It’s funny, when I look back on little me, I’m torn between wanting to hug her and tell her to never change, versus telling her to change sooner. During those little kid years, I was awesome. I was happy, I loved exploring, looking at bugs, playing a game, not playing a game. I just existed and I was happy.

I don’t doubt that kids whispered about me, I know they laughed at me, sometimes boys threw rocks at me, but after school I always ran to the ice cream truck that parked at the edge of the playground. I would use my milk money to buy jolly ranchers to share with the mean kids. Today we would call that “bribery” but as a little kid I wanted them to see me as a nice kid, the kind you wanted to be friends with.

Yes, right. The very definition of bribery. It never worked anyway.

I know kids are mean now, they were mean then – the nature of children doesn’t change. I have distinct memories of kids being cruel to me, like boys throwing rocks? Yeah, that’s real. There was another day I was skipping home from school and a group of older kids behind me kept calling me the “R” word. I really didn’t know what it meant, I knew they were saying it to be mean so I shifted from skip to run, but once I got home, it didn’t matter.

I think I was in second grade and I was called a chicken because I wouldn’t go down the giant metal slide that ended in the fiery pits of hell. An unshielded, unprotected metal slide, as the focal point of the fenced recess area, designed for daytime play for children aged six to ten. Damn right I was chicken! But I was also stupid, so I caved under the pressure. Climbed that ladder, which, kids today would not be allowed within 50 yards of without a hard hat, it was so ridiculously tall! But yeah, I climbed it. I froze at the top until the kid behind me pushed me.

Pretty sure I didn’t die. My brain always blocks out traumatic events so I have no actual memory of the journey to the bottom, just the knowledge that I did.

There are some blurry faces living deep in the corners of my brain, but I don’t dwell on them, those mean kids really didn’t do any permanent damage. But, much like a lot of weird fat kids that didn’t really belong anywhere, I did have a bully.

Sometime in my third decade my aunt told me that my sister hated me just for being born. It stuck in my brain and I puzzled the accuracy, but in reviewing my childhood, I can assume it as fact.

There was all the normal sibling stuff, I asked her if she wanted to play, she told me to go away. I wet the bed, my mom put me in bed with her for the rest of the night, she would threaten me with violence if I dared breach the pillow wall. Typical kid stuff.

But as I grew more accustomed to indoor plumbing and found things to do by myself, her cruelty would manifest in other ways.

There were very few occasions my sister would approach me and suggest a game. One particular afternoon I’d raided the box my mom had in the garage for goodwill. There was a navy tweed skirt, I mean really, I have no idea what a tweed is, but to my little brain, this was the epitome of business fashion, this dark blue tube that, on me, looked more like a missile silo.

You know who wore navy business attire? Diana Prince.

Seriously? Wonder Woman? Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman!

Alright, I was no comic book geek (my mom wouldn’t allow it) but I was a big fan of whatever super hero came on television. The old Batmans, where they would actually show the “POW!” and “BOOM!” 6-year-old me thought that was brilliant! But Wonder Woman was different. She was real, normal, a girl.

My dad had been in the Air Force and after having kids, shifted to air national guard, so I knew the military had an “air” unit. Of course there was the army, that’s where GI Joe worked. I probably had a faint grasp on Navy and Marines, but Diana Prince, in her dress blues, for all my intentional purpose, was Air Force. I could sneak off with one of my dad’s hats, mom’s old shoes and stride around the backyard as Diana Prince.

(A Wonder Woman costume was much harder to procure so I would only pretend that I was the secret identity. If my imagination did create a situation that required a transition, I would spin until I fell down and then go to commercial break.)

My sister elected to play with me, or my mom told her to, whatever and I was absolutely into my dress up, role play, super hero fantasy, but, surprisingly, she agreed anyway. There were no rules, no declaration of intent. As all kids know, scenes must be carefully planned so everyone knew how to act. Nope. My sister just said she was the bad guy and tied me to the fence.

Then she left.

With me tied to the fence.

The worst part, it was one of those old ropes that, as it disintegrated, the loose fibers magically turned to razor wire. My dad gave it to us to use as a jump rope but he’d tightly wound the ends with black electrical tape so we wouldn’t cut off any fingers holding it. I don’t expect he thought it would ever be tightly embedded in my fleshy little biceps.

