My Sister Built the Family We Never Had

The best decision of my life took about ten minutes, and I made it at a traffic light a few blocks from home, when I was eight years old.

I’d run away. I’d had enough of that house and everything that went on inside it. I packed what mattered: some books, the best rocks from my collection, a change of clothes that smelled like our laundry soap. I told my mother I was running away to join the circus. She laughed and made me lunch.

Then I walked. Down Stoddard Street to Hund’s Market, left for three blocks, right for four, left again, until I reached a traffic light that felt like the edge of the world I knew. My little bag got heavier with every step. I stood there with everything I owned and the whole wide world on the other side of that crosswalk.

And I thought about Belinda.

She was five-ish. She kept hamsters in careful cages and had a name for every one of them. She followed me around because she wanted to know things, and she was the one person in that house who was always glad to see me. If I crossed that street, she’d be alone in that house with our father. I knew what would happen. I’m not going to spell it out. Anyone who grew up in a house like ours already knows, and anyone who didn’t is lucky.

So I turned around and walked home, every block in reverse, and I was back before dinner.

Nobody gave me a medal. My parents laughed about it at the dinner table. But that walk back was the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve never doubted it for a moment. An eight-year-old doesn’t get many real choices. That one was mine, and I got it right. I stayed in that house until I was nineteen, and the reason I stayed had a name.

We were best friends, Belinda and I, from the day she was born. Inseparable. Not because anyone told us to get along. We liked each other. We invented games that made sense only to us. I showed her rocks and told her where they came from. I showed her insects and named them. She was curious about everything, and I was the kid who knew things. It worked out fine for both of us. When our family moved up the mountain to Lake Arrowhead and everything else fell away, we still had each other.

My sister has a birthday coming up, and I want to tell her a story about what came of that walk home. I’ve mentioned it to her once, briefly. It deserves more than that, and so does she.

The park in San Jose

The park was loud, and nobody was angry.

It took me a while to notice that. I was sitting by myself on a bench near the edge of a park in San Jose, a plate of food balanced on my knees and a cup of coffee going cold beside me. I was doing what I’d done at every family gathering since I was a boy. I was watching for the fight.

This was years ago. I can’t pin down the year anymore. Belinda had invited me up to San Jose for a family get-together. I think it followed a wedding, and I think I missed the ceremony and made it in time for the party in the park. Time has smudged the edges of the day. The center of it hasn’t moved an inch. The flight was a short one, barely long enough to drink the coffee they hand you, and I spent all of it bracing.

Family gatherings meant bracing. They always had.

Belinda and I grew up in what I call Crazytown, and I’ve written a whole book about it.

Holidays where you could feel the argument coming before anyone opened their mouth. Dinners where everyone watched our father’s face to see which way the night would go. Long car rides with the two of us in the back seat while the front seat fought about money and directions and whose fault it was. Our parents ran a business, and somewhere along the way they stopped running a family. A room full of relatives was a room full of landmines. You learned where to step, and you learned to keep your eyes moving.

So I walked across that grass the way I walked into everything back then. Shoulders up. Scanning the crowd. Finding the way out.

The afternoon I stopped waiting for the fight

I found a bench off to the side, by myself, where I could see everyone and nobody would pay me much attention. Somebody set down a plate. The air smelled of food off the grill and cut grass and coffee, and over everything was the roar of a crowd talking at once.

I ate, and I watched, and I waited. I was waiting for the raised voice. The cutting remark across the table. The relative who’d had one too many, the cousin nursing a grudge, the couple in the corner arguing through their teeth with smiles pasted on for the guests. Somebody storming out to the parking lot. Somebody crying alone in a parked car. I’d seen every one of those a hundred times, and I knew the signs.

None of it happened.

Kids tore across the grass, laughing, and nobody snapped at them. Men leaned back at the picnic tables telling stories, and the people listening laughed at every punch line. People got up to hug each other, and the hugs lasted. Plates went around the picnic tables. A little one fell asleep on a shoulder and slept like that park was the safest place in the world. Every face I looked at was smiling. Not the tight, polite smile people wear to get through an obligation. Easy smiles. Real ones.

Nobody was walking on eggshells. Nobody was keeping score. Nobody was hiding anything, at least not on the outside. These people hadn’t come out of duty. They wanted to be there, with each other, and they were having a wonderful time.

