Me: “Awesome! Barack Obama is now following me on Twitter! How fun.”

McCayla: “Shouldn’t he be trying to kick McCain’s butt instead of stalking you on Twitter?”

One of the incidents I was thinking about a while ago was shortly after my other sister Violet had been given a lipgloss kit. Violet was always really into experimenting, and had made a green lipgloss and thrown it in a bowl on top of her dresser.

As was typical for a Saturday, my parents went for a ride on their Harley and we were all home alone. I had thought that McCayla was just sitting in her room being the strange little kid that she was when Violet came downstairs and says “McCayla is really scared and doesn’t want you to get mad. She won’t come downstairs unless you promise you won’t get mad.”

“Oh, fucking hell. (If I said a sentence without the fuck word in it when I was a teenager, I have no idea what it was) Ok, I promise, I won’t get mad, but I hate it when you do this. Now, where’s McCayla?”

McCayla comes walking down the stairs very slowly with her hands in front of her face crying and repeating “promiseyouwon’tgetmadPROMISEYOUWON’TGETMAD!”

I brace myself for the worst, expecting who knows what. When her hands were free I fell forward grabbing the handrail on the stairs laughing until my stomach hurt.

McCayla, still bawling, attempted to tell me what had happened. “I was playing Indian.” Her face was covered in green patterns resembling tribal markings. Apparently, she’d found Violet’s lipgloss.

“It’s Native American now, kid. Oh…fuck. Ok, give me a minute to think, let’s go to the bathroom.”

I scrubbed her face while she bawled and it wasn’t coming off at all. No fading-nothing. I said I thought we were going to need to call someone and she FREAKED OUT. McCayla grabbed my legs and started screaming “Do not call Mom and Dad!”

I was trying everything we had in the bathroom. Being a teenager, it occurred to me that when I washed my face with hot water and put globs of Eucerin cream on my face it would clear up-so I gave it a go on McCayla’s green face-and for some reason I’ve never figured out it worked! Makes me really wonder about Eucerin cream.

I desperately wish I had pictures of McCayla’s green face to show people, I still see it quite clearly in my mind, haha…

Yesterday I was thinking about when I had gotten the back of an earring stuck in my ear. I was 9 or 10 years old and we had gone to Disneyland in the middle of February. My mom warned me to make sure my earrings stayed on real tight on the rides or they might fall out. This scared me, and I kept checking my earrings, making sure they were screwed on as tight as possible. Well, at some point after our trip, I realized that the back of my earring had gotten half way sunk into my ear. I managed to take the post out and tried to pick and pull at the back of my earring, but it remained inside my ear.

I went to my mom and asked her, hypothetically, what would happen if part of my earring were to get stuck into my ear. My mom was REALLY big on talking about hypothetical problems, and how they could lead to our deaths. No, really, it shocked people who came over how often my mom would talk about our deaths. She once told me that if I didn’t clean my room, there would be a fire and then I wouldn’t be able to find my way out with all the mess. My dog and I would be trapped up in my attic bedroom and two firemen would have to go come looking for me, who would then get lost in the mess, and they too would perish, so if I didn’t get my ass upstairs and clean up that mess two firemen, my dog, and myself would all die in the fire that was sure to happen if I didn’t clean my room.

So, me asking her about what would happen if part of my earring were to get stuck in my ear really excited her. She told me all about how we would have to go to the hospital and they would slide my ear open, possibly put me under for surgery, and they would have to remove the piece of earring and how I would have to have stitches, and how it would really hurt. As a child, I was always extremely terrified of the possibility of having to have stitches. She also said that if I didn’t go and get the piece removed, the metal would give me an infection in my blood stream and travel to another cut somewhere on my body, go through my heart, and kill me.  She then asked me why I had asked.

Terrified, I told her I was just curious.

I concluded that obviously this situation was much more complicated than I had anticipated, and it would be easier to try and figure it out myself, or die trying. This sounded much better than going to a hospital and possibly dieing there.

So, every night, sometimes for hours, I picked at the earring in my ear, but it only seemed to be getting sunk farther in there. I always wore my hair down and was careful to keep my ear hidden.

A full year later, on a night in February, I was laying in bed playing with my ear and suddenly part of the earring-back came out—through the front of my ear! It hurt, it was disgusting, but it was gone! The feeling of relief was like nothing else, it was finally over! I wanted to go shouting my victory to everyone, but alas, it was a secret.

Five years later my younger sister Violet was going to the doctor with my mom-because she had gotten an earring post stuck in her ear! I desperately wanted to tell her all about what had happened to me, but was still afraid of getting in trouble, so I didn’t tell anyone.  Violet had the earring removed at the clinic and it had been no big deal. No one died, Violet barely even cried, and the day ended with an ice cream sundae.

Last night I had randomly been thinking about the earring experience I had, and remembered  that I had never told Violet about it. I called her today to fill her in. It felt so strange to tell her about something so many years later, and it got me thinking about all the things that she had been present for and probably didn’t know about. With the way we grew up, we kept a lot of things to ourselves because fear was a large ruling factor in our lives.

I wonder how many of my memories are drastically different from her perspective because she had information  I didn’t, and vice versa?

Anyhow, when McCayla was around 6 or 7 years old, she loved playing in the yard and was constantly covered in dirt. She could not stay clean for anything, and she had no problem with that. At some point, she started blowing her nose on the front of  her shirt. One day my dad noticed her doing this and made a completely disgusted face.

“Listen kid, you need to stop blowing your nose on the front of your shirt. People can see that!”

So McCayla stopped blowing her nose on the front of her shirt.  One day, my dad noticed that she had taken his advice, and again, he screamed out in total disgust.

“God, McCayla,  why? Why would you do that? You can’t blow your nose INSIDE your shirt either!”

She looked so surprised and confused. “But…you said!”