Island Child

Emily, Lantana, Holly, Forrest

Hanamanu, Maui. Camping in 1989.
Things about this picture.
I really really really liked having a lot of kids in my family. I was proud of it. It was fun and never boring. We were evenly spaced, by two years. I thought four was a lot, but I married a man who came from nine, so maybe it's not so extreme

I have my hair in a braid, as I did most of my childhood. After a bad incident, my mom was very afraid of another uku, or headlice, epidemic. I'm wearing muddy high tops. I grew up as country mouse in a wet, muddy tropical town. I always thought you could tell a tourist by their clean shoes. How could shoes people WEAR be clean?  (Now, my dad says Oahu people never have dirt on their shoes and to check your feet over there in the city.) At the time, I was always secretly envious of girls dressed in frilly lacy socks with patent leather shoes. I admired those hideous 80s styles, trendy at the time, on TV, and on tourists from the mainland. In retrospect, I should be grateful my parents were hippies stuck on 70s fashions.

My sister Lantana, a.k.a. Lany, is copying my foot movement. She copied everything I did. She tried to write in cursive when she was supposed to be learning to print, I taught her the times tables when she was 5, and she read all my high school novels when she was in 6th grade. She pretty much stalked me.  I only minded when my friends came over and I wanted to feel cool. But then we grew up a little more and it was more mutual stalking. The fact that she copied WHATEVER I did was a lot of responsibility. I avoided drugs or anything bad cause I wanted her to have a happy life. No carefree youth for me...See note below:

Oldest Children, (from random birth order website)
Oldest children often bear the brunt of responsibility for their younger siblings. They are placed in a care providing and protective role for the younger siblings and therefore may tend to be more responsible in their lives in general. This can result in a desire to control the people and situations around them. Oldest children are usually the “good” children of the family who follow the rules and set the examples for younger children. Positive traits that are typically associated with oldest children include their leadership abilities and ambition.

I am the typical oldest child.  I didn't really like having to fake being brave when I also thought there were monsters or at least Night Marchers in the bushes. In Hawaii, we had Hawaiian studies from K-6, where an elder, or kupuna, would visit our class and teach us Hawaiian language, games, and legends. They would tell us about the night marchers, ghosts of ancient Hawaiian warriors, as would many adults in my life. I grew up on three acres surrounded by pasture. It was DARK, the sky sparkled with stars. It was beautiful, but very rural. So, I half-heard the night marcher drums each night as I fell asleep.

I like Holly, the baby. I was so happy she was a girl because I LOVED the name Holly. She was born with a happy-go-lucky personality, on July 12. She told every stranger she met her name, and that her birthday was July 12. Holly ended up getting random piles of birthday cards. She liked to make us laugh. She never said hibiscus but hibis-followed-by-kiss-sound. And she was our living doll, letting us carry her around and dress her up. I also appreciate that my parents were cool and hip enough to take four little kids/babies camping. Andrew and I can barely get it together to take two people camping--are our future kids doomed? 

And my brother Forrest. He's two years younger than me and was my main pal for years. He was very sensitive but also charming. Note: he is the only one looking at the camera. He liked to please and engage adults and bigger kids, always. He was more drawn to the bad boy types and always established himself as a dude. Probably to compensate for having three sisters, he was obsessed with dirt bikes and all boy stuff. But he was also good for late night heart-to-hearts. Also, check out that bomber jacket.

One funny thing about this picture is you can tell our birth order.  At some point my brother and I were the same size, then he grew bigger than me, and I stopped physically fighting with him. He hated that I got to (or as I viewed it, had to) learn to drive before him. And then Lany, third-born, and now nearly 6 feet tall, started her growth spurt and they were the same size. Like him, she was competitive, and hates to be discounted, especially on the count of being a girl. She would wrestle with him and do scary bike jumps in the yard and prove herself daily. Meanwhile, I reminded everyone to be safe.  

I wrote this in past tense but many of these things are still true about my siblings. I feel like we are all going to return to the state of being together all the time (which is what we do whenever we are on the same island) and whatever else we're doing now is just a phase.

Bonus pic: Childhood friends, then my brother (with red cords), and me. 

 In a fort in an ironwood tree.