Something else I've been pondering. . .
I realised something, as we discussed birthday plans for Betsy, Vicky, and I on Wednesday. Yes, I'm excited about turning 25. I'm actually very excited, even though all my friends just grumble that it puts me "that much closer to 30." But the girls? Betsy's going to be 17, and Vicky's going to be 14. And that's just mother fucking weird! As if it's okay that I get older, but they had to stay small forever? (Okay, so Betsy might have been taller than me when she was 8 and I was 16, but still, she was in single digits!)
It's just funny to me to think about them being teenagers. I was a teenager myself when I got hold of them and started taking care of them. Vicky was this tiny, spoiled thing who would generally just do what I told her unless her mother was around. Then all bets were off, because back then she was her mother's baby. Betsy, on the other hand, made me cry on my first day. Hey, cut me some slack, I was 16, and she truly was an evil child. They both always smelled funny, you had to stand over them to make sure they brushed their teeth, you had to read to them before they'd go to sleep. Their hands were always sticky, and they always smelled like fingerpaint! Betsy would read while she walked, slowing us all down considerably, and Vicky would sometimes just refuse to walk if she didn't get her way, once resulting in me calling their dad and telling him that if he didn't come and get her near the Gap in the World Trade Center, I was just going to leave her there, and he could call the cops if he wanted to. I'm not really sure what he said to her, but she walked the rest of the way home.
I hated them. After my first day, I went home and my sister said, "So, Kid, how was your first day?" and I replied, "They won't do it if I ask, so can you please sign off and help me get my tubes tied?" She laughed at me, but I would come home from work every time and beg her. She always told me that I'd change my mind (which I'm still not really sure I'm going to do, though I feel like now that she's dead I have to breed to keep the line going). They'd torture me on the bus, they'd scream if I told them we were taking the subway (which, in the dead of winter, was NOT a fun thing, because we'd have to wait half an hour for a bus, and they'd whine they were cold the whole time!), and sometimes they'd play with my hair when we were sitting still, which always resulted in me finding something strange and sticky clumped into my hair when I got home. I once made them run out into a hail storm, thinking we could make it home just fine, when in reality I should have just stayed under the overhang of the WTC garages with the sailors I'd met on the bus. We ended up in some construction shanty along the West Side Highway till the hail stopped, because the girls were crying so hard, and we all had bruises for days after that.
When my sister was in the hospital, they both came to see me there. They couldn't come upstairs, but I was down in the lobby to get away from the mob, and they'd both told Ellie they wanted to come and see me. She took them to the Brooklyn Museum afterwards, and they picked out socks for me because they thought that maybe I'd need them. It made me cry, because these kids had the insight that maybe I'd need something practical, since I lived at the hospital for a week, instead of a delivery of 6 pizzas (I know people meant well, but it was the RCU for goodness' sake!). I bet Ellie helped with that idea, but they picked out the socks.
Now Betsy is the epitomy of teenaged angst, and Vicky is this total punker-rage against the establishment kid. We all knew that Betsy would be angsty, but Vicky so far seems to be okay. She's turned into this self-possessed, level headed person (AND she has boobs, so now I know how my sister felt when I was 12 and suddenly looked like a woman instead of her skinny, mousy little sister!). It's weird, and it's the only thing that's making me feel sort of . . .odd. I've never been aware of that kind of thing before, my age or any sort of "feeling old" issues. I'm horrified to think of what it must feel like to be a parent!