Salutations, dear readers! Here is the promised “Part Two” to last month’s article on siblings. I ended up having a lot more to write than I expected, so it looks like I will be writing a Part Three as well. Apparently, I had more interesting sibling memories than I thought. But for now, just enjoy this set of stories and anecdotes.
Life started out great when I had all the attention. Then I noticed that, after a while, my mother’s tummy started swelling until it got so big, she couldn’t hold me anymore. And one day, mother and father came back with a whole new person. What???
I looked at this tiny person with disgust and decided that the best option would be to show him who’s boss. So, I pushed him. Little did I know that he would leave me out in the cold, taking up all the attention from my (dare I say frazzled) parents.
Fast forward to kindergarten where things with a brother were going better. I had switched from my previously hostile stance to a much more accepting view. When the kindergarten teacher dished out Red Vines, I ensured that one was donated to him. Elementary school life with a brother was pretty great– weekend trips to the park and local market, homework together, story time with daddy, occasional trips to the zoo—even the petty fights over snacks and toys didn’t cloud it. Of course, my klutzy self was a little too hyper sometimes. Once when running through the house in some wild hybrid game of tag and hide-and-seek, I accidentally slammed the door. Hard. On his tiny little fingers. Naturally, I understood. After all, I had slammed a car door and the front door on my fingers as well. But mother didn’t…
Everything changed with middle school and hormones. Previously, I hadn’t envied my brother much, but now that I was older, I started seeing all the unjust things in life. How come he could spend a grand total of two hours (or less) on all his work for a day and get by with it, but I couldn’t? How come he could get away with hitting me, but I couldn’t? How come when he didn’t even try in school while I got nearly perfect grades, our parents had pretty much the same reaction? This was unacceptable. And that is when things stopped looking peachy.
Fights became more physical, and I was often unreasonable. I was dealing with my own issues and having a cute little brother who was somewhat spoiled didn’t help. Still, sometimes I felt bad about bullying him. Now that we were both older, we needed to eat a lot more which ushered in a whole new level of “food fights”. We would fight over even the tiniest morsel of food, no matter how ridiculous. Obviously, this drove our parents crazy, and our father was constantly muttering about buying a scale to weigh any food we had to share. Which proved an obvious point. We hated sharing. Especially me. I was always possessive of my things, but when I was forced to share because he was “younger” it frustrated me to my wits’ end. The arguments went on back and forth, usually with me gaining the upper hand until a parent took his side. Then I was the one in the wrong and ended up in way more trouble than him. Even if he had started it. A famous phrase going around the house went something like this: “I don’t care who started it! Just stop fighting already!” I thought it was so unfair because I always got the brunt of whatever punishment was doled out just because I was older. My younger self spent a lot of time wishing I was my brother or the younger one. Now that I am older, my opinions have changed…but that’s for another article!
Image Credit: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/e816wc/mochi_and_blue_brother_and_sister_and_9_months/