I Wonder if my Brother will Marry this Girl?

This is my Wonder Women post for today.  Thought I’d get twice the mileage out of it!

 

Props go to 2 of the sisters mentioned, Baby and Catwoman, who are graduating from high school and college respectively in the next few days.  You do us proud, sisters mine!  (As you may already know, Twisted/’Frass/Amanda also gets congrats, on her new job!)

 

My brother.  Sigh.  He grew up in a household of 4 sisters.  He wore our hand-me-down girl’s shoes through most of his early years, watched many, many hours of My Little Pony, and has dozens of potentially lethal baby pictures of him with baby dolls and stuffed animals.  But don’t pity him.  Oh, no.  Save your pity for the women he dates.

Picture it.  You’re a teenaged girl, nervous because you’re meeting your boyfriend’s family for the first time.  On the chosen night for the introductory family dinner, you follow him in the door, and are met by a half-circle of women, arms crossed, lazily assessing you under half-raised, scornful lids.  After a perfunctory hello, the women link arms and troop as one into the next room, and you follow weakly behind your boyfriend, having been given the clear message that he has been THEIR brother for years, and you are an unwelcome newcomer.

Our brother is 20 now, a rising college junior, and is super cute.  Girls have LURVED him since Kindergarten.  And we, his loyal sisters, have been there from day one, weeding out the weaker candidates with all of the wonderfully, subtly nasty tools available to the female sex.

Different girls have reacted to us in different ways.  Some go for the lateral attack and pretend to be OUR best friends.  When they call or come over they always ask for one of us, but we all know who they’re REALLY interested in.  Others pretend we aren’t there – we prefer these because it is much easier to justify our malice.  Still others save their wooing for the schoolyard and never venture to the house – we know them only through the faux-casual Myspace comments that they leave for him.  Yes, we monitor it.  He is our only brother and requires protection from unsavory women.  To be fair to us, our brother has typical teenaged boy taste.  That is to say, he likes ‘em with minimal brains and minimal clothes.  They are as unlike us as he could possibly find, which is probably the point.

Until this one.

He brought her home, and within hours of her arrival the phone calls started.  “I really like her,” whispered our surprised Mother over the line.  I called ‘Frass.  ‘Frass called Baby, who still lives at home and confirmed the suitability of the newest candidate.  ‘Frass called me back to relay Baby’s opinion, and then Catwoman beeped me on the other line.  Baby called me to re-hash even though I’d already talked to ‘Frass, and then I called Catwoman to relay the news.  Our brother sent us pictures of her.  I guarantee that in four different states, three sets of brown eyes and one blue stared without blinking at the girl.

She looks like one of us.

She gets straight As.  Even in Organic Chemistry.

Her name is Laurel.

OK.  Claws retracted.