Barbie and G.I Joe

Brothers and sisters are an interesting thing when they are young. You sort of hate each other, but sometimes you sort of have no choice when there is no one else to play with. This week I've been thinking about my brother Tate a lot who I adore as an adult and have been trying to remember our childhood together. I say this because so often on tv and in real life you hear peole with one child say "We want another baby so Junior will have someone to play with." Did Tate and I play together as kids? He was very boyish and I was very girlish. He had a little room with green carpeting and plaid wallpaper. I had a pale blue massive room with a seperate doll storing alcove. I had Barbies. And then my god-parents daughter Katie became an adolescent and I had MORE Barbies. (By the by, Christmas ain't nothin when you are a six year old girl and the totally-cool-almost-teenager-family-friend hands you a pillowcase FULL of her own beautiful Barbies and says "Do you want these?"). Tate had G. I Joes and Transformers. In times of desperation when between the two of us there were no friends available then Barbie would drive her corvette down the long hallway between our rooms and help G. I Joe fight He-Man...but only if G.I Joe promised to get his hair done at the Barbie salon afterwards. Nothing is funnier than Kamakazie Barbie slamming her pink car towards He-Mans castle with the diminutive G. I Joe flopping around in the seat beside her, except for G.I Joe driving his little Jeep to the salon with Barbie strapped to the hood since she doesn't fit in the seat.
I played alone a lot because I liked it that way. I could control the story, and there was always a story. And looking back, the stories were a little twisted. I remember often playing Barbie fashion show, where all the barbies would be lined up and judged by the giant baby dolls. The winner got a date with Ken and the losers were all MURDERED. I'm serious. Or there was the Barbie that I accidentally made ugly by cutting off all her hair at the Barbie salon so I made her live on the other side of my room in a shoe box. I would often move her long skirts up over her plastic breasts so that she had to wear an ugly muumuu, and once in a while I would stuff it full of clothes to make her appear knocked up. Where I had grasped the idea of white trash at that age is beyond me. I had one Ken. He was tropical Ken so he only had swim trunks, and he was a bit of a gigalo since I had about 20 Barbies.
I had colorful My Little Ponies which I loved, but you couldn't do much with them except make them run around. I was very imaginative, but also a practical little girl in many ways and horses don't talk. So the only part they could really play in my toy world was either as transportation for Barbie, or the game "Glue Factory" where they would all be headed for the glue factory until Barbie came and saved them. Not quite what Mattell intended I guess.
I had Cabbage Patch Kids...I always liked them because they were adopted. They came with little adoption certificates. I would sit them down and read them my book "Why Was I Adopted?" and I always kept their real names. Trixie-Babbette, Diana-Robber, my prized one with synthetic hair instead of yarn Ruby-Adele.
Tate and his friends poured salt on slugs.
I had a lot of dolls, my parents had friends over once and they brought me two dolls which I innocently named "Gin" and "Tonic" much to everyone's glee and embarassment. I had this brass bed and I remember I would put all the dolls on the bed as though they were in jail and I was the warden...then I would decide which one got dinner.
But there were times that Tate and I played together. Or at least got into trouble together. He might not remember this but I do...our brand new stepmom had baked a cake...for a dinner party. She barely knew us and we had been fed dinner early as to not be around at the party. I can't say whose idea it was, but we definetely snuck into the kitchen and swiped our fingers all around the bottom edge of the cake and licked up all the icing. Not just once either, multiple times. We basically ruined the cake. But, we were really young, and that's what kids do.
When Tate got into video games once in a while he would let me play them with him. Mario 1, Duck Hunt...I sucked, but Tate did give me pointers.
Stealing Tate's Halloween candy was verboten. I still have the scar on my finger to prove it.
Torturing Babysitters together was always a good time.
Taking the Garbage Pail Kids stickers OFF the cards they came on and sticking them all over the house led to severe anger and pain...from either of us.
Our Godparents had a huge basement full of toys and when we would go there we always put on little plays for the adults.
