Mom Always Said Not to Play Ball In the House

Since it was 115 yesterday (according to this morning’s Chron…I never saw it get over 112…HA!), we pretty much didn’t leave the house after 10am, except to take out the garbage. As I mentioned, TV Land had a Brady Bunch marathon on, and after an early dinner, we were watching the top 10 most popular episodes, and of course, the episode with the broken vase came on. I suddenly thought, hey, why was that only Peter’s fault? All three of the boys were playing basketball in the house…it was just Peter who got unlucky enough that he bounced the ball down the hall, over the ledge, and broke the vase. Excuse me, not fair. The way we were raised, all three of those boys would have been in equal amounts of trouble, because it wasn’t breaking the vase that was against the rules…it was playing ball in the house.

This brought me back, to my prime example. When I was in 6th grade, and Richard was in 8th grade, I had my best friend, Neva, over for a sleepover. Neva and I were playing Monopoly, and Richard was watching. Well, more than watching, he was torturing me. Neva was doing pretty well, and every time I would land on one of her hotel-properties, he would taunt, “Heeehhhh….heeeehhhhh….heeeeehhhhh” Think of the most annoying way possible for a younger brother to say this, and my older brother was doing it to me. Over and over and over. Finally, I lost it. I couldn’t take it anymore. Who knows, maybe it was 112 outside. So I kicked him, under the table. He kicked me back, and one thing led to another, and the next thing you knew, he was choking me. We were both standing up, his fingers were digging welts into my neck, and he was shaking my head back and forth as he choked me. My head went so far back, so fast, that it knocked the blender right out of the base, and it bounced off of the counter, and shattered onto the floor. Luckily, that broke up the fight. Immediately, the fight turned into who was going to pay for the blender. “YOU BROKE IT, YOU PAY!” we both screamed. Neva was crying, and the welts were rising on my neck. We cleaned up the broken blender, I cleaned up my neck, and we waited. Waited for my mom. Guess what she said. “You’re not supposed to fight. You were both fighting, you both pay.” We both paid. The injustice of it all….he should have paid for choking me. (Of course, being raised that way, my mind goes directly to the injustice of Peter being the one to blame, when there were 3 kids playing ball in the house that day…)