Oops, Baby!
Me and Jeff. I’m on the right.
I am what is commonly referred to as an Oops Baby. My brothers are all at least a decade older than me and I was told that my mother initially thought I was food poisoning. I still have that effect on some people.
Being the fourth child and ten years younger than your closest sibling is pretty weird. All of my brothers were gone from home by the time I was 8 and I once marked a box saying I was an only child before I remembered that, yes, I had siblings.
My mother, the unreliable narrator of my childhood, told me that when I was a baby I didn’t want anyone changing my diaper or touching me except my oldest brother, Jeff. I don’t remember this, although I do remember a lot about that house considering we moved somewhere around my 5th birthday. I remember my father washing my hair in the sink and saying that he found Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse in the bubbles. I remember the jukebox in the pool room that I listened to Crocodile Rock and Alice in Wonderland 45s on. I remember the attic room that converted to my nursery, as there was quite literally no room at the inn for an unplanned babe.
Most of all I remember the night I cut my hair. I have no idea how long my brother Jeff watched me while I was taking a bath that night. He was, of course, supposed to watch me the whole time, but at some point, the thought of talking to his girlfriend on the phone outweighed the possibility of 3ish year-old me drowning. Teenagers make fun choices.
Lucky for him, I didn’t drown. What I did do, and what I remember quite clearly, was get out of the tub and push through the saloon style doors that separated the toilet/tub part of the bathroom from the vanity/sink part. These doors always made me think I was Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke and still love it when I occasionally see them in houses today. Once I bellied up to the vanity, I began searching in earnest for the thing I coveted most: my mother's hair cutting scissors. These shiny, shiny shears were a big “NO TOUCH” and so all I wanted to do was get my grubby toddler paws on them.
And get my paws on them I did. Standing naked in front of the mirror, I began cutting off my hair. I remember this pretty vividly, as I was giddy with excitement. My mother often put my hair up in ponytails, which hurt, so I decided I would just cut my hair into ponytails, or as they would be called later in the 80s, dual rat tails. What can I say? I was a trend setter.
When my brother remembered I was still in the bathtub, he came in and started screaming when he saw me with the scissors and my hair on the floor. This, in turn, caused my mother to panic, thinking I was dead or grievously injured. I was neither, but I was mostly bald.
My mother claimed it had taken me all three years of my short life to grow that hair and it broke her heart. For some reason, she scooped all of the cut hair up and put it in a Cool Whip container to show guests. Maybe it was to prove that I had had hair at one time.
At any rate, this didn’t alter my relationship with my oldest brother, nor did it give my parents any pause about letting him be my babysitter. Parents also make fun choices.
We would soon move from that Spanish style home to a California style condo in a neighboring suburb. I was 5 and my brother was a senior in high school. As we were downsizing due to one of my father’s fun financial choices, my brother and I shared a room, him on the ground floor and me up in the loft that each bedroom in this condo had. In retrospect, I can’t imagine putting a 5 year old in a loft 10 feet off the ground with no secure door or wall on it, but I thought it was badass and I guess I managed not to die.
Even though we shared a room, I don’t remember Jeff being in our room that much. I guess he was going to school and working at Shoney’s and doing things that didn’t concern Kindergartners. He still rode me around in his fly AF Bobcat, which was like a Pinto, but less likely to catch on fire. I remember always thinking the car, and my brother, smelled dirty. It would be about a decade before I smelled marijuana for the first time and exclaimed, “Oh my god, this smells like the inside of my brother’s car!”
In that car, I not only got several contact highs, I also learned the words to almost every Charlie Daniels song and all of Willie Nelson and the Family, Live. 8-tracks were awesome. I also learned what it was like to pick up hitchhikers, which was something my brother did with me in the car until I told my mother about it. It was 1978 and he was 6’7” with a sweet porn stash, so I doubt anyone was going to mess with him, but I already knew that picking up hitchhikers was bad. This was probably something my Grandma Wall had told me, along with, “Don’t ever become a prostitute,” which I thought meant I couldn’t wear sparkly tube tops and hot pants and made me very sad. I digress.
For some reason I still don’t understand, my parents thought it would be a good idea to leave me alone with my twin brothers, Tom and Tim during this time. They had been trying to kill each other since they were born, and they didn’t stop just because they were supposed to be babysitting me. Nights with them were a horror show, complete with physical fights, broken furniture, and, inevitably, someone locked in a bedroom. It was usually about the time Tom was taking the bedroom door off the hinges with a screwdriver to get to Tim that Jeff would come home from work. This was like Superman coming in to save Gotham. He would drag them apart from each other and tell them to shut the fuck up and calm the fuck down or he would beat both of their asses. I would hide around a corner and cheer Jeff on, secretly wishing to see these ass beatings take place. The threats, sadly, were usually enough. I knew every time I was stuck with them, if I just held on long enough, my big brother Jeff would come home and rescue me.
