Today is my brother’s 15th birthday. We have always been lowkey about birthday celebrations, so it never really struck me how little I thought about my brother’s growth and what role I have played in these 15 years, until this year.
Many of us value friends and our peers more than we do for our siblings. While I dare say that I am not a bad sister, it makes me feel a little guilty that the kind of communication between my brother and I is something I did not put a lot of thought into. I don’t apply alot of my patience and goodwill to him, even though I try my best to do so with anybody outside my family. Perhaps I don’t feel like I will ever offend him, or that we will always naturally make up. Paradoxically I harbor a sense of entitlement towards the kind of relationships I have with my closest and dearest. And it goes both ways.
Personality wise, we hardly have any common ground. Someday I just cannot peer into his head and I feel that I never really understood him, or his values, or his experience. Our family never really possessed great communication skills, and sometimes it scares me when I feel this wall around him and no matter how I pitch stones at it, the sounds only echo in an empty city. He is way more sentimental, careful, obstinate, more lazy, gross, and undisciplined. I swear there is always the possibility that somehow our personalities got delivered into the wrong body: strictly personality wise, he is more feminine than I will ever be and I am more masculine than he is.
To add-on to that, my brother has always been more like my mother. It makes me question if one’s personality traits could be inherited. If that’s the case I can only cross my fingers and trust my mother that one day he will grow out of the shortcomings and become a better person. Not that he is a bad person, just that he is a huge asshole to me. After the lesson where we learnt about “what is not love” and abusive relationships, I swear I had such a keen sense of “oh lolz” when I thought about the way we got along for the past few months. We really don’t get along most times.
But that is not to say that we never did have good times. Every family holiday our relationship warms up and we really get each other and I feel that we are actually siblings. We share some secrets that we will never tell anyone else, have a laugh at things that would raise some eyebrows and warrant judgements, but not between the two of us.
My mother told us that in the future, we will be the closest people on the Earth so we got to have each other’s backs, which brings me to question myself how much am I investing into my role as an elder sister. I’m sure I could do a lot more to help him with his academics, and I plan to do so from now on, but seriously sometimes he pisses me off and I don’t bother to teach him. There’s also that dilemma because I never had anyone to teach me and I came along fine, so how much is too much and when will it cripple his independence?
Jeez it’s not easy being an older sibling. But I guess I’ll try harder from his birthday onwards.
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