The night my parents sat my sister and me down in our living room and explained to us that Mommy was going to have a baby, I imagined a baby doll waiting in the garage for us. I waited patiently, and then expectantly as they explained that soon we would have a little brother or sister. Neither of us spoke, and at the time I assumed Tara was waiting with diminishing patience, as I was, for one of them to go out to the car and bring the baby in. Of course, Tara was only three at the time, and since it took her close to a year to even realize she had a brother once he arrived, it is more probable she was watching Sesame Street in her head or pretending she was a puppy. I, on the other hand, remember a distinct feeling of confusion when I realized that not only was there no doll, we wouldn’t even get the baby for months.
Talk about a let down.
The months leading up to my brother’s birth were a little more eventful, however, than I would have at first expected. Nearly every night we discussed possible names before my parents finally agreed on Holly for a girl, Brennan for a boy. I was not-so-secretly praying for a brother, not being all that impressed with the sister I already had.
When the call came from the hospital, and Sandi, our baby-sitter and best friend’s mom, informed me that I had a baby brother, I congratulated God on his listening skills. A slideshow of images appears in my head every time I think of those days: the dark pink, wrinkled face of my new baby brother, only a day old as he sat on the laps of his older sisters; watching my mom make room for Tara on her hospital bed when Tara insisted she had to rest; my grandparents in the oversized hospital gowns. But what I remember mostly are the ribbons my grandparents gave Tara and me the day Brennan was born. They looked like pink and blue lace but were stretchy, and we were extraordinarily pleased with them. Our high-school baby-sitter French-braided our hair with them to celebrate, and it was understood, at least between Tara and me, that this was the real treat, and not be confused with the gift of human life. On the way home from visiting the hospital, our car broke down and my dad walked us to a nearby house where we hitched a ride the remaining four miles home. Tara and I cried like it was the end of the world. Some might argue the excitement and stress of a new baby brother, Mom away from home, and all that extended family around had worn us out, but four miles can be a long and scary distance. I was excited about having a new brother, but his birth just didn’t stack up to everything his older, worldlier sisters were going through at the time of his birth.
By the end of my kindergarten year, only a month after his birth, all that had changed. Not only was I enamored with Brennan, I wanted another one. “But Mom,” I rationalized, “we have two girls and one boy. We need another boy to even things out.” Some days I felt a sister might be good. “Mom,” I tried persuasively, “if we have another girl, then when I leave for college, you’ll still have two girls and a boy. Nothing will change.” Hardly foolproof logic, but it didn’t matter because Mom was having none of it.
I was nine years old when my mother wrote a rap for each of us kids to perform on tape. Immortalized forever in my pink and white tie-dyed, hello 1991 T-shirt and matching stretch pants is me rapping, “I love my mom and dad, and I love my baby brother. I always tell my mom she needs to have another.” So she is aware that I want another one, I remember thinking. It will happen eventually.
By the time Brennan was five, my best friend’s mom was up to her fourth child. “But Mom, Sandi has four kids. Don’t you want her new baby to have someone to play with?” “Her new baby can play with Brennan,” she’d say distractedly, while folding laundry or cleaning up spills. I’d get pouty and leave in a huff, the star in my own movie about a misunderstood, underloved girl. “All she wanted was someone to love,” I imagined my audience saying. Never mind the sister and brother she already had.
Shortly after this time, I gave up on the dream of having another sibling and moved onto my next great plan. Every Friday night, Tara and I would beg our mother to let us have a friend—any friend—over to spend the night. She had plenty of reasons why we couldn’t: the house is too small or if you have one, then I’ll have to let your sister have one. The reasons went on and on, but without question, the most irritating one was, “Girls, for crying out loud, I spend all week in a small, overheated room teaching to eighth and ninth graders. The last thing I want to do at the end of the week is come home to a houseful of other people’s children.” This seemed horrendously unfair. Why should Tara and I have to suffer because other people’s children were obnoxious?? Why should we have to suffer because our mother had chosen a career that involved children? When asked, my mother would respond as she finished making dinner, “Why don’t you become a teacher, and then you’ll know.” Well, I informed her coldly, you lose, because guess what?
