No One Beat Me Up
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Thursday, July 22, 2010 11:15 AM
“If I had to use two words to describe my childhood,” my sister said the other day, “they would be: pink belly.”
I was unloading the dishwasher and almost dropped a handful of forks. What?!? Pink belly? What was she talking about?
Apparently, “pink belly” is a game wherein the perpetrators hold down the victim and smack him on the belly until it turns pink.
I am the oldest of six children, and Tirienne is the fifth. Do I need to tell you that numbers four and six are boys? It seems like a safe bet that most instances of “pink belly” happen to people who have brothers.
My sister is eight years younger than I am. She was only nine when I left home for college, so I missed a lot of her childhood. And now that she’s living with us and we’re spending time together, I’m learning how different from mine her growing-up years were.
The six of us came along girl-girl-girl, then boy-girl-boy, and my mom jokes that she mentally referred to the two sets of her children as “The Ladies” and “The Ruffians.” Being one of the ladies meant that in my childhood, there was no wrestling, very little horseplay, and certainly no “pink belly.” When angry, we might smack or yell or even cut the hair off each other’s dolls, but we would not beat each other up. Ladies just don’t do that.
The ruffians, on the other hand… well, if you made one of them mad, he’d put his head down and run straight at you, intending to pummel you with his skull. I’m six and ten years older than my brothers, so this was never a problem for me: I’d simply lift the attacker by his shoulder, sweep his legs out from under him, and sit on him until he promised not to bother me any more.
(We don’t need to discuss what happened many years later, when my brothers got taller than I am.)
My sister, sandwiched between the two boys, didn’t have the luxury of sitting on them. She had to learn to fight back in kind. She managed, but it made her childhood very different from mine. Our brothers’ physical energy was a blip on my radar; it was her daily reality.
On the other hand, as I like to remind her, I spent many evenings babysitting while I was in high school. The younger kids didn’t have to babysit; their weekend evenings were free for socializing.
We older kids also had the unenviable job of breaking our parents in. They had an energetic zeal about the rules in those early years, and I can think of at least three things that I was told I’d “never” be allowed to do that my younger siblings did without a second thought.
As I tell Tirienne: yes, perhaps you were subjected to “pink belly” but you were also allowed to take tap dancing lessons. I was restricted to ballet. So it all comes out even in the end.
Some siblings played “pink belly” and some did not, but we all join in with vigor when the “whose childhood was hardest?” game starts. Who could resist that one?
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