For Dee

Dee would hide behind the curtain on our sliding glass door while the four of us hummed the theme to the Johnny Carson show.

Da dada dee dum dadadadadadadaaaa da dum dum dum

Then Cliff would try to suppress laughter while saying "Ladies and Gentlemen, heeeerrrrre's Deedee!

Dee would fiddle around, trying to find the end of the curtain. Finding success she would emerge, throw her chubby arms out and flash a row of pearly white baby teeth while we all laughed and clapped and generally encouraged her to believe she was the center of our universe.

She really was.

I'm the youngest of the older four and Dee is eight years younger than me besides. She was all of our baby to share, fight over and pass off.

We would alternately treat her like her much abused Elmo doll, making her play "bewilder baby" where we would throw pillows at her toddling body, trying to make that faint crinkle sound babies create when their diapered bottoms hit the floor, and then we would treat her like our own personal baby genius and applaud her attempts to say "biodegradable".

She would sing snippets of Saturday's Warrior, she would cry and tell us that we treated her like junk. She would call us names like "big bird stop sign" when she was angry. She kept growing up as we kept growing out of the house. I would get her ready for school in the morning.

In many ways she was my baby, but I was not her mother. I was her snot faced sister.

I'm still haunted by my fourteen year old self pulling Dee out of bed, sometimes by her hair, when she wouldn't wake up. She was just a little kid. I should have been better, and gentler and more motherly. I was not sensitive to her tender head while I did her hair in the morning, although I will say that I did try to go the extra mile by giving her Heidi braids piled on top of her head and clipped with a lacy bow because that's how she liked it.

I moved out. I got married. She moved in with me during my first year of marriage and my parents last. She was so confused at ten, and I couldn't tell her that I was just as confused at eighteen.

She moved back with Mom, then with Shelly, then with Mom and Jay, then when she was sixteen she came back to me. Dave taught her how to drive. We went out to dinner and played Nerts. She was in Madrigals. She sang beautifully, she was funny, even with such a gap in our ages we were all pleasantly surprised that our personalities as Brown children must be locked somewhere in our genetic code, because without the benefit of having had us all close to her chronologically, she's completely one of us.

I also wanted to kill her, because in many ways she was my baby, but I am not her mother. I'm her over bearing sister.

She's twenty one now. Now it's all of us who wish we heard from her more often, but I like that. I think she deserves some time where we are all a little bit longing for her to be more of a presence in our lives. I think that's exactly how you should feel in your early twenties. Like after being youngest for an eternity everyone suddenly wants to know why you never call, what's going on in your life, how work is - it's very Cat's-in-the-cradle-and-the-silver-spoon. She has pink hair and a boyfriend I have only met once. But he seems nice, and her pink hair is actually pretty cute. I hope she is living an amazing life and is having an amazing time, and I hope that in quiet moments she still wants to play Nerts with me.

Because she's not my baby, and I'm not her mother. But she is my sister.