Categories: Memoirs

SUPER SISTER SLEEPOVER

It took my sisters and me over 40 years to overcome our sibling rivalry. From jealousy to humiliating comments to just about anything that could be construed as not conducive to nurturing a healthy relationship, we engaged in every emotional battle imaginable until we agreed – finally – to call a truce.

And with that truce we decided to celebrate the love we new we had for one another by holding a Super Sister Sleepover. Our goal was to enjoy a playful night of eating, drinking, and being merry. We also decided to bring along a list of memories.

That was our first mistake: “Remember the time Auntie Margaret & Auntie Alice asked Kathy if she moved her bowels, and Kathy was only two and didn’t know what that meant?”

I remembered it well, because our mother, in an attempt to rush through language she found uncomfortable, never told us the correct pronunciation and allowed us to call this particular bodily function, a “boumument.”

I was five years old, and I remembered that moment, that exhilarating moment when I felt my genius kick in. What an astounding show of intelligence – I actually translated to my baby sister that what our beloved aunts were referring to was what she (and we, sadly) called – a boumument.

But before I could speak, before I could revel in my memory of this momentous occasion, Cindy jumped in.

“YES!” she exclaimed. “I was a three and a half year old prodigy with a genius-level IQ who figured out what that meant. I saved Kathy from humiliating feelings of stupidity. I figured out they were talking about bowel movements!”

Whatever.

I suddenly remembered the time Cindy and I searched the dictionary for the meaning of “Chinus.” Hmm. Maybe we misspelled it. Maybe it was c-h-i-n-a-s. Webster didn’t help. Women have porcelain plates? Mom’s rapid string of words raced through our ears, “Men have penises. Women have chinas.” (You repeated that in your mind just now, didn’t you?)

Our second mistake was agreeing to wear bathing suits. What that meant was that I first had to buy a bathing suit – one that would cover my repulsively flabby belly. Like a rubber ball that had ballooned to astronomical proportions over the years, my belly, the way station for my four babies (from more than two decades before), could have housed the Suleman octuplets when they turned three years old and nobody would have noticed a difference.

Even sit-ups couldn’t coax the protrusion into its proper position as it stubbornly hung over my panty line. Though my sisters complained about their own obesity, I knew I was the fat one. Though, come to think of it, I did notice that one of Kathy’s earlobes looked bigger than the last time I saw her. And Cindy’s big toe was in desperate need of aerobics.

My shopping expedition for a bathing suit was a nightmare. I hate shopping (people are always surprised that a woman hates shopping). Trying to find something big enough to hide my abnormal girth, but not so obvious as to draw attention to my reasons for purchasing a tent suit, I finally found one that I thought would help disguise me enough so that people would believe they were looking at Angelina Jolie and not me.

So there we were, the three of us, dressing for the pool after our delicious dinner, which included yummy drinks of varying flavors that helped us laugh explosively about everything. I put on my blousy two-piece bathing suit, pulling the top down to cover my midline grotesqueness and saw my sisters trying to hide their embarrassment. Their heads cocked, they sighed, “It’s not that bad.”

You can always tell when something looks absurd – people try to soften the blow by saying it’s not that bad.

The fastest way to the swimming pool was through the lobby. So we wandered aimlessly around the hotel’s back corridors for nearly two hours as we maneuvered our way through the hallways until we found the pool, which was filled with moms and dads and their kids. We pretended to blend in.

But then, as I descended into the depths of the pool, my blousy top mushroomed out like a parachute landing on the ocean, exposing a whale beneath my suit. With my belly flopping below, the bathing suit became a stubborn umbrella that refused to close. I flapped my arms around the offending garment in an attempt to hold it down, but it was like it had a mind of its own.

Like the Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid, I exploded out of my bathing suit until I looked like a beached whale, flab floating everywhere. My sisters looked at me with pity as Kathy tried to hide her earlobe and Cindy bent her toes beneath her feet.

Despite the fact that I exaggerate exponentially (it’s an inherited trait), and despite the fact that my sisters would write a completely different version of our sleepovers, our Super Sister Sleepovers have been a HUGE success. Though we planned on celebrating every year, we have yet to celebrate more than two Super Sister Sleepovers. Next time we want to include my daughters, my granddaughters, cousins, our sister-friends, and even our mom (so we can tease her to her face instead of behind her back). We even thought of renting out a hotel filled with Super Sisters.