Writing Contest: From Our Family to Yours

Family is a touchy issue for a lot of people. Some don’t get along. Some people don’t even have a family to speak of (unfathomable!). We love to hear about family matters that inspire or even anger. As long as your family is invested in you, it doesn’t matter if they’re happy with you or angry at you, because as long as they feel something towards you, that’s how you can know that they care. The worst thing we can think of is not having family at all.

Beautiful sisters that we are, we pride ourselves in our family roots. The attractive throng of stubborn and hard working individuals that we are descended from are a matter of pride and a feeling of superior exemption in our heart of hearts. How many times have we been accused of being as obstinate as a Doss, or acting like a Hancock. There are Haffers, there are long lost Whitecottons and all kinds of quirky and interesting people along the way. The foundations of our very souls are grounded in the treatment by and tales of our very strong, very amazing family.

There is the matron supreme, the mama of all mamas, the rock in a turbulent world that each of her 6 children have always been able to depend on and look up to. Not a shred of mistreatment ever occurred to one of her children by her hand. She dealt with a couple different horribly mean men and came out stronger and a special favorite of all of her children. On my part, I look up to my mother’s temperance in times of need when I feel that I am not being fair and even tempered with my children, as she always was able to be.

Then come the big bad 3 sisters. The character and imagination of these ladies is a topic of true inspiration for their 2 younger sisters (namely, Nancy and I). Our eldest was out of the house before we were born, she was always the grown up and married one. She served as an inspiration and excursion destination to us whenever our Mommy simply worked too much to keep up with us. We used to love her house so much we’d hide keys or purses to keep from having to leave. Nevermind the fact that she had two daughters not more than 5 years younger than we are. We became best friends and did some of our most ridiculously stupid things that we could think of, and we did them together.

Our next eldest sister was the dark, brooding, middle child, and she was so freaking cool! (yes, I still think so). She has a poetic soul, a troubled mind, and a heart that cried out to help little sisters that were not always treated very nicely by a very depressed and somewhat unstable father. For a while she was our champion, taking care to see that we were treated fairly. When she moved out I think that my whole life came crashing down around me at the tender age of 5, and I slept in her Guns’N’Roses every night because of how much I missed her.

Our next eldest sister was the one that lived with us the longest, (we graduated ten years apart), but she stayed at home for quite some time after, and she became the scapegoat for any problems Nancy and I had, because she did not like our defiance, which in all honesty, we cannot help but dish out to anyone that is bothered by it, still. We love her dearly, and she was a source of great fun and playtimes with her creative stories we would bring to life, as well as playing a Hogwarts-esque type of boarding school game.

Now before I bring up the next in line, I want anyone related to me to settle down, and if you’re not, be prepared because he is the one male in any of his sisters’ (or his mom’s) life that was good to them. He is the standard for each of his sisters that anyone they are involved with can never live up to. The Marine, the police officer and the all around badass big brother. Being the special favorite of everyone related to him isn’t as easy as it sounds. For his sisters, he has to act as a sort of a father figure fill-in. For his mother, he is everything that she has tried to instill in her children, and somehow failed in everyone except him. He is the golden child, and I would say it bothers me, but he is very awesome and I would be a great person if I was half as awesome, responsible and just generally badass as he is.

Then there’s us. The dorks. The young ones. The impressionable, eccentric, and slightly bi-polar little sisters. Growing up with bad haircuts and low self-esteem. A lot of times we only had each other and we fought. A lot. At one point I was convinced that Nancy was actually trying to kill me due to the violence of her emotions. As well as her biting. We have blossomed into slightly more self-aware weirdos and our awkwardness is only overshadowed by our amazingly eccentric personalities, as well as our very high highs and resoundingly low lows.

We love our family. We worry about them when they are having a hard time and we always miss the old days when we were all closer.
We know that our family, good times or bad, is what has shaped us into who we are today and the stories we have, funny, sad, meaningful, or all three mean everything to us.

We can never forget when our big brother rode home from California on his motorcycle to visit. All of our nieces and nephews being born, how whiney our sisters were when they were pregnant. There were so many petty fights, and so many really messed up incidents that did not result in nearly as much punishment as it warranted. (No one would ever believe the degree to which Nancy’s habit of anger-biting effected my life.)

We want to hear about your families. We want to hear what makes you tick. What makes you happy or angry about them? Do you have any crazy stories? These things are important, because after all, if a girl didn’t have a family, who would they cry to? (Or yell at?)

Please send a parable that is humorous or meaningful about your family that you would like to share, and we will choose one lucky submission and publish it on our blog, with you, lucky winner, as a guest writer for The Sisters Curious!

thesisterscurious@gmail.com

Joanie quite flawlessly locates four-leaf clovers, and enjoys

endlessly barraging her husband with a babbling brook of questions about nonsense she has no intention of letting him speak long enough to answer.