Sister tales

My oldest sister (that's how she was referred to when I was at school) got a few good years of parenting practise well before she became a mother.It was her duty to look after me so while my mother got some well deserved shut eye,my sister practised her mothering skills on me.I was marched off to the British council library to read children's books.So much for that.

My sister is addicted to books,she will read anything she can get her hands on so when her first child was born,my mother put a ban on books.When my sister starts reading she forgets the world and my mother was more interested in her first grand son being cared for than for the latest Agatha Christie.My sister of course had other ideas.She fell in line but soon got bored so her way of getting both jobs done was to balance the child on her lap and hold her book in one hand,a bowl of cereal in the other and she would spoon the goo into the child's mouth by braille while she finished her latest book.It drove my mother mad but there was very little she could do about it.

When her children were a lot older,she let them do what they wanted.The messy rooms were soon cover up with innovative curtain ideas but she couldn't dream of cleaning up the mess.For years their home had pretty dark coloured wall and no one did anything about it.When the kids had left home and someone decided to paint the walls white,the house changed character.My sisters vivid imagination took a pretty funny turn and in one of those discussions with me she wondered if her children's lives had been darkened by the colour of the wall.Perhaps she had not been a good mother,maybe a little more care would have resulted in happier children (her kids are very happy but its sound like a better story line to imagine that they had dark lives and were unhappy thanks to the colour of their walls).One way this sister was different from the other sister was that she never lost her children in a supermarket.My other sister left her son in a supermarket trolley because she was so caught up in billing and forgot that she had brought a child along.I doubt if she would ever go to a supermarket and forget again (the child in question was pretty happy to be seeing the world from a different perspective)

Of course as time went on my sister lived life on her terms and her children grew used to that and enjoyed themselves and did rather well for themselves but my sisters active imagination creates stories that keep us in fits whenever she arrives at any of our homes.Like my mother always says...take her with a huge bag of salt.

She is now a grandmother but since the kids live in another country we are yet to hear morbid tales of her grand parenting ways.In time she will come up with stories that will sound like fairy tales and have us all either crying in despair or rolling with laughter.She is the ultimate entertainer