flashback: guess who is coming to dinner: round dos

so my brother didn't bring home another cougar but i revisited this piece and did some flip and flopping for a writers conference app and i thought i'd bring you a new version. this was a fav on a blog and in my class the first time around so let's hope you like the changes. i took into consideration questions such as how can the reader know what you look like kate in comparison? (unless you know me) or what did you parents think?- them being born agains made it all the more interesting. sorry i haven't been posting regularly the end of grad school and the end of the school year caught up with me. i am going to get back to my more regular posts! i promise! thanks as always for stopping by and your support.

What do you do when your brother tells you; he is dating someone closer to your age, someone closer to the age of your stepmother, and also your father? You have two choices after the surprise falls out of you again, to either: 1) throw judgment out the window or 2) judge, judge, and judge some more. Well I wish I could say I did one, but that just isn't part of my older sister makeup. I still want to protect my brother even if he doesn't think he needs it. So I opted for two, plus some lectures later, and to get through some herbal sedatives, lots of herbal sedatives. If I knew what I had in store, I would have gone to the doctor and begged for some prescription freedom. Lesson learned.

All I see is three to four inch heels, well manicured feet, jeans with sequins on the bottom and little on the rear just to make sure you are paying attention, they glisten in the light of the hotel bar against our overpriced champagne. Then the boobs, huge obtrusive boobs, cleavage that makes Pamela Anderson stalkers even swoon. No, it keeps going when I see her face. Her face is covered in makeup, makeup like you used to wear when you couldn’t be comfortable in your own skin. That was when I was 15. She is 42. Very tan skin, almost too tan, and hair, her hair is perfectly done, almost bleached but still shockingly pretty. Not one knot, not one hair out of place. The OC embodied in one woman is sitting next to me, next to me as my brother introduces her to me and me to her.

My younger brother, my brother is 20 years her junior. She tells me as she speaks with her half-British, half-Laguna Hills dialect about her surgeries, “I have had two boob jobs, my ears pinned back, a nose job.” Holy fuck, I just met you 5 minutes ago I think. If I had all that work done, I hope I would be hotter. More unique. Less Barbie, more exotic.

The older sister. Me. Melting in this fancy hotel couch. Mental music plays of why me and fuck my life on repeat. I want to take my brother under this wing to shelter him from this storm of his undoing. I helped raise him for God sakes don’t I get to partake in the all-important role of badgering him and providing unsolicited advice as all parents do. I was once upon a time a child raising a child – a mother role left to a motherless child, me then, and me now.

As we sit next to each other- we are the polar opposites of femininity, of womanhood. My skin is pale and pasty from the fog and mist of winter reality against her fake and bake orange. My body parts all real. My breasts still perky even over the age of thirty without a doctor’s help or assistance, but my lips are fine markers of lines. And no personal trainer to perfectly sculpt me. My dark hair dyed only to hide the gray of an early grayer and it is done up because I didn’t wash it and barely brush it.

It wasn't just our looks, which left us on opposite sides of the line drawn so regularly in womanhood. There was more. The more part never stopped pushing my limits of needing prescription freedom or needed to regress into the fetal. She worked up to the important things when we had known each other a little longer like 24 hours or something. “Have you had your boobs done? They are very nice.”

“Excuse me. No, they are real.”

“Well I’m thinking of getting mine done again,” she sings in a high pitch.

Shoot me. Please take me to my dead place. Whatever I did universe, God, Buddha, in my former life please, please forgive me. I will do whatever penance required, live more simply, be kinder to my neighbor, get rid of material possessions-just make this lady go away. I spew, “If you make them any bigger, you are going to fall the fuck over.” Aloud. Not in my head. She laughed her uncomfortable laugh. Can I vote her off the island of my genetics? This is a joke of the worst kind. She tells us how she renamed herself. Renamed herself? Because too many women in the salon, too many women in the salon had her name. Is anything about this woman real? Anything at all? What does my brother see in her but her boobs her huge boobs? I can barely avoid my eyes from glancing there. It’s hard to concentrate on anything else.

She liked to flash her goodies to all. Even to my family. She wore a nighty around my uncles and parent’s homes, homes against their own judgment they welcomed her in, and didn’t pause for one moment to evaluate the appropriateness of it all. Here is a tip- black lace and silk and seeing the top of your thighs or maybe your thong not so good for the family visits especially not the first one.