Sometimes she came back and let me loose. Oh sorry, I guess I should have stated more clearly this happened more than once. Sometimes we’d play “cops and robbers” sometimes it was “superhero and villains” and it always ended with me tied up. Once, it was a Dudley Do Right kind of thing, she tied me to a picnic bench and said the train was coming…

I was just happy she was playing with me.

On rainy days stuck in the house I’d always beg her to play hide and seek. I just knew I was the best hider! She could never find me!

It was a long time before I understood that she never looked. I stopped asking when I realized my mom was in on it. My mom knew that I was hiding, my sister wasn’t looking and that I thought it was because I was a good hider. She’d let me fester in the hamper until I gave up or got hungry. It didn’t hurt as much that my sister didn’t look, playing half a game of hide and seek is still better than no game at all, but knowing my mom laughed was a different kind of embarrassment.

But she was still my big sister and I knew someday I wouldn’t be the annoying little sister anymore and we’d be best friends. Until then, I always had Ranger Rick magazines and my dog, bug catchers, I was also pretty determined to catch a rabbit in our backyard… in a region that has precisely zero rabbits. So, you know, I’d still show up, continue to be annoying for existing, there’s always tomorrow….

And one particular tomorrow had pizza!

Such a big deal! See, we didn’t do fast food, rarely ate out at all. Our generation was the “families eat together at the table” and “eat it or wear it” no matter what flavor of the rainbow was served. Too often it was brown. There is nothing worse than hot brown! Sometimes a special night would include homemade pizza; that weird amoeba shaped doughy blob that had way too much sauce and way too little cheese.

But on the rarest of occasions, the planets aligned, the weather was perfect for staying out just after the street lights came on with no punishment via mosquito and my dad would pick up commercially prepared, frozen never fresh, served in a cardboard box with half the toppings stuck to the lid, pizza.

Not sure if my heart is racing remembering the excitement or I’m having a stroke? Whatever.

My sister was babysitting down the street and I knew she’d be so disappointed to miss out on this rare extravagance so I asked if I could take the pizza to her. My mom agreed, put a couple slices on a plate and covered it with foil.

I crossed the street in front of my house, feeling confident knowing that my dad would hear me scream if I was smashed by a car because I could not take my eyes off that foil long enough to look both ways. As much as I wanted to skip, I carefully maintained a normal human walking gait with the rights and the lefts, wasn’t going to do anything weird and risk dropping the plate.

I made the five-house length distance, arrived with the pizza still safely in my hands, on the plate, under the foil. Just glowing, I rang the doorbell. My sister opened the interior door, phone wedged on her shoulder, rolled her eyes and closed the door.

“It’s ok, she saw the pizza, she’ll be back when she’s done her call,” I thought and perched carefully on the edge of the concrete porch. Other than the tapping of my toes, I remained perfectly still and quiet, sentinel of the pizza.

It felt like an hour, but it was probably only a couple minutes, I heard the door click and before I could stand and turn, ready to sing out good tidings I felt a sharp pain in my back. As my sister had walked out the door, she purposely, intentionally, with force and malice, kicked me in the back.

I don’t know why the impulse is to hide our pain, pride perhaps? I didn’t have the capacity for that level of manipulation, so I probably didn’t want her to feel bad for hurting me. I handed her the pizza and turned to walk home. I clenched my teeth to hold back my tears and when I heard the front door shut, I ran. I ran home and when I burst into my house, I was blubbering.

My dad, being a dad, asked what happened and through sobs I told him that my sister had kicked me in the back. When he later confronted her, she claimed it was an accident. I was laying in my room, hiding in the shadows on my bed and I heard my dad tell her “You best make friends with her now, one day she is going to be bigger than you and she will knock you on your ass.”

A couple days later my dad took me in the backyard and gave me “ass knocking” lessons. He did the thing with the jabs and the upper cuts. I thought it was really strange that our mutual father was encouraging me to inflict pain upon his first born. But as an adult, with a wider lens, he saw how often she broke my heart and he just wanted me to stand up for myself. Give it back to her in a way he could not.

It was a long time before I ever took advantage of puberty rearranging my width to make height. In my later teens I fought back, but it usually made me sad that there was so much hostility there. For much of my adult life my mom would lecture me, with irritation “you just have to accept her for who she is!”

I feel that I have. From my perspective I have endured more than my share. I have graciously offered unrequested forgiveness if only out of habit, for I realized long ago that we will never be friends. But it has been 50 years, my well has run dry. I can accept we are different people, but from now on, I will do the accepting from a great, safe, distance.

It’s my table now, I decide who sits here.