O Suzi Q

A mostly true story . . .

SEE!

LOOK!

She’s planning something. I just know it!

You can see it in her eyes, can’t you? Well . . . CAN’T YOU?

O Suzi Q!

Whatever will we do now without you?

Well . . . you finally got your wish . . . now you have our Mom and Dad all to yourself, don’t you?

Our son said that I need an intervention regarding my apparent narcissism.

I don’t think that I need an intervention. Do YOU think I need an intervention?

Wait! DON’T bother answering that because I’ve already moved on in my thoughts from whatever it was that you might have wanted to say to me.

I’ll tell you who needed an intervention . . . JUST LOOK at this old family photo of me, my siblings and our parents above.

THERE!

RIGHT THERE!

Right smack dab in the middle of everything . . . the very focus of this so-called “family” photo!

It’s HER! My arch nemesis, SUZI Q . . . or “MBBD” as our beloved Big Daddy cutely nicknamed her, “My Beautiful Blond Daughter!”

And LOOK where I am in this shot . . . I’m hardly even in the shot . . . I’m practically falling out of the picture, huh! THAT’s where the hell I AM!

When I was twenty years old or thereabouts, our sister Suzi Q told me something that I sort of always knew but couldn’t quite articulate . . . SHE said that she had once resented ME being born!

THAT’s right. You read that correctly. My big, middle sister, my own blood sibling, had resented my very existence. And she didn’t say this with any malice, mind you, because she didn’t have any then nor since. In fact, after years of therapy and also some super heroic hard living, “MBBS” . . . or “my beautiful, blond sister” as I sometimes thought of her . . . had no malice in her heart for any human being . . . NOT even for me and our little sister, Kathy, the so-called “baby of the family.”

No, Suzi Q just let that particular mic drop one sunny afternoon, perhaps as some part of her therapy that she was then receiving, that she had once resented me being born. It was kind of like . . .

Oh by the way, I resented you coming into existence . . . but what movie do you want to go see this afternoon?

“What the HELL!” I thought to myself in that moment.

“Wait! WHAT?” I asked. “You say that you didn’t like the fact that I became part of our family?”

Oh, yeah, sure, Kathy too, but I thought we were talking about what movie to go see this afternoon. Oh LOOK, “Aliens” is out. Remember how much we enjoyed watching “Alien” last year. We BOTH jumped in our seats when that little baby alien with the piranha teeth popped out of the guy’s stomach and ran away into the bowels of the spaceship. Remember how you held tight to my arm like when you were a little boy?

“Yeah. Yeah. I remember, but back the dump truck up, Sister, ‘cuz I’m still stuck on you not wanting ME to come into existence.”

Of course I didn’t. What’s so puzzling about that? Before you, it was Joe as first born, and Mary as first-born daughter, and I was the baby of the family, the center of all our family’s attention and love . . . and THEN they brought YOU to our house. How do you think that made ME feel? HOW would YOU have felt about that new arrangement. AND THEN three years later when Kathy was born, and I couldn’t even be the “Baby Sister!” I had to grow up too soon. That’s what my therapists all say. THAT’s why I had to have both ends cut off my hot dogs before I would eat them. THAT right there is so loaded with Freudian symbolism, I’m surprised that nobody caught on even then. Maybe Dad did. Maybe that’s why he wrote in letters from overseas about me as “M.B.B.D.” Our Dad called me “my beautiful, blond daughter!” He wanted me to still feel special. Anyway, the therapists said that I needed to get it off my chest about how I felt about you . . . and now I have. Don’t worry. I got over my resentment of you long ago. Now you mostly just annoy me, but only some of the time. Let’s go see ‘Aliens.’

So, there you have it, Folks. The secret to my seemingly insatiable need to seek to be the center of attention all goes back to our Dad’s “MBBD.”

I’ve had to fight like a dog in the street all my life for every scrap of affection that SHE didn’t get first!