The cougar didn't just advertise she took it to the next level. With my brother as a willing participant of course. While we try to act “normal” around the wildlife dating my brother, she and my brother cuddle like teenagers so much my parents had to intervene. See my parents- my father and stepmother are born again Christians so they are not really down for making out or semi-dry humping on their couch. In their home, they require a prayer before meals and the four minute discussion/lecture entitled: Why don’t you go to Church as part of their list of duties as Christians. “I don’t want to be speeding up around in heaven and not see you,” preaches ever so subtly my father. My father has given himself a timeout in his bedroom listening to his peace of blaring Fox news and flying airplanes on his computer. As my brother and the cougar rest on each other’s bodies upon the coldness of the leather sharing a square reserved for one. My stepmom has to request backup from my father to deal with their inappropriateness; my father yells from down the hall, annoyance reverberated against the walls of our family home.

No one tells you how to deal with this, no one writes books about what happens when your brother or son brings home a cougar. Maybe I should write one. It would include the following topics in the series: How to deal with your brother when he brings home a cougar, or becomes part of the conservative movement and is on the O’Reilly Factor before he can drive or gets deported from Africa and you are notified by the Drudge Report and Huffington Post not your next of kin. The cliff notes on my brother are as follows: this isn’t the first stunt he has pulled- and it most defintiely won't be his last. I am in shock. In shock about myself. Why am I as surprised as much as I was at his first attempt at oppositional defiance disorder?

The surprise of me, his mini-mother, is fueling the fire of this rebellion. I want to protect him. I want him to be okay. I want to know my attempt at motherhood was not failed. Even if it was a result of circumstances beyond my control that I became his mother. And as this visit ends, something changes inside of me. I grew distaste of course for OC woman with fake tits who are orange, but also I need to let go and realize the shock will keep happening. If it isn’t a cougar, it will be something else and it will be soon.

So next year, next Thanksgiving, I’m going to my local coffee shop or nursing home or senior center or maybe I’ll just make a house visit to Hef’s mansion and really take it up a notch. I mean I might not be the girl next-door kind of girl material- me being a brunette and all and don’t forget with no silicone or saline to call my own. Hey it is worth a try. I hope to find my own boyfriend to borrow, to rent, to fall in love with and to take home. He might be 70 or 80, but it’s my turn to be the talk of my family.

frozen food of the family dinner table

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.

hairy thing

When you are fifteen or sixteen at family gatherings you want to blend in, you don’t want anyone to really notice you unless, unless they are paying you compliments. Telling you how great you are-not the life decisions you should be making or discussing politics. Actually I like to blend in still, but I usually fail miserably at this.

So I am sitting there among my aunts, uncles, my grandparents, my dad, my stepmom and my brother, my brother, we are eating, eating. I begin to hear a little voice say, Kate has a hairy thing. Very faintly at first. I look around, looking into eyes of those around me, to see if they have heard, heard those words. Looking for slight recognition. He says it again, Kate has a hairy thing. Of course, it’s my brother. Please make him stop. I’m willing him to stop, he keeps going. Kate has a hairy thing, louder now, louder now. I am sure I’m not the only who can hear him. Oh shit. He needs to shut up. I look over and see him, his freckles painted on his face, his blue eyes big like chucky, his eyelashes I’m still jealous of but he still is cute of course. His head has curls of hair. He has a glint in his eye. He knows what he is doing. The only thing more important to him other then ninga turtles and chicken nuggets is making my life miserable. My life miserable.

He says it again, Kate has a hairy thing- louder, almost yelling. Everyone is looking at him, looking at me. I am turning red- the irish coming out. I want to die. I really do. How do you explain why your younger brother saw you naked? It is not a shock that puberty has paid me a visit but I don’t want my family members provided a memo, a memo with the details. Kate doesn't just have pubic hair, but a hairy thing. Kate has a hairy thing. No one is talking, no one is responding. It has to stop. I’m trying to will, hope, plead, anything for it to stop. I am thinking of what to say. T jumped out of my closet when I was changing after the shower. Trying to explain this away. But there is no explaining. I see out of the corner of my eye- my stepmom grab, grab my brother’s hand and drag him, drag him away from the table.

