In the last blog, I gave you a glimpse of my mother’s hopes for me, but I wanted to take it a step further and explain why it is really hard for the baby girl with two older brothers and a coach for a dad to be frilly! It’s called survival!! My oldest brother, Jim, is nine years older, and Ken is seven and a half years older.
We had a yard big enough for half a football field and a basketball goal, with the concrete painted to mark the free throw line, in one corner of the driveway. There was not another girl my age in the neighborhood; both neighbors had boys the ages of my brothers as did the ones on the side of them.
It’s hard being the only girl in a neighborhood and family of boy athletes, Boy Scouts and burpers. Right, Rebecca? You understand! You have to be tough and tough skinned. I hated it when the “boys,” as they have always been affectionately called, would hold me down and tickle me. I know they were trying to get me to wet my pants, but I don’t think I ever did!
When I was in first grade, the neighbors on the west of us put up a tow sack swing, filled with sand, that hung from a rope tied to a tree limb at least 50 feet (well, more than 20 anyway) in the air. My brothers would swing from it often, but it was off limits to me because of the potential danger. The night before school was out for the summer I begged my parents at the dinner table (after eating chili pie—this is significant) to let me go watch Jim swing. They relented with a stiff warning to Jim not to let me swing–just watch!
Before we even arrived in the neighbor’s yard, because there was a vacant lot between us, I had convinced Jim I was up for the swing. So, I climbed to a lower branch and I tried several times until we both got our nerve up for me to climb up the wooden spikes nailed to the huge tree to a platform that loomed high in the oak branches. The plan was for Jim to swing up to me and I would jump into his lap for the Tarzan and Jane ride of my life. As I stood waiting, Jim yelled, “Jump.” And just as I flung my body into the wild blue yonder, he yelled again, “NOT NOW.”
Thump. I landed on my left elbow and my distorted arm hung limply. I cried out, “Jim, my arm is broken, my arm is broken.” He was already standing over me and quickly said, “Don’t tell Mother, please don’t tell Mother.” Finally, he put me in his arms and carried me home. Then he took the punishment! Within 30 minutes my stomach had been pumped to get the chili pie out so I could have surgery on my arm.
My arm was in a cast all summer and then I spent an hour after school for weeks with another neighbor doing therapy, gently bending my arm so that it would eventually work properly. See, you have to be tough!! But I’ll never forget the wind on my face and the rush of adrenalin as I climbed that tree and jumped into outer space. It was worth the pain.
But this was the same brother who opened the car door while mother was still driving in the Brookshire’s parking lot, causing me to fall out with the car moving. Several stitches to the head later, I still have scars to show for that. Ken was no angel either. He made me mad enough one day to slam my finger in the dining room door which resulted in a broken finger, lost fingernail and another trip to the emergency room. It really was his fault!
I could name many more examples, but you get the picture.