“I said, GUESS WHAT?”
“All right,” she’d sigh resignedly. “What?”
“I’m never becoming a teacher. Yeah, you heard me. If the result of teaching is that you don’t want kids around, I’m never doing it.”
As any educator will understand, this seemed to brighten her spirits rather than diminish them. And the result of all our whining was that the One Per Season Rule went into effect. “You may each have one friend a season. You can choose whoever you want, whenever you want, but don’t come whining to me two weeks after you had someone, cause it’ll be your own fault you used up your season.”
The ‘whoever we wanted, whenever we wanted’ part sounded just fine, but once a season? Tara and I looked at each other and scowled. One per season? That meant only four times a year. We turned the scowls on our mother who sighed the sigh of the truly weary. “Take it or leave it.”
We took it. It’s not like it was really a step down.
The result of this was that I routinely began to live in a dream world. Whereas up to this point, I could never understand why Tara’s habit of insisting we acknowledge she was—despite all evidence to the contrary—a dog, I slowly began to understand that when life hands you a lemon, well, you just gotta get on all fours and pretend that lemons were dog food.
“My name is Leisl,” I said, “and this is my brother, Kurt. Are you here to talk to our mother, Maria? She’s down the hall playing the guitar and singing about her favorite things. Oh look, here is my sister Louisa.”
But Tara was having none of it. “I’m not playing. I’ll only play if I can be the dog.”
“Tara, the von Trapps did not have any dogs.”
“Then I can’t play. I’m a dog.”
“Unh! Why do you have to ruin everything? Just be Louisa for a little while!”
“Woof,” she said matter-of-factly before settling on the floor with her head on her paw to rest.
I sighed, torn between my desire to be the von Trapp family and the reality that, like it or not, we were already short four members. Up to this point, I kept telling myself that four members could be overlooked. After all, my mom really did enjoy singing and playing the guitar, and probably would have agreed immediately to be Maria. My father flat-out refused to even acknowledge the game, calling me Erica despite my efforts to legally change my name to Leisl Michelle von Trapp (Leisl’s middle name was never shared with the general public, therefore, I decided just to keep my own—I liked it and it was so much fun to write in cursive). Refusing to do anything fun wasn’t such a far cry from Captain von Trapp, so I figured my father passed inspection. I’d put on my mother’s dress clothes and mope around the house, pretending he had given orders that under no circumstances were we to have play clothes.
So being short four members wasn’t really a problem, because we so obviously made up for what we lacked. We were, I was convinced, the von Trapps incarnate. It was only my mother’s steady refusal to produce any more offspring and my sister’s insistence that she was a dog that was keeping the rest of the world from knowing it too.
“Woof,” Tara repeated stubbornly.
I stomped my foot impatiently. The von Trapps did not have a dog; they had guitars and fun uncles. This wouldn’t be a problem if Brennan had wanted to the dog. Brennan had never seen The Sound of Music and so was resigned to the lowly role of Kurt, who had barely any lines, and was really only there so that Freidrich wouldn’t get lonely. But Tara knew the lines and, more importantly, knew the songs. She knew exactly when to stop back and let Leisl have her solos. Tara understood that Leisl was the oldest and prettiest and therefore the most important.
Louisa was manipulative and liked to crawl into normal people’s bedrooms with whole jars of spiders in her hands. Tara was perfect for Louisa and if she couldn’t see that …
“What if Louisa is a girl who thinks she’s a dog?”
Tara chewed on that. “Can I bark whenever I want?”
“I guess.”
“Can I have a solo?”
“What do you want to sing?”
“I don’t want to sing, I want to bark.”
It was shortly after this when I began wondering exactly how old Leisl was when she ran off to the hills that were alive with the sound of music to live alone. I slipped deeper and deeper into my dream world, until …
“That girl? That girl pretending she’s a dog? No, that’s not my sister. In fact, I don’t have any sisters. Or brothers. I’m an only child.”
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