My brother had a surprise graduation ceremony, in that it would be a surprise whether he actually graduated or not. The school told him he would know if he opened up his diploma folder and saw a diploma there. He did and no one had to lie to our Grandma, which was nice.
Graduation led to my brother continuing to live at home and work at Shoney’s, which, after a while, wasn’t a lifestyle choice my father was OK with. I wasn’t there for the conversation and drive that led to my brother going into the Navy, but according to him, he came home from Shoney’s one morning and our dad asked him to get in the car. The conversation went something like this:
Dad: “We’re going for a ride and only one of us is coming back.”
Jeff: “Where you going, Dad?”
Dropping people off at the recruiting center was my dad’s way of saying “you don’t have to get a job or an apartment, but you can’t live here,” or something like that. I was the only sibling who would avoid this fate, probably due to being female and adorable.
I didn’t want my brother to leave home. I remember the day he left, we were living in an old house in Williamson County that my father had bought at auction for about $60,000. It was on five acres and the driveway was really long. As Jeff drove down it, toward his future, I ran after his car, eating gravel dust, wailing for him not to go. What my little brain realized at the time was something my adult brain would have trouble coming to terms with for years: Jeff was the only other semi-sane person in our house and he had just left me in the asylum with the inmates.
Sometime after his basic training, he came to eat lunch with me at my elementary school. This was one of the most exciting days of my life. My big brother, in his fancy sailor outfit, sat in a tiny chair with his knees up to his ears and told my friends about the Navy and all his adventures. I felt like the coolest girl on earth.
I would go on to have a kind of relationship with my brother Tom, but I never got close to my brother Tim, his twin. Much to Jeff’s chagrin, Tom taught me to love the music of Barry Manilow, Styx, and Michael Jackson. It balanced out my musical palette the Charlie Daniels and Willie Nelson, I suppose.
Being an Oops Baby, you go on to have a whole separate life after your older siblings leave the house, and that’s exactly what I did. My childhood was very different from theirs, and we remember different events in different ways. Jeff knows things about my parents that I don’t and vice versa. It’s like living in parallel universes.
Jeff would come home and visit and would always write me fantastic letters from wherever he was, which was all over the world. Sometimes I wonder if his travels gave me the travel bug or if I was born itching to get away from everything I knew.
When I was a senior in high school, my father had just filed for bankruptcy for the second time, causing us to lose that Williamson County property and move into a model home my uncle had built in Murfreesboro. I went from having a lot of privacy in a rambling old house to sleeping right across the hall from my parents in a cookie cutter ranch, hearing my dad snore and my mother grind her teeth. I was being very closely supervised for maybe the first time in my life and I was going crazy.
My parents had good cause to keep an eye on me, but there was no way I was going to stay in that situation. I asked to go to college at the big university in Knoxville, something that was possible back then, even with a 2.75 GPA and a fair ACT score. I also had the bankruptcy working in my favor for financial aid and Pell Grants. I got everything together, only for my mom and dad to tell me that I could stay right there in Murfreesboro, live at home, and go to MTSU. I was crushed. There was no way I could stay in that little house and stay sane.
Somehow, my brother talked to my parents and told them they were going to have to let me go sooner or later. I don’t know exactly what he said, but whatever it was, it convinced my mom and dad to let me go to school in Knoxville, where I wound up graduating with a 3.85 GPA in four years, including a year abroad in Germany. Some people just aren’t cut out for high school. Jeff and I had that in common.
When my father died in 2003, my brother was one of the only family members I could lean on, talk to, and laugh with. I didn’t realize it until then, but Dad was the glue who held all of us together, and with his death, our already not so tight family ties came completely untethered. In general, we are terrible at doing family things. We don’t get together for holidays or even call each other for Christmas. We don’t do gifts and I think I’ve sent my niece one birthday card, because I suck at being an aunt. It’s a good thing I’m still adorable.
Despite our utter failure at family orientation, my brother and I have stayed connected. It’s the same connection I had with him when I was small and trusted only him to change my diaper. The same connection that I had when I cried for him to not leave home. The same connection that still lets me call him if I’m having a breakdown and cry.
When my husband and I celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary, my brother surprised me by coming to town. He walked in the door and picked me up and swung me around. As a pretty tall person myself, I had been too big to be picked up since I was 12. Flying through the air, It was like I was five years old again, with a contact high and the opening jam of “Stay A Little Longer” playing somewhere in the distance. Big brother was back to save the day.
