It sounded in my head like a kind of a picture book or story hour: Boys and Girls, today I�m going to tell you about the Three Jays.It started when I was putting together an entry that had some links to my players page, where I wrote brief descriptions of the people in my life. Recently, I�ve been coming up with new names to call them in my entries, shorter names, really, so when I finished that entry I cleaned up the players page itself, putting in the new nicknames for people alongside the ones I�d been using. And I came to the Three Jays, or, more precisely, J, J, and J. Since that�s about as clear as mud, I�ve gone with J1 , J2 , and J3 .
If there are children you can love as you love your own, these are mine. They are my sister�s three children, that is, her own. Since her grown stepchildren only joined the family three years ago (via husband #3 aka The Keeper) I�ve never gotten to know them. But the Jays are all dear to me; they are the children I knew and loved before I had children. How incredible it was to be an aunt before I was a mother, without the responsibility of my children yet. I had all the time in the world to sing to them, make clothes for them, and do all the fun stuff that grandparents do but with more energy, since I was younger then myself.
J1, now 28 years old, will probably grow up one day. Or not. For the first three and a half years of his life, he was nothing but joy, for everyone. He started to talk at nine months and hasn�t stopped yet. He started to read at three. He was walking charm, and still is. When he was three and half, his mommy went to the hospital to have another baby and almost didn�t come home, and by the time she did, we had all spoiled him rotten. So since then, still charming, but not always so easy-going.
The baby turned out to be two babies, in the long-ago days when ultrasound was only as good as the technician running the test. This one said �I�ll stake my reputation on the fact that there�s only one baby in there.� I was in the room when she said it.
J2 is the boy, J3 is the girl. What really got me started on all this today is, Why all the Jays? So the real story isn�t about the Three Jays at all, but about their father, Satan J. Satan J got this thing into his head that all of his children had to have his initials. Since this also meant they had to play fast and loose with the Jewish naming customs (every baby given the same name as a departed loved one), a little creativity was in order. J1, for example, is named after Grandpa Sam . Hmm. So they gave him a Hebrew name that was Grandpa Sam�s Hebrew name, which only ever gets used at your Bar Mitzvah or wedding, assuming you even have a Bar Mitzvah, or a Jewish wedding. J2 is named for someone named Henry, and J3 for Grandpa Sam�s wife, my Grandma Ida.
I digress. So know it seems pretty clear that Satan J wanted some kind of obsessive control over his children and their lives. This would be incorrect. In fact, although he was fond of J1, he wanted nothing to do with the other ones at all. This is how I first found this out: Two days after the J twins were born, their mother ( Sibs ) had a convulsion, and then she went into a coma. If I hadn�t been watching my own sister lay there dying, I would have felt like I was watching one of the soap operas she and I watched together every afternoon. She came out of the coma 6 days later, and had total amnesia. Although a lot of her memory started coming back right away, it was a day before she knew my mother, three days before she knew me, and nearly a week before she knew Satan J (which she later regretted.) When she came home from the hospital about ten days after waking up, she believed she had had twins because we all told her so, and she had listened to tapes of J1�s voice to familiarize herself with it, because she didn�t remember him at all.
I was driving to the hospital with Satan J one afternoon while she was still in the coma, and he told me that if she didn�t wake up, he was going to put the J twins up for adoption, and then take J1 and move away. I was horrified. All I could think of was how I was going to tell Hubs � we had been married for 5 months � that we were becoming the parents of twins. Giving away my sister�s children was not an option.
In time they were all home. My mother moved into my sister�s house for about 8 months, until both twins slept through the night, because Satan J never got up. He never changed a diaper or fed a baby through this time, although he had done all those things with J1. When they were older, after my mother moved back home, he would sometimes change or feed J2. He never � even to this day, 25 years later � has shown the slightest interest in J3, who is the most loving and sparkly human being on the planet.
When the J twins were 4 or 5 and J1 was about 8, Sibs was separated from Satan J, and then divorced. Not being too good at this picking-a-husband thing, she got married about a month later to someone she had been seeing while she was separated. He had never been married, had no children, and was good to the kids and looking forward to being a father. Then they got married, and he took off his mask, and turned into the abusive alcoholic he had been all along. Not so much physically abuse to anyone, and mostly verbally/emotionally abusive to his wife, and then to J1. The funny thing was, he always loved J2 and J3, and was fatherly to them, and loved them in his way. He is not a Jay. He is best referred to as The Scumbag. She stuck with him for over 10 years.
Again, I digress. Soon I really must tell the story of how she found The Keeper, because it�s a really, really good Story of Us story.
All I wanted to say, really, is how much I love the Jays, and how much it sucks when children who are so much a part of you have to grow up and move far away and have their own lives.
