Happy Birthday, Baby Sister

On 10.25.09, In Ramblings, by Kristie

Today, October 25th would have been my little sister, Brandi’s 31st birthday. She passed away at the age of 29. I had a good, hard, ugly cry, last night even though I tried my best not to. I anticipated that I would awake this morning and suddenly be in tears. I wasn’t. I have chosen not to focus on the tragic fact that my sister isn’t on this earth and at home celebrating her birthday with her husband and little girls. It’s just too heartbreaking to go down that road and it’s not what this day is about. I want to celebrate the time that I had an unbelievable friend and confidant in my sister. I want to remember all of the fun times that I had with her, but there are too many, so I would like to share some things about my sister’s wonderful life.

It’s hard to believe that thirty-one years ago, my mom brought this little, curly headed baby into the world. I remember thinking that she looked like a baby doll and I truly thought that she was for me. We immediately shared a room when she came home from the hospital. Me and Brandi Nicole, bunking together. Me in my canopy bed and her in her crib. It was the start of a beautiful friendship and more.

We are five and a half years apart, but even at such a young age, I was very maternal with Brandi and that girl was just so easy to love. She was really cute, very funny, and just a sweet little girl. We watched the show “Wonder Woman” on a regular basis and when Brandi was about two, she could not say Wonder Woman, so she would spin in circles and sing, “wonder wonder”. I remember this t-shirt that my mom and I found shopping one day and it had this little wonder baby on it and we bought it. Brandi wore that wonder wonder shirt constantly until her belly hung out of it like an old man with a beer gut.

Brandi did a great impression of Miss Piggy doing karate as well that would make us roll on the floor laughing. “Heeeee, yah” and she would charge at you with a karate chop. We were inseperable and wanted to do everything together. We loved to take baths together transforming our bath tub into the largest Barbie resort pool in town.

She was easy going, but there were times that her temper would flare and you had better just get the hell out of her way. She would purse her perfectly shaped rose bud lips together and walk really fast, swinging her hips like a mad woman. This occurred often in her junior high days (I didn’t live at home any more during her high school days) when she wouldbe getting ready for school. She would be pissed about something and walk down the hallway with those lips and hips and nostils flared. I see it in my mind now like a cartoon where we would all be leaping into the closest open door to get out of her way.

When I moved away from home, I moved to Austin and then to Houston and I went home at least once a month to visit my family. Brandi and I always wanted to surprise each other if we did anything different with our hair and I cannot relay how many times I would show up and we would have gotten the same haircut or we would both be wearing the same nail color and it would be colors that you wouldn’t see every day. I remember one was called Gun Slinger Metal. We had a lot in common to say the least.

I don’t remember how old we were, but I was probably about twelve , Brandi about six, and my brother, Lee; thirteen or fourteen. My brother was asleep on the couch, he was and still is a very sound sleeper. We painted his fingernails hot pink and purple and when he didn’t wake up, we continued to paint his face with eye shadow, mascara, and lipstick. There may have been blush involved, but I can’t remember. We quietly snickered and took off and hid all of the evidence. We were in our room playing and kept waiting for him to wake up so that we could show him our handy work. Time kept going by, so we went to the living room to find that Lee was gone. We searched the entire house and could not find him. We realized that he had left. We immediately locked all of the doors. My brother came home banging on the door, screaming profanities. He had gone to the grocery store and didn’t look in the mirror before he left. He said that everyone was staring at him and when he went to pay, he noticed the fingernail polish. He still didn’t know that his face was made up until much later when he went to a friend’s house because my sister and I refused to let him in. I got my ass kicked, but it was so worth it.

Brandi came up to Houston to spend two weeks with me over Christmas break one year. She loved for me to take her to the Montrose area to see all of the transvestite hookers and so many other things that you don’t see in a small town. She would say, “take me out to see the freaks” and off we went. We went to see a play where the seating was very steep. During one of the scene changes, when all of the lights went off, we heard a lot of noise and it was obvious that someone was falling down the stairs. When the lights went up, the woman that had fallen, was quickly trying to get into any available seat before the lights came up, but she was caught. We couldn’t stop laughing. We knew it had to be embarrassing and she seemed alright. It progressed from there and we just could not stop laughing. The play had started up again. I told her not to look at me. Every time we looked at one another, we would just start laughing and no matter how quiet we tried to be, we could still be heard. “We can’t look at each other, stop it”, I told her. We were finally calming down when I looked at her out of the corner of my eye and I saw that she was looking at me out of the corner of her eye and we both lost it. We had to get up and walk down the steep flight of stairs, still laughing and trying not to trip and fall. Every time I laugh to the point that I can’t stop, I remember that.

I grew up looking after my little sisters when my mom worked the graveyard shifts. I helped them with their homework, bathed them, and fed them. I resented this a lot when I was growing up, but as an adult I have been grateful that I had that relationship with my sisters. They come to me for advise, they look to me for my approval, and they hate me when I tell them what they don’t want to hear.

Brandi and my mom came up to Houston for a college tour when my sister was a senior in high school. We were going to take her to the University of Houston and the night before, my mom and I plotted all of these things in front of Brandi that we were going to do to embarrass her and of course we used these very southern, red neck accents as we were planning. Brandi would just sit and laugh and then chime in. I always wondered if she was secretly worried that we really were going to embarrass her. I’m sure just being us did embarrass her somewhat, but she would never let us know that.

I had the great priviledge of being at the hospital when both of my neices were born. Seeing my sister as a mom was a real joy and I instantly fell in love with her girls. Brandi was an amazing mom and I know people always write or say this when that person dies, but I mean this with 100% conviction. If her kids annoyed her, you would never know it because she didn’t vent about it. She was so in love with her kids. She was the kind of mom that would let the house be a disaster and sit and make a bigger mess with her kids to make art work or to sit and watch a movie as a family. She really had the art of motherhood down. I learned so much from her and I’m still learning a lot from her. She had a child first, so when my daughter was born, I went to her for advise, to vent, to cry, and to share triumphs and mistakes. She was a huge support. I see how happy my kids are and what a great life they have and a lot of that credit goes to Brandi. I would not be the mom that I am if it had not been what I witnessed from her and the examples that she set.

Brandi was a devout christian, always giving her time to her church. She wasn’t one of those people that quoted from the Bible, but lived a completely different way. She didn’t preach or come across as self righteous. She would simply tell you about what she learned in church that week or tell funny stories about the kids she had to watch in the day care.

She was funny. I mean really funny and witty. She was very quick with jokes and sometimes they were corny, but it was funny. Every time we go to the movies, we still call out things on the marquis sign. She would read the sign and say, “oooooh, let’s go see ‘Now Hiring’” and it would take a second for the kids to catch on that it was advertisement, not a movie.

She taught my youngest daughter the game of stinky feet. To this day, Penelope still asks me to smell her feet and wants me to yell out, “peeeeeeuuuuuuw, stinky feet”.

There are so many other things that I could share about Brandi, but it would become a book. She was a true asset to my life and I was closer to her than anyone. I have shared things with her that I would never tell anyone else. She put up with me no matter what. No matter how obnoxious I could be, she was always there. It takes a great, selfless, sweet, caring, compassionate, patient, sometimes crazy, and giving person to put up with a gal like me.

Brandi, you are loved and missed more than words could ever fully express, but you are also celebrated today in who you were and the happy life you lived, ’cause, hey, we girls just wanna have fun. Happy Birthday.