I grew up the first of six siblings. Not a large family by some standards, but larger than most.
My mother wanted to have kids. Later in our lives she told us that what she wanted to be when she grew up was a mother. She also told us what she wanted to do was be a mom and have 12 kids. Yes, that was not a typo. She said she’d always seen herself as mother to 12 children. My father didn’t. So six, it turns out, was his limit.
Let’s count the number of days from the time the youngest was born until I graduated from high school. That’s 12 years at 365 days for a total of 4,380 days. Multiply that by six kids and it gives us 26,280 opportunities for adventure… and mishap. If you multiply the number of interactions between every other sibling and figure an average of one interaction per hour each day… hell, the numbers get into the millions and I didn’t even count Leap Years!
In a family this size, the opportunities for conflict and misdeeds are basically beyond comprehension. As I think about it now, I can’t imagine what it would have been like with twice as many of us.
There were doctor visits and hospital stays, as you’d expect with any young family. But beyond routine childhood illnesses and surgeries, our hospital visits included stitches for one child who was running down a hallway and fell on a mangled metal toy cash register. Another was whacked on the head with a broken-handled garden hoe. Wait. Now that I think of it, that was the same sibling. She got stitches in her lip from the toy cash register collision and stitches in the top of her head from the embedded garden hoe, the latter courtesy of my brother.
If the accidents weren’t enough, we seemed to find opportunities to create and court disaster.
One time we decided to turn our stairway into a slide. In our living room was a staircase that went down to our basement. It was carpeted. My mother always warned us to be careful when we wore only socks. She warned us that we might slip.
Slip? The low-pile carpeting could be slippery?
I can’t remember which of us were involved in the planning and execution of this dizzying concept, but it could easily have been all six of us. It was probably just me… but it could have been all of us. We gathered all of the cushions from the living room furniture and sneaked as many pillows from our beds as we could without arousing the suspicion of our mother. We piled all of these cushions at the bottom of the stairs. We then got a cardboard box from somewhere. The box was from the supermarket and had been used to ship produce. It had no top and had a few vent holes along side. I don’t recall where we found the box and it could well be that it was the box itself that spurred this idea.
We had the box, stairs, cushions and pillows. Now all we needed was the rider of our roller coaster. Easy. Lisa. Lisa is the youngest. She easily fit into the box so she was the logical choice. At this time, she may have been four years old. Maybe younger.
This was the early 1960’s, the heady days of the Space Race. I lived and breathed the space program and knew the significance of scientific testing on our new slide/coaster car! Since this box was gravity powered, we first conducted G-force testing to better understand the acceleration of the box due to the vector sum of non-gravitational forces acting on an object free to move through a fluid space such as air (or water, but not in this case) and I had already vectored in the coefficient of drag relative to the thickness of the pile of the carpet versus the slickness of the bottom of the box.
Not really. I just had the brilliant idea of shoving one of us down the stairs and within minutes we had thrown the cushions and pillows to the bottom of the stairs, told Lisa to get into the box and slowly eased the box to the precipice.
Bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump-bump! Down she flew! The entire ride took probably no more than three seconds. The box upended once it reached the bottom of the stairs and she was ejected onto the cushions and pillows. If memory serves, she laughed and took another ride or two.
Click here to order my Kindle Short.
Before the next child could experience the exhilaration of hurling down the stairs in a flimsy cardboard box, wearing no more safety gear than pajamas, we heard the vacuum cleaner switch off. Within moments, our mother emerged into the hallway and saw us all gathered at the top of the stairway. I feel it safe to say that my mom, having born six children, was an experienced mother. She instinctively knew that six siblings huddled together in close proximity was, at best, an atypical occurrence. Normally, by 9 a.m., we were sick of the sight of each other and she spent half her waking hours acting as a referee. Here she finds us, all acting in concert with one another and instantly becoming quiet when she appeared in the hall. This could, at best, mean we were doing something we shouldn’t. And, on a sliding scale, could have possibly included fishing line, kitchen cutlery and a small fire on the living room rug. You never knew…
“What’s going on?”
“Nuuuuhtheeeeeng…” we sang in unison.
Now Available in Paperback and for Kindle!
She walked towards us and we parted to reveal our baby sister smiling up from the cockpit of our top-secret, highly experimental X-23 Super Coaster that only by happenstance looked like a fragile, innocent child seated in a flimsy Sunkist orange box about to be thrust down the stairs.
“Nobody move!” In an instant she was among us and a fraction of an instant after that, my baby sister was hoisted by one arm from the box. “Whose idea was this?!”
My eyes found the floor but ten other eyes looked at me.
Gulp.
My mother turned a steely look to me and liquids of unknown origin accumulated in my shorts. She cradled my sister in one arm and, with the other, unceremoniously scooped the box from the floor.
“What were you thinking?!” She asked. I assumed it was rhetorical as she did not wait for an answer. Instead she carried my baby sister to her room and I never saw that box again.
And the truth was, I wasn’t thinking. Or, more to the point, I was thinking like a child. I was thinking only of the fun of the moment and hadn’t considered the consequences or the dangers.
But I have thought of that day many times over the ensuing decades. Since becoming a parent, memories of that day cause a weakening of my knees. Our little adventure that day was so fraught with peril. The slightest misstep of that box on the stairs could have injured or killed my sister. As an adult I have seen that box catch on a high step and tip forward, sending my sister tumbling down the stairs. I’ve seen missing teeth, lacerations and compound fractures.
And even though she made it safely to the bottom, there was only a distance of about two feet between the bottom of the stairs and the exterior wall of the basement. Only the cushions and pillows kept her from a catastrophic and tragic union of her skull and the bricks.
Being from a large family has its advantages. There is always a family member to turn to in a crisis and there’s plenty of love to go around. On the other hand, when you have a junior rocket surgeon like me as the first born, one can be lucky to make it to the age of majority.
