Things Only My Sisters Know

There is a girl only my sisters ever really knew. Before the degrees, before the titles, before I learned how to perform. She wore green and black rollerblades, and she was scared of absolutely nothing.

This one is a love letter. Not to a place and not to a lesson, but to the girls who knew me when I was most myself, and who are still my whole village. Because lately I have been finding my way back to her, the daredevil in the size 7 skates, and it turns out my sisters kept her safe the entire time. So this one is for them, and it is a little bit for her too. Grab a seat. This one is sweet, and it is crispy, the way I like it.

It started in kindergarten. I marched up to my teenage parents and begged them to buy me some skates, because I wanted to skate more than I wanted to breathe. I had already graduated off those little plastic princess heels every 80s and 90s girl coveted, the ones that clicked across the floor like you were somebody. My first real pair came from Walmart. Green and black, and they clicked too.

Then I found rollerblades. Green and black again, size 7, and I broke them in every single day. I was out there. Out. There. So out there that boys in my class, the ones who only noticed me the day I finally showed up in a dress, started asking how my calves got so muscular. I had no clue what they were talking about. Sir, I roller blade for half my waking life. That is the secret. That is the whole entire secret.

I was a daredevil, and I have the childhood to prove it. I built ramps. I got hurt. We did not do doctors growing up, so we mended it all at home, walked it off, and got right back on the wheels. And I got good. Good enough to skate on one leg with the other kicked up in the air, good enough to drop way down low to the ground and rise back up, and fast. Fast as lightning. I would tear up and down our street showing off for the kids who wandered up from the back of the trailer park like I was the main event. Because I was. I was Sk8rbabe, my very first Yahoo handle, in the flesh, living my whole truth on eight wheels.

When the skates got too easy, I took it to the bike. I would get going fast, then stand straight up on the handlebars, balanced, and throw my legs up like it was nothing. I was a tomboy down to the bone. I climbed trees. I lived for a rough, rugged challenge. I dug up worms and grabbed frogs with my bare hands. I made soup out of those little wild weeds with the onion bulbs at the root, and I made mud pies with genuine dedication.

And listen. I collected POGs. Proudly. And for anybody too young to have lived through it, let me put you on. POG actually stands for Passion fruit, Orange, and Guava. It was a Hawaiian juice, and the whole thing started with kids over there flipping the little cardboard caps off those juice bottles. The name just stuck. By the time it reached us, a POG was a cardboard disc about the size of a milk cap, covered in the loudest designs you have ever seen. You stacked them face down, slammed the stack with a heavier disc called a slammer, and whatever flipped face-up was yours to keep. That was the entire point. You played for keeps, and you built your collection off of everybody you beat. That was the whole dopamine rush of 1994, and we were absolutely feral for it. This was back when we lived in the very back of the trailer park, before we moved on up to the upper east side, which, and I truly cannot stress this enough, was just the first street of the same trailer park. But we had arrived, girl.

There was a boy I had the biggest crush on. We liked all the same things and we played POGs every single day. And that boy had the coolest POG album you have ever seen, one of those binders with the plastic sleeves, every single one organized just so. We were too damn poor for anything like that. His family was not doing a whole lot better than mine, but he had that collection laid out like a museum, and I thought it was the greatest thing on God’s green earth. We used to sit in the ditch near his trailer for hours, playing the game, flipping through his album, talking about POGs and wrestling. I also, in the interest of full honesty, once cracked his brother upside the head with a big old telephone pole. In my defense, I was simply trying to prove I could pick the thing up. And I did pick it up. Controlling it after that was a whole separate conversation. I got hung out to dry for that one.

We put on shows for our dad and our step-mom, and every now and then, when he was sober, he would actually come and watch. I used to do a full Britney Spears, oh baby baby, right in the middle of Walmart, in front of my sisters, laughing from the very bottom of my belly while our dad threatened to send us all to wait in the van. And that was a real threat, because it put our once-a-month luxury outing to the Ryan’s buffet on the line. I did Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura. I loved Sting, and I would argue down anybody bold enough to tell me wrestling was not real. It was real to me, and that was final.

One Father’s Day, all of us painted a log, hammered a few nails into it, and proudly presented it to our dad as a coat rack. The man did not own a single coat. Did not matter one bit. Best log he ever received. So no, childhood was not all bad. We rode the roller coasters at Libertyland in Memphis and lost our whole minds at the Memphis fair, chicken on a stick in hand, screaming.

But here is the part I need my sisters to know I still carry. I was the girl who got on the bus in fifth grade unable to say one word, only able to cry, because I had been assaulted at school that day. And when somebody on that bus tried to make a joke at my expense, my sisters were not having it. They were tough, my sisters. One was the meaner one, and the other was more of an I’m cool if you’re cool type, right up until she dragged that boy up over the back of his own bus seat and taught him, in front of God and everybody, that we do not play about each other. To this day I am impressed by their hands.

I was also the girl who blurted out the wildest, most out-of-pocket things, because I have ADHD, combined type, back when my dad did not believe in any of that. I was the girl who snuck off to her boyfriend’s house and absolutely got busted for it. I was full to the brim with passion and honesty for life, and I did not know yet that the world would spend years trying to talk me out of both.

Because here is the truth sitting under all of it. I wrote poetry as a kid, and one time in fifth grade I wrote something so heavy my teacher did not believe a child had written it. I wrote dark, because for most of my life I was a child nobody had really wanted, and the page was the one place that let me say so out loud. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write books.

Somewhere along the way, life handed me a costume and told me the guilt was just the cost of being real. It took a lot of healing to finally set that costume down. But I am not performing anymore. I found her again, the daredevil in the green and black skates, the one who caught frogs and argued about Sting and loved harder than was ever safe.

My sisters and I got pitted against each other for a while when our parents split. It got messy. But we found our way back to one another, the way we always do, because that is simply what we are. That is my village.

I used to think I had to earn my seat in every room by becoming someone shinier. My sisters never once needed the shiny version. They knew the real one, the loud, brave, frog-catching, pole-swinging original, and they loved her the entire time.

So I am done rushing myself into somebody I am not. I like her crispy and real and a little bit reckless. I like my bacon exactly the same way.

Unraveling with Mo 🥓