Just shared the story with a friend of the first year that the husband
came home with me for the holidays, after which, I realized that we probably
sound similar to a TLC show like "Honey Boo Boo" or some such. We are big
Scrabble players, we all play somewhere along the way when we are together, maybe the night before
Thanksgiving or Christmas Day, sitting
around; undoing the top button to let the turkey have a little more room. This
was a Christmas Day if I remember correctly and two of my brothers had just
gotten into it over the validity of a played word. Dad went for more pie and
Mom said, “Take it outside.”
Mom was a big fan of “take it outside.” We fought each other
like wild cats and as long as we took it outside, Mom didn’t have much to say
either way. I still bear the scars from some of our glorious battles,
especially the knee and elbow ones from the time I ran over Jon when he refused
to move out of the gravel road until I gave him back his bike. I refused to
give him the bike and so we were at an impasse and I had to run him over on
principle. Wise? I think not, but at least we were outside. And who can forget
the time that I hit David on a sneak attack with a half watermelon, lobbed
perfectly from the porch right into his face as he rounded the corner of the
house. Perhaps my finest hour in sibling rivalry.
The close proximity to family during the holiday, often
brings out the 4 year old in me and I revert to preschool tactics like biting,
scratching and eating someone’s cookie while they aren't looking. Once, to my
shame, my son caught me in the middle of a slap fight with one of my brothers
after a particularly long post-Thanksgiving afternoon.
In a complete shift
in paradigm, K grew up in a household where “stink” was a bad word and you
never, ever said poop or anything of the sort. Any you most certainly were not
allowed to “take it outside.” So he didn't know what to say or do that
Christmas as my brothers rolled around in the yard punching and kicking over the
validity of tile placement. He worriedly said, “Should I do something?” I said,
“yeah,” and so we had some more pie too. Laters.
