A week with the girls

I knew I was home when I saw my sister eating a couple of homemade cookies and my mom had a chocolate in her mouth.  Before breakfast.  Sigh.  There’s no place like home.  I’m totally the kind to have dessert after lunch and dinner.  A lot of the time my whole reason for having a healthy meal is so I can have dessert, maybe even a couple.  If the choice is just too hard.  Twisted, wrong, so not in the health books.  So tasty though.  And obviously a habit that runs deep in the family.  Love it.

They are all just as inconsistent as I am because at the same counter as the cookies and caramel brownies were the lunch makings.  We’re all about whole wheat, not so into lunch meat and cheese, preferring salads and loads of fruit.  We nearly exclusively drink water and avoid fast food (except In and Out) and fat (except in our desserts).  We like oatmeal and Wheetabix and whole wheat toast and fruit for breakfast.  We’re just not into waffles and pancakes and white things.  Except if it’s a Costco cake.

During one of those healthy lunches I polished off some Greek yogurt and went to throw away the container.  My sister immediately called me on it and reprimanded, “You’re going to recycle that, aren’t you?”  Of course!!  I’m home!  They recycle here!  I was joyous that someone was as Nazi as I am about it.  We commiserated that we can hardly bear to look in the garbage away from home because of all the potential that is just tossed.  We both admitted to bringing home items to recycle from large gatherings.  My mom cleans houses and is the exact same.  In fact, when she comes to my house she tosses all sorts of items in the recycling pile that we just don’t have the resources here to take care of.  Kind of throws her off-kilter and I am just as sorry about it as she is.  But I appreciate her vigilance as well as being in the company of fellow greenies.  So much.

We all need 9.5 hours of sleep.  Random, but tested.  Independently.  If I could change five things about myself, that might be #2.  Cheri and I take naps every chance we can, daily if possible.

My mom came into the room I was staying in one morning at 7:15, shaking me awake.  I told her I was just tired, that I was fine, just wanted to sleep a little later.  Her pillows were so fluffy that they puffed all around my head and I was basically lying flat on the bed and she keeps her house so cozy that I just hadn’t gotten great sleep the first couple of nights.  She came in again at 7:30, visibly upset, wondering what was going on.  I was up.  It wasn’t worth it.  I finally realized I’d made her nervous, she was scared that something serious was wrong.  Understandable, since she had been the one to find my dad just a couple of days earlier.  I got it.  But I also had to kind of laugh.  My mom and sister Cheri get up early.  Like 4:30 or 5.  Yikes.  I’m middle-ground, 5:30-6 usually.  But they are happy and cheery from the moment their toe nails hit the carpet.  My other sister (Cheryl) and I take a minute more.  A good long hour more, if we’re honest.  Which is why I avoid everyone and just go exercise.  It’s the only way I know to let myself warm up to the fact that I’m up.  The sister like me stays downstairs and showers and keeps to herself for the same reason.  We’re slow, but we eventually make the transition.  At the other end of the day, the early birds are in pajamas by 7 or 8.  Good grief.  While Cheryl and I are pleased to be sitting down to HGTV for the evening.  So good to be around people who get me.

The reason Cheryl and I like HGTV so much is we don’t get it at our houses.  Are you kidding?  She doesn’t even have wi-fi; we don’t even have a tv that gets channels.  We are the most old-fashioned youngish people I know of.  And my mom’s on our team, as you would expect.   Cheri is high-tech, but we still accept her.  She takes care of the rest of us and provides our kids with all sorts of pads and computers and phones to entertain them in a pinch.  But only for a limited time.  Cheryl and I are sticklers about wanting our kids to play the old-fashioned way.

We love it when our boys come in sweaty and stinky from a hard-day’s play.  But they take showers and wash their hair every single day.  Without exception.  We’re big on keeping nails short and ears cleaned.  I come from a fastidiously clean family.  But I’m the black sheep here.  While I love clean sheets, fresh laundry, and daily showers, I’m not as concerned about germs and dirt as they all are.  I’m good camping, eating a peanut that fell on the floor, or leaving the hand-washing dishes for a day.  Or more.  The others are clean, clean, clean.  And I think I love it.  I just can’t keep up.  But when it comes to organizing, we’re all on the same page.  We cleaned out an entire closet and set of bathroom drawers, lugging away huge bags-full of donations.  Heartily satisfying.

Likewise, I can always count on these girls to be on the same page when it comes to what we read.  We’re all voyeurs in a sense, wanting the inside scoop on anyone’s life or culture or business.  We’ll occasionally read a fluff novel, but they sort of bore us.  We’re nearly exclusively a non-fiction kind of family, and only with them will I offer my wares.  I know we’re weird, but at least I’m in good company.

I also had to laugh because I say hells bells a lot, just so engrained in me from growing up with my mom.  Bronwyn (my 9 year old) has called me on it and has asked me not to say it.  I’m trying.  But being back home, I felt normal.  It came up a lot.  It always has.  Lots of damns and hells.  I know.  Not the best choices, and hells bells is about as far as I take it.  But ahhh.  I felt so at home.  And it made me smile.

Which is so funny.  When you laugh with siblings.  Because you sound exactly the same.  At least my sisters and I do.  We belly laugh.  And we can hardly breathe.  And we get tears streaming down our cheeks.  It might be embarrassing.  But not when we have each other for comfort.  And we laugh all the time when we’re together.    There’s no way around it when we’re dealing with mom or talking about dad.  There’s no better combination to get us going.  We wonder what kind of money we could make if they left hidden cameras rolling, just capturing normal interactions in our parents’ house.  Even in the midst of what probably should’ve been a reverential and somber week as we prepared for my dad’s funeral, we really couldn’t help ourselves.  We laughed at what kind of golden casket he’d want, with puffy tufts and velvet lining, the 21 gun salute, maybe even a parade and fireworks if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.  We laughed when we were thinking of headstones.  Because he would’ve wanted a tall one, with lots of words and maybe roses and a poem.  Or country song he’d written.  We laughed when we came up with a pun he would’ve thought of.  We just couldn’t help ourselves, and I bet you it was cathartic.  I know it felt good.  The whole time we were together.

The whole week was therapeutic, so calming, so nice to be home.  Sometimes I feel like the odd nut, a little off, wondering why I’m so different, why I can’t just stick with a green smoothie like all my health-nut friends and forgo the cookie, why I think it’s my personal crusade to save the world through recycling and turning off the water, why I like to organize and clean on my day off, why I can’t laugh a soft and pretty little laugh without tears, and why I can’t seem to overcome my hells bells habit.  And now I know.  That it’s ok if I don’t.  I just need a trip home every now and then to remind me.