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Emilyb
June 18, 2005

The McClintic Six

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**Will be published in Woman's Day special issue, Oct. 2005**

Journaling:
This photo takes me way back: the wood-paneled diesel station wagon with the tailgate down, the Dairy Queen ice creams, the Health-Tex clothing, Jon’s bleach-blonde hair, and Lindsey’s wee little head sticking out of the baby seat in the middle row. How in the heck did my parents survive with six wild and crazy kids?
We were constantly making mischief. Thank the Lord for medical insurance, because my parents used theirs often! Ben and Jon seemed to alternate weekly trips to the ER. Okay, actually it was mostly Ben, but Jon went a few times, too. When Ben was 18 months old, he pulled a full coffeepot off of the kitchen counter and ended up in the burn unit for weeks. He still has the scars all over his chest and shoulder. A few years later, he stuck his finger in a light socket on a dare and burned off most of the flesh up to his elbow. That same month, Jonathan broke his arm so badly that it looked like the letter “S”. Then Ben broke his collarbone riding his bike down a super steep hill, and we later dared him to walk on top of the garage door when it was open. That would have been okay if he hadn’t walked on the windows and fell through, ending up with rows of stitches up and down his legs.
That wasn’t the only dare that I recall—one day while exploring the attic, I was dared by Chuck and his friend to step off of the rafters and jump in the insulation. No problem, I thought, until I actually fell through the ceiling and ended up on the floor of Ben and Jon’s room below. Since Mom and Dad were out for a few hours, we thought we could hide the damage. Chuck and Camille whipped up some Plaster of Paris and went to work repairing the huge hole in the ceiling while I took a bath to remove all the insulation from my skin. Not surprisingly, the repair job didn’t work and we were busted big-time when Mom and Dad got home. Why they left Chuck in charge in the first place is beyond me! This is the kid whose idea of babysitting was to invite his friends over, turn off all of the lights, and run around playing “Monsters”, a game he invented that was basically hide-and-seek in the pitch darkness. You haven’t experienced panic until you have played Monsters with him. When he found us, he would scream, “BOO!” in our faces at the top of his lungs and make us almost wet our pants in terror.
Aunt Jeannie often tells me that when we were little, she worried about us because there were so many of us, our parents were so young, and there always seemed to be someone crying. I don’t remember it that way, though. I remember a lot of fighting, of course; I recall being annoyed that I had to share a bedroom (Camille actually used masking tape to separate “my side” from “her side” in an attempt to keep me out of her stuff) and I remember almost never getting what I wanted because we didn’t have enough money. But I also remember wiffle ball games in the backyard (how many families have enough people to split into two teams and not have to use ghost-men on base all the time?). I remember the thrill of Monsters, and almost always having a playmate, even when I was grounded and not allowed to play with my friends.
Nancy Mitford once said, “The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life's essential unfairness.” How true that statement is! Growing up with five siblings was sometimes unfair, but it was also an adventure and it made me who I am today. With that many kids fighting for two parents’ attention, if you didn’t stand out, you’d get left behind. I would not be as outgoing or as adaptable as I am today if I had not had to make sure I got attention somehow as a child. I did that by filling the role of the family clown. At dinner each night, my goal was to make everyone laugh with my jokes and stories. Those evening stand-up comedy routines cemented my love for storytelling, which I still do with my daily anecdotes to friends, family, and on my scrapbook pages. Even as an adult and a mother, I am still the middle child of six siblings, the clown, the bossy one, and the attention-monger.

supplies:
Mod pp
Chatterbox pp, rub-ons and alpha stickers
Melissa Frances index tab
MM rub-ons
rickrack
EK success corner rounder

Other:
This photo was a mess when I started. It was very yellowed, had scotch tape on it, and holes from thumbtacks. I cleaned it up as much as possible using the clone tool in Adobe PhotoDeluxe.


layouts scrapbooking family siblings 1970s Family
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