud and sporadic we all were holding our ears and rocking back and froth for it to stop. But it never really has. The tempo slows down sometimes, the beat you get used to it and then the roaring banging of pots and pans again. He wasn’t just rebelling against my dad, he was rebelling against me.
It is hard, hard to have not birthed a child but have to help raise one. Raise one at the ripe age of 9. A child raising a child the only way I knew how. I loved him. I mothered him. But did I do it wrong. Did I hold him too tight? Did I tell him how and what to believe? Did I made a mistake? How can a motherless child raise her sibling? I did. I did have mother figures after she went away, my grandmother, and aunts, and stepmother. But nothing is like the embrace of your mother. A love irreplaceable. My love wasn’t a mother’s but it was a sister’s love, love for my brother to be held and feel love. Love that I once felt from my mother. That I mothered him the best way I could. Could as a child.
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