They’re My Idiots

I am very fortunate in that my family is very close.  We were each other’s first friends…and first enemies.  We have truly seen each other through it all:  the good, the bad, the ugly.  For the record, you don’t know ugly until you see the butt-cut I rocked in the early 90s.  Yikes.  We keep each other grounded with a lot of love, a lot of sarcasm, and a lot of movie quotes.  While I’ll admit, these people drive me to madness from time to time, they are also my most favorite humans on the planet.

I sometimes wonder what makes us so close.  Is it big family syndrome?  Is it the way we were raised?  Is it a result of nightly family dinners or the ridiculous amount of time spent together in a Windstar?  Is it because we didn’t have technology so we had to rely on each other for entertainment?  5 kids is a lot these days-we’re basically a tiny gang.  It’s a lot to keep track of, ask my mother.  #lakme (in case you’re tuning in for the first time, my mother is Lakmé and her reputation has gifted her a hashtag)  We probably should have had roll call.  Tyler got left at a Chinese restaurant one night and Breanna was stranded at an ice cream shoppe another.  At the time it was a major crisis but thinking about it now, it’s like boo-hoo.  There are worse places to be abandoned.

For a few years it was just me and my brother who is 7 years older than I am.  I thought he walked on water.  He was the coolest.  He was left-handed so I wanted to be left handed.  He played sports so I wanted to play sports.  Meanwhile, he wanted nothing to do with me.  I can’t really blame him.  Who wants their annoying little sister tagging along?  If you think I talk a lot now, you should have known me pre-filter.  I never shut-up.  Ever.

Two more boys came along and it was me against the world it seemed.  I was a total tomboy.  Anything ‘girly’ was frowned upon.  I have a pile of decapitated Barbies to prove it.  I endured an upbringing full of tickle tortures, moose bites and everything in between.  A mild Guantanamo if you will.  When my mom was pregnant with her fifth child, I told her if it wasn’t a girl, I was moving out.  I even packed my Minnie Mouse suitcase.  I was serious.  I got my wish…and then there were five.

What I love about family is the range of emotion that goes with it.  While I may not want anything to do with my sibling(s) at a particular time, there’s also this crazy sense of protection.  For instance, I can make fun of my family all night long but you can’t.  That’s a hard no.  You can even repeat what I’ve already said and I’ll go from 1 to Liam Neeson in a matter of seconds.  Family is weird like that.  It must be a blood thing.

We certainly aren’t the Tanners or the Bradys of the world.  If we were a tv family, I imagine it would be somewhere between the Starks (Game of Thrones) and the Bravermans (Parenthood).  We fight and we argue and we lose our patience with one another constantly. We don’t always hug and make up afterwards. In fact, this past Christmas we all placed bets on who would cry first. (Sigh)  That’s my family.

No matter what happens, no matter what was said, there is always an overwhelming sense of unconditional love.  I would go to battle for these people- no questions asked.  They are my cloth and my roots.  They’ve known me the longest.  They know me better than anyone.  They are my best friends.

We give each other a hard time constantly.  To this day, we tell Breanna her dad was the mailman.  If you can’t take a joke, you’ll never survive a day with the Kodros clan.  If you don’t know A League of Their Own, SNL, or Christmas Vacation backwards and forwards you probably won’t even understand what we’re saying.  Currently we have a group message chain in which we only speak to eachother through gifs:

They’re my idiots, and I wouldn’t give them up for the world.  Most of the time 😉