The BOSS OF ME blog

My sister-in-law thinks my brother is hilarious. I do too. He’s a funny guy. And when he banters with me via text, through her, she thinks we’re ‘milk out of your nose funny’ (or in her case, lightly chilled pinot grigio).

There’s a reason I text my sister-in-law (let’s call her ‘SIL’) and not my brother. Actually, there are lots of them; here are a few:

• I like her better.
• She texts more than one-word answers. Usually. Although she’s pretty loose with the ‘Wow’s’ and ‘WTF’s.’
• If we didn’t text via my SIL, my brother’s predisposition for hiding pizzas under the couch, and mine, for hiding canned ravioli under my bed, would never come up.
• I like to imagine the incredulous facial expressions my SIL is unquestionably making as she reads my witty retorts to my brother’s ‘kind-of-funny’ and intentionally offensive words.
• She’s funny too, and when she’s not texting my brother’s dictated insults, my SIL adds her own smart-ass comments, such as, “What in the hell you guys?” which really add that ‘je ne sais quoi’ to our otherwise non-existent communication.

My sister, we call her ‘Stinky,’ occasionally pipes up during our text exchanges. As to the previously mentioned, pizza-hoarding, ravioli-stashing comment thread she texts, “Is this for real? Hmmm, I guess when I was 8 I kept a can of Duncan Hines frosting in my closet.” Apparently a food-hoarding ‘problem’ runs in the family.

Wait, what?

It’s like this: my brother does not like to share, with anyone. He might share with my SIL though, which could explain why she was so befuddled by our food-stashing conversation. In their almost ten-year-long exercise in endurance (I mean super-romantic courtship), my brother somehow managed to suppress his most basic food-hoarding instincts. This explains why most of the enduring couple’s prolonged wooing occurred at all-inclusive resorts with 24-hour buffets. But I digress. And I predict ‘shit’s about to get real’ in my SIL’s household as, it has been reported that my two-year-old niece’s first full sentence was, “Sharing sucks!” Those two simple words conjured up vivid recollections of several food-hoarding incidents occurring while cohabitating with my brother, I thought to myself: “Hmmm, that apple didn’t even bother to fall off the branch. Sharing definitely sucks kiddo, especially with your father.” My SIL assures me that hiding food items, even non-perishable ones, did not occur in her household growing up. With shifty eyes and a ‘WTF’ expression, I guilelessly texted the words: “Like you’ve never stashed a non-perishable food item in a weird place.” And with what I imagine was a massively exaggerated eye roll, my SIL responded with, “I thought that’s what the kitchen was for.” “Whatever, little miss smarty-pants,” I thought as I held a bag of frozen peas up to my left eye.

Frozen peas? Now what’s going on?

Earlier in the evening I had texted my SIL a seemingly innocuous video titled ‘Paparazzi Bashed by Toddler,’ which initiated the evening’s witty text banter and comical eye undulating. The video was the local paparazzi (me) getting ‘taken out’ by a disgruntled toddler. I was attempting to surreptitiously record the 18-month-old’s super hilarious and excruciatingly futile attempts to put on her boots – when I was maliciously and unceremoniously accosted. With a load in her pants and a bad attitude, I’m not at all sure where she thought she was going. In need of a good night’s rest, or maybe a shoehorn, the toddler did not take kindly to my laughing and heckling. She took particular exception to the iPhone aimed in her direction and immediately proceeded to dispense some good old-fashioned ‘toddler justice,’ to my face, with her uncooperative boot. So, after a citizen’s arrest and an equally unceremonious diaper change, the muscle, also known as ‘the Daddy,’ tossed the offending toddler in the slammer (aka, ‘the clink’ or ‘crib’) to serve out her sentence for ‘assault with a tiny little winter boot.’ “Take that you nasty little aspiring Sean Penn!” I yelled as I clutched the bag of frozen peas to my eye from the relative safety of the living room couch (or maybe I just whispered it myself, I can’t remember – I’m prone to concussions).

So how does a texted video titled Paparazzi Bashed by Toddler? trigger a pizza-hoarding, ravioli-stashing text thread?

The evening I sent my SIL the Paparazzi Bashed by Toddler video, she asked my brother what he thought about me becoming a writer. I imagine it played out like this (and I’m ‘the writer’ so I can set whatever scene I like):

While holding a fully loaded ketchup chip just inches from his drooling pie hole, he incredulously said:

• “Isn’t writing like a career in talking; just on paper?”
• “K, wait, she’s writing about writing?”

Once he got over himself and stopped guffawing, he decided I must need some material and dictated to my SIL:

• “Tell her to write about the time she knocked out her tooth by driving a dirt bike into a boat parked less than a foot in front of her!”
• “Tell her to write about the underage dance club she used to hang out at! Inquiring minds would like to know, ‘Who the fuck dances sober?’”

After downing my own handful of ketchup chips I rebutted his obviously unsupportive comments with: “Right, and he decided to put his promising career as a pro hockey player on hold to explore the exhilarating ‘ins and outs’ of the transportation industry and is living out his lifelong dream of being a manager at a trucking company. And me working at any other job would stop my nonsensical advice spewing.”

After typing “Truth,” of her own volition, my brother instructed my SIL to type the following: “He wants to know if you still hide ravioli under your bed.” I pondered, “When the hell did I do that?” as I typed: “And he hid pizzas under the couch. What’s his point?”

So that’s how that all happened.

I shoot my own incredulous look right back at my phone in response to my imagined SIL’s eye-rolling, nostril-wine-spraying, text-reading responses, and it dawns on me that she did not grow up the same way my siblings and I did. And despite being part of our family for over thirteen years now, there may still be a few things my SIL doesn’t yet know about the Hewlko siblings. I mean; my SIL definitely knows my brother can’t dance sober and that I (allegedly) jabber on non-stop about everything. But since a face-smashing dirt bike incident and underage ‘non-drinking’ parties somehow slipped past my SIL’s notice and I am the writer of The BOSS OF ME blog (that pretty much only my family reads), I take this unprecedented opportunity to provide a much-needed public service. As for the food-hoarding epidemic I predict is now about to plague her household, I loudly proclaim, “Consider yourself duly warned my dear SIL!” The Hewlko’s genetic inclination for squirrelling random food items and spewing nonsensical information is now revealed and thoroughly documented in this blog post. And for Pete’s sake: that’s what writers do dear brother. BOOM!

They say a leopard can’t change its spots, and in my brother’s case, he’s been suppressing his food-hoarding instincts for a long time. Further compounding the issue, my SIL and the chronic food hoarder have added two offspring to the mix (albeit ridiculously adorable and deceitfully innocent-looking ones). So my unsolicited advice to my dear SIL and anyone who suspects they may have birthed tiny little sharing adverse food hoarders is: Look for the signs. You might have to stage an intervention or something. It will start small: a goldfish cracker here, a can of ravioli there, and before you realize it, you’ll find a lukewarm pizza in your hall closet. But remember, as long as no one’s stashing frozen pizzas in locations other than your freezer, everything is fine. Thanks to this blog post, you know that hiding frozen pizzas under couches and in closets is incredibly wrong. Furthermore, when it comes to food hoarding and, pretty much everything, the Hewlko siblings always think we are right – and that’s one thing I know my SIL knows for sure.

THE END

The making-of SIBLING RIVALRY: Doing a particularly subpar rendition of Emilio Estevez as Billy the Kid in Young Guns II, I aim my index finger at my brother’s face, fully cock my thumb and cheekily proclaim, “Yoohoo, I’ll make you famous.” My brother becomes my muse and I write SIBLING RIVALRY.