I sat on that bench, alone, looking around, and the thought that went through my head was simple. Wow, everybody’s getting along.

This is weird.

I didn’t know what to make of it. It didn’t match my reality at all.

I was a grown man, and I had never seen that. Not once in my life. I’d read about families like that and watched them on television, and some part of me had filed them alongside dragons and starships. A nice idea someone made up. And there it was, all around me, at every picnic table in that park. It was a wonder. I don’t have a better word for it.

Then it landed on me whose family this was.

Hers.

What does a happy family look like to someone who never had one?

It looks impossible, and then it looks easy.

Impossible, because when you grow up the way we did, you believe the whole world works that way underneath. Every family must have the shouting and the silences and the walking on eggshells. The happy ones are just better at hiding it.

Easy, because once you see one up close, you notice how little effort it takes the people inside. Nobody in that park was working hard to be pleasant. They were just being themselves, and themselves turned out to be people who liked each other. That afternoon taught me that some families can have happiness, and the knowledge has stayed with me ever since.

Who is my sister Belinda?

She’s my little sister, two years younger than me, and the smartest person I know.

She was born into the same house I was, with the same parents. And our parents had something extra for her. Belinda has epilepsy, and they told her, in so many words, that nobody would ever love an epileptic. They said it to their own daughter. They expected her to believe it, and for a while she did. She thought she’d be alone her whole life.

Then she met Ken, and he loved her, and he still does.

She finished college, became a biochemist doing research at UC Riverside and Cal Poly Pomona, and later earned an MBA. I never finished college at all. I went from a VP job in my early twenties to twenty years at Trader Joe’s to writing books, and I’m proud of that road, but I’m prouder of hers. She did it the hard way, against every message she grew up with, and she did it anyway.

She and Ken raised five children. And every picture I see of that family, every single one, has everybody smiling. Just like that afternoon in San Jose.

Together they founded Schmahl Science Workshops in San Jose. It started in 1994 in their garage, when Belinda’s daughter needed help with a fourth-grade science fair project and Belinda invited her and a few friends over to do real experiments.

Three decades later it has reached more than 325,000 children, and it serves many thousands of students a year, most of them in East San Jose and other neighborhoods where good science education is hard to come by. Her philosophy fits in one sentence: “The kids in East Side and downtown San Jose are just as smart as kids in Cupertino.” She’s spent thirty years proving it.

She’s also the one person in my family who’s proud that I make my living as a writer. The rest of the family never cared. When I mailed the 2,000-page autobiography I wrote years ago to twelve relatives, my father told everyone to burn theirs. Belinda read it, said it was pretty cool, and mentioned only that I’d gotten a little too detailed about my love life. Fair enough.

How do you build a happy family after a hard childhood?

I can’t give you her method. I can tell you what I’ve watched her do.

She didn’t copy what she grew up with. She looked at the house we came from and built the opposite. Where we got silence and anger, her kids got noise and laughter. Where our parents put us to work, her children grew up with two parents who wanted to be with them. She didn’t let the cruelty decide who she’d be. Our parents handed her a sentence: you’ll be alone. She refused to serve it. That takes a kind of stubbornness I admire more than almost anything.

And she kept her distance from what would have pulled her back. In the end, both of us stepped away from our parents. I don’t regret it for a second. You can’t build something new in the middle of a fire.

Happy birthday, Belinda

Out of what we came from, you built a family where people are glad to be together. Where kids laugh and nobody flinches. Where a brother who flew in bracing for landmines found nothing but people happy to see him.

That eight-year-old standing at the traffic light comes back to me more than you’d guess. He had no idea what was coming. He didn’t know the little sister he went back for would grow up to be the smartest person he’d ever meet. She’d become a scientist, find a man who loved her, raise five happy kids and spend thirty years giving other people’s children the encouragement we never got.

I’m so glad I made that decision. Of everything I’ve done in my life, it’s the one I’m surest of. And I like to think the boy who showed his little sister rocks and bugs had something to do with the scientist she became. You’re a fantastic person, Belinda, and I’m proud to have had a small part in that.

Happy birthday, little sister. I love you.

If you’ve been carrying a family story like ours and want to get it down before the details fade, I’ve written about what nineteen years in Crazytown taught me and what happened when my family read my memoir. And if you’re ready to write yours, my memoir service is a good place to start.

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