While visiting my grandfather in South Carolina we always went to this magic store to buy tricks. My grandfather, Papa Nort, was a pretty serious guy as far as grandfathers go and I will never forget his face when Tate and I walked into his house as little kids puffing away on fake cigarettes.
Tate got a love note once from his first little girlfriend in fourth grade. Her name I think was Rebecca. When I was mad at him once I found it and tore it up into a million pieces. That didn't go well, and I've always felt sort of bad about that actually.
He told me to cut off all my hair and watch it grow right back in the mirror. I did. It didn't.
Brothers and sisters though, no matter how much fighting, will have a strange connection. For as much as he might have hung my dolls out the car window while we were driving down the highway or rolled me up in rugs and burped in my face...we could still communicate without talking like people in all families do. "This guy is boring" "That new couch is ugly" etc.
One year, hypnotized by some strange cloud of sugar and spice we decided to sing Christmas Carols to my mom when she got home. I remember we sat awkwardly on the couch and just sang them to her for a while much to her delight and perhaps confusion. I guess she preferred it to the time I put on all her clothes and lipstick and high heels and walked into the living room declaring "Look at me! I'm a hooker!" Not really knowing what that meant.
But mostly we beat the crap out of each other. Most days involved a time where I would start whining, then Tate would do something aggressive, then I would sound off a terrifying scream and run to my mom for cookies. Most fights were in regards to what would be watched on television that afternoon or who ate the last row of cookies. There were a lot of cookies in our house. Mom bought them for our lunches and foolishly put them "out of our reach" on top of the fridge...did she think we didn't know how to stand on chairs?
Fights as little kids involved such slanderous insults. From Tate "You are such a brat" and from me "You are a Dummy-Nature" which I still don't know what that means....it was something I had misheard someone say once and thought it was the end all in name calling. When Tate and I spar as adults now and it nears the line of seriously getting agitated with each other, one of us will undoubtly say, "Stop being such a Dummy-Nature about this" and laughter will ensue. I also misunderstood another phrase and was mocked repeatedly by Tate and his friends for proclaiming, "I'm gonna tell on your mom!"I told on him for everything to my poor mother who probably wasn't sure how to handle my complaints. "MOOOOOOOM! Tate won't stop singing at me!!!!!"
At the end of each day when our dad came home we would run to the door and attack him together before he even put his briefcase down. I would take one leg and Tate the other and we would latch on as Dad wobbled into the kitchen. Then we would each get tickled and we would each get "Sac 'o Potatos" from Dad which is when he would yell "Sac o' Potatoes!" and walk around with us on his shoulders saying "Where should I put this heavy Sac o' Potatoes?" and we laughed and screamed "We're not potatos! Put us down!" each hoping that he would never ever put us down.
Then Mom would tell him if either of us needed spankings. Isn't that weird? Now it is, but then it was totally normal. The mom dealt wth the kids all day and said things like "Wait till Daddy gets home and I tell him about this." So after playing with us, if needed, he would go downstairs and get the paddle that he had MADE out of thin balsa wood and hear from mom who needed how many and for what reason. Tate and I for years would sneak into the basement and write each others names on the paddle...until our little brother was born and we called a truce, crossed off our own names and boldly wrote "Craigen" across it. By that time though...it was becoming a little un PC to spank your children so the paddle went into retirement.
In a lot of my childhood memories, Tate simply isn't there. We both had a lot of friends and did our own thing. We were fairly independant kids and, again times they are a changing, lived in neighborhoods where kids could sort of roam the streets freely from one house to another until it got dark and was time for dinner.
In summary, Tate made me laugh a lot, made me cry a lot, gave me some scars, taught me how to play certain games, never ever let any other kids really honestly be mean to me, watched Smurfs with me which we eventually abandoned for Simpsons, teased me and let me tease him a little because he was scared of clowns, went through the same family changes as I did, licked icing off cakes with me and always very sweetly cheered me up when I was sad. I guess for as much as I griped about having a pain in the butt older brother, he has done his job perfectly.