Ya Ya Bitchyhood sister speak

Sister Speak

My sister Lynn is three years younger than I am and had been the victim of my wicked humor and practical jokes in early childhood. However, during the height of our dysfunctional pre-teen hoods, we somehow united against the ravages of misery and developed our own language and silly sayings for everyday things. Often, we’d break into song about the most innate and ridicules, leaving our parents dumbfounded, driving them nuts and we did it at great risk, often provoking more abuse from the autocrat. For years, we sang a stupid diddy called, “Dee Dee girl,” a repetitive insult to the ears about a girl or Trump-ish man for that matter who had the unfortunate timing of crossing our paths with a horrible hair cut or hair style. Sort of a code for “Bad hair day.” Our mother had always taught us if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, so instead, Lynn and I sang it. This included the obvious bad hair style of any and all hair a baby has, stapled into a lone pink barrette atop a bald baby head. Is this supposed to announce to the world, “Yes, this is a baby girl,” or better yet to say, “well, yes, it is human, see? No scales nor feathers, but this one chunk of hair”(even though the baby looks like a cabbage patch doll).

Sadly, I became the leader of the Dee Dee girl cult by bestowing upon my newborn daughter the very same lone pink Barrett hair style. Of course for the first two years of my daughters life, she was to Lynn, Dee Dee girl. For two years, my daughter thought her name was Dee Dee, instead of her birth name, Emily.

Another thing we did to evade the pit of depression after our abuser’s wrath was our “Brain-dead” salute: When faced with an obvious stupidity of other people or if we just wanted to crack ourselves up, we’d put our left arm in a semicircle to our forehead and stick our right arm through the circle, waving it in small circles. No matter what we’d endure before, during and after a bout with an enraged abuser, we could always crack each other up with that bit. It left our parents perplexed, not understanding the giggles coming from what should have been the room of doom and punishment.

Most siblings (especially ones who have grown up in dysfunctional homes) find a mode of survival: A way to escape the destruction of human spirit and climb on top of the heap, laughing hysterically. Over the years we have developed this ability to make each other laugh into an art form. We have nailed it down to such perfection all we have to do to each other, is utter a “Dee Dee,” or put our left hand to our forehead that it will cause us to giggle until we pee. We call it, sister speak. Those who haven’t suffered abuse would naively call this behavior insanity. Indeed our husbands and my children gawk at Lynn and I during a sister speak episode and shake their heads: Time to get out the straight jackets, here we go again.

Although thankfully, Lynn and I no longer have to associate with intensely angry, dysfunctional people, when faced with insecurity, we rely on the silly relics of our childhood to free us from those angry embers. Lately we find new more embarrassing ways, songs and saying to deal with the odd dysfunction so many fellow humans seem to suffer from.

Recently, Lynn took me to Mendocino for a belated birthday (A.K.A Ya Ya bitchyhood) weekend. Before leaving, I paid homage to my mother’s home in which she bestowed upon me, clothing. Let’s just say that the clothes my mom so graciously gives me are top of the line, second hand thrift store faire. Faded labels such as: Lane Bryant, Izod and ESPRIT. Though I do appreciate the gesture, I am really not a Lane Bryant, Izod and ESPRIT person. After pillaging through the stripes, plaid shorts and square necklines, I came across something that inspired a new phrase for my sister speak: My mother and stepfathers matching Gucci thong underwear.
EWWWWWWW!

After grossing Lynn out with the history of our new vocabulary word of sister speak, we arrived at our wonderful five-star Inn. We noticed there were a lot of elderly female guests. Our neighbors, are longtime Lesbian couple on a romantic weekend. Though that doesn’t “ewwww” us, we were invariably lumped in with the other twenty-something lesbian couples as we were: Number one, together all the time. Number two: Laughed and hugged each other and number three, stayed in the same room. What else are people(especially men with pea brains) supposed to think? So when men (BTW single girls, note to self: Men outnumber women 5-1 in Mendocino and Fort Bragg), started to hit on us in a bar, we just beamed at each other and winked, giving them the “ewwwww” phrase as we giggled profusely. This of course caused more confusion for the men, and subjected the poor fellows to a bout of even more belly laughs from us, the faux lesbian duo. All we had to do to crack each other up the entire trip was lean over and quietly whisper to each other, “Ewwwwww."

It’s not that we don’t appreciate a good measure of attention from the opposite sex, in fact, Lynn and I often come up with new and improved ways of gaining male attention. Usually it’s just fantasy and enlists skills we sadly lack. The second day of the great Mendocino escape of the Ya Ya bitchyhood sisters, we were on the beach, soaking up rays in our long underwear and flannel shirts(too sexy)! A gaggle of young male feti took to the beach, toting Corona’s and obvious buzzes. I alerted Lynn to potential eye candy with my very smooth, very covert loud purr of my tongue, to which she of course started laughing and I joined, with my snort-laugh.

As the Corona toting feti kept angling for attention from us (the only females under the age of eighty on the beach), we came up with several fantasy scenarios in which to entice the unsuspecting feti. The first was one of us was gravely ill and needed fresh air. However, not wanting to anger the fate gods, we eighty-sixed that idea and thought we could be wealthy cougars. However, since we were wearing flannel and neither one of us exactly cougar material, we moved on with a brilliant idea of: The invasion of the foreign femme fatale. Only, we didn’t want to risk that one of them knew Spanish or Japanese-the two languages we hardly know. So, we decided to invent a language, complete with Aborigines tongue clicks. After several practice runs, we were laughing so much at our greeting, “Hungu vu gaga lacky click loo loo duck click lucky moo moo, click.” Then, I had to put a cherry on top of that greeting with the fact that maybe, we also had Tourette’s syndrome. So the greeting turned into,
“Hungu vu gaga lacky click dammit, loo loo duck click lucky caca-hell, moo moo, click.”
We looked through our tear-streaked faces only to discover our potential victims had left. We figured they either thought we were on some really great peyote and weren’t sharing or the more obvious; we are crazy.

This weekend had glorious weather, wonderful food and the best housing so far on our elongated list of ya ya bitchyhood weekends. But the best part of the entire weekend was adding another ridicules array of vocabulary to our sister speak, “Ewww, purrrr, hungu vu gaga lacky click loo loo dammit duck click lucky caca-hell, moo moo.”