Our nice family table. Ruined. I didn’t know what happened but T returned and his face now was glowing red. Glowing red and his mouth everflowing, now silent. Silent. I didn’t know what had happened but I was thankful. That it was over. Over. The strange thing is I don’t remember anyone talking about what had happened it was just business as usual. Food to fork to mouth. Repeat. Napkin to mouth. Talking and more talking. Repeat.

On the drive home, I found out that my step-mom had saved the day when she grabbed him, grabbed him away from the table and told him if he didn’t stop, he didn’t stop saying what he was saying that she would tell everyone, everyone at the table he had skid marks in his underwear. Skid marks in his underwear. Who knows if he even had them? I didn’t care. It shut him up. That was enough for him to stop- at least long enough for today. At least for today.

guess who is coming to dinner: cougar style

What do you do when your brother tells you, he is dating someone closer to your age, someone closer to the age of your stepmother, and also your father? You have two choices after the surprise falls out of you again, to either, 1) throw judgment out the window or 2) judge, judge, and judge some more. Well I wish I could say I did one, but that just isn’t part of my older sister makeup. I still want to protect my brother even if he doesn’t think he needs it. Like my parents still try to tell me things as I walk out the door, don’t forget your coat it’s raining. So I opted for two, plus some lectures later, and to get through some herbal sedatives, lots of herbal sedatives. If I knew what I had in store, I would have gone to the doctor and begged for some prescription freedom. Lesson learned.

All I see is 3 to 4 inch heels, well manicured feet, jeans with sequins on the bottom and little on the rear just to make sure you are paying attention, they glisten in the light of the hotel bar against our overpriced champagne. Then the boobs, huge obtrusive boobs, cleavage that makes Pamela Anderson stalkers even swoon. No it keeps going when I see her face. Her face is covered in makeup, makeup like you used to wear when you couldn’t be comfortable in your own skin. That was when I was 15. She is 42. Very tan skin, almost too tan, and hair her hair is perfectly done, almost bleached but still shockingly pretty. Not one knot, not one hair out of place. The OC embodied in one woman is sitting next to me, next to me as my brother introduces her to me and introduces me to her. My younger brother, my brother is 20 years her junior. She tells me as she speaks with her half-British half-Laguna Hills dialect about her surgeries, I have had two boob jobs, my ears pinned back, a nose job. Holy fuck, I just met you 5 minutes ago I think. If I had all that work done, I hope I would be hotter. More unique. Less Barbie, more exotic. Later she worked up to the important things when we had known each other a little longer like 24 hours or something. Have you had your boobs done? They are very nice. Excuse me. No they are real. Well I’m thinking of getting mine done again, she says. Shoot me. Please take me to my dead place. Whatever I did universe, God, in my former life please, please forgive me. I will do whatever penance required, live more simply, be kinder to my neighbor, get rid of material possessions-just make this lady go away. I say, if you make them any bigger, you are going to fall the fuck over. She laughed her uncomfortable laugh.

In the car when I was stuck with the two, the longest ride as of yet, they would googly eye each other in the rear view mirror. I love you, no I love you more. Then argue. Then talk about marriage. All the while my brother lecturing me about my love life. I either need to get a therapist for the ride next time or some serious medication. She wore a nighty around my uncles and parent’s homes, homes against their own judgment they welcomed her in, and she didn’t pause for one moment to evaluate the appropriateness of it all. This lady is making me seem conservative.At my parent’s home, she and my brother cuddle like teenagers so much my parents had to intervene. As she wears her juicy couture suit when our family goes on a hike, still showing too much, that zipper too low. It is her standard look. The cleavage. I am much younger than her telling her she should cover up to meet my parents, my family. This is a joke of the worst kind. She tells us how she renamed herself. Renamed herself? Because too many women in the salon, too many women in the salon had her name. Is anything about this woman real? Anything at all? What does my brother see in her but her boobs her huge boobs, maybe, I’m not sure. It’s hard to concentrate on anything else.

No one tells you how to deal with this, no one writes books about what happens when your brother or son brings home a cougar, or any of my brother's antics for that matter. Maybe I should write one. It would include the following topics in the series: How to deal with your brother when he brings home a cougar, or becomes part of the conservative movement and is on the O’Reilly Factor before he can drive or gets departed from Africa? So next year, next Thanksgiving, I’m going to my local coffee shop or nursing home or senior center and finding my own boyfriend to borrow, to rent, to fall in love with and to take home. He might be 70-but it’s my turn to be the talk of my family.