The girls know that they are frequently referred to as Sugar and Spice on Facebook. Sugar loves to torment her sister with this, but what she doesn’t seem to remember is that she used to be quite the Spice Girl herself. Sugar was an only child for four and a half years and her behavior was quite similar to how Spice currently behaves. She’s often disgusted with the way her sister acts, so I’ve recently started sharing stories of her own bad behavior just so she knows she wasn’t always the perfect child.
Sugar is often embarrassed at the outfits that Spice puts together for herself. She obviously doesn’t remember her own fashion faux pas. She doesn’t remember being mad for the color orange and piling on every orange piece of clothing she owned and calling that an outfit. She doesn’t remember wearing a striped sweater with heart-patterned leggings and thinking that looked great because there were similar colors in them. She rolls her eyes at Spice wearing a tiara when we go to dinner, but doesn’t recall that she wore one to school as a first grader on Hat Day. I also have pictures to prove that Sugar once wore toe socks (rolled down because they were knee socks) with flip flops to the mall.
Sugar complains about Spice’s love of “private talk,” the word “penis” delights her tremendously. Sugar doesn't remember the time she drew a slew of people on a birthday card, each one with two boobs and a belly button. Of course the card was for the child of a very religious family in the neighborhood. I had to find stickers to put over the boobs so my neighbor wouldn’t be too horrified.
Sugar cringes when Spice has a ridiculous public tantrum, not remembering the time she laid in the middle of our street and refused to walk home. I had to carry her up our hill and was infuriated by the time we reached our house.
Sugar was mortified at Disney when her sister refused to leave the Dumbo ride. How could she have forgotten that her tantrum a few years earlier was even worse and the ride operator had to come over to us and say, “Excuse me, your turn is over!”
Sugar giggles like mad when Spice does something that makes my left eyeball explode right out of my face, but she used to do things that had the same impact. There was the time that we made dozens of gingerbread cookies, each one with hand-piped frosting. I let the frosting harden, then carefully placed them in large baggies. Sugar seemed to think they were really cute, and perhaps needed to mingle. I’ll be damned if that kid didn’t pick up the baggie of cookies and shake the life out of it. You guessed it: arms, legs and heads everywhere. I called EN at work and told him there was a good chance that his child would be home alone when he arrived. To this day, gingerbread cookies have not reappeared on the list of Christmas cookies we make.
Spice’s laissez-faire attitude towards The Wrath of Mama mystifies Sugar as well. She’ll shriek at her sister, “Mama’s mad! Don’t you care?!” Interesting to hear that come from the same child that once wrote on her bedroom door, “Sugar’s Dor.” When I questioned her about it, she stood back, admired her handiwork and said, “Well, did I spell door right?” No, damn it, you didn’t.
When I gave birth to Spice and she was so little and sick and so meek, my mother-in-law said, “I’m not surprised she’s so mellow seeing as the other one is so feisty.” I think what will happen though the years is that they will swap titles back and forth. We are on the cusp of Sugar entering middle school and every once in a while, I can see a glimmer of that old spiciness shining though. I just hope they remember to swap attitudes evenly. I don’t think I could deal with two Spicy Chicks… and two Sugars? That would just be surreal in this crazy house.
xoxo
Ice Princess
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