How My Sister and I Ruined Each Other’s Childhood Dreams
By: Danika Bloom
Tags: This Happened To Me, Parenting, Children, Family, Humor

As a child I remember watching TV shows like The Brady Bunch, Eight Is Enough, The Waltons, and The Partridge Family. One of the things those shows convinced me of was that I wanted to have lots of kids — ten of them, at least.

My own mother wasn’t a big fan of children — she was known to say,

“If I could have given birth teenagers, I’d have taken that option .”

But my paternal grandmother loved babies and little kids. She lived across the street and she helped raise us. Nonnie, as we called her, was the second child of thirteen. She told wonderful stories of her childhood and all those siblings she helped to raise.

As a child myself, I pictured myself as a mom to Cindy Brady, Jim Bob Walton, and cute little Nicholas Bradford. As for the Partridge Family, in my future, hunky lead singer Keith was the father to all of our beautiful and talented children.

Interestingly, my sister, Anne, who is just two years younger than me knew from the time we were still playing with dolls that she never, ever wanted to have children. Not a single one.

Anne and I weren’t especially nice to each other as kids, taking advantage of each other’s fears and insecurities at every opportunity. My abject terror of spiders meant that Anne developed an arachnid superpower: She could summon and catch a spider with just one mean thought. Not to help me, of course, but to put in my bedroom and feed my fears.

My superpower also related to emotional abuse; I knew just what to say or do to embarrass her and make her cry in front of her friends at school. We were really quite horrible to each other.

The Ouji Board as our gateway spirit summoner

We believed the house we grew up in was haunted. It had all the right characteristics: it was over 100 years old with a creepy attic window, Grandma Bloom had died in it, and the property right next door was a funeral parlour.

How much more obvious could it be that we shared our house with dead people?

I felt spirit presences quite often in my room but I wasn’t afraid of them…they were just kind of there, hanging out in a corner, up near my ceiling.

I didn’t start to talk to them until I was in late elementary school, when our family got a Ouji Board. I only had two friends who were brave enough to sit in my spirit-summoning space — the tiny landing of a narrow staircase that had no natural light, right off my bedroom.

Cathy, Francine and I asked all kinds of questions of the spirits. It was through these facilitated conversations that I started to talk to the spirits living in the corners of my bedroom. I didn’t ask what my future would bring — the Ouji was a better communicator for those needs — I asked them to mess with my sister.

I figured if she didn’t get in trouble for putting spiders, the obvious incarnation of evil itself, in my room, it was fair game for me to put spirits in hers.

The spirit-slinging turned to casting curses at each other.

“I hope you never have any kids and die a lonely old woman,”

she’d scream at me.

“Yeah, well I hope you have ten kids and never have any peace and quiet in your life,”

I’d throw back.

The Force was strong in us

Fast-forward into our twenties, Anne and I became friends. We even lived together again by choice. But those evil wishes we’d slung at each other so many times through elementary and high school? They stuck.

My dream of having a baseball team of kids was dashed by a cursed uterus that allowed me to easily conceive little Cindy Bradys and Jim Bob Waltons, but went rogue within three months, leaving me such a bloody mess that when one fetus finally did graduate to full human form, I accepted my miracle child — a Gemini, so he was really like having twins, another dream I’d had — as enough.

Anne, who’d wanted no children, ended up in three long-term relationships with men who brought kids into the mix. She, in fact, lived our mother’s wish, having never given birth but raising four kids from pre-teen through high school commencement ceremonies! It still makes me laugh!

Now in our fifties, we only use our witch powers to help the other manifest good in her life.

That said, some old habits are harder to break. Anne still derives great pleasure in sharing horrifying spider pictures with me and I still really enjoy sharing embarrassing stories about her.