I Asked for a Puppy; I Got a Brother
The things I regret about my relationship with my little brother
I was five when I started to annoy my parents. I wanted a dog. We lived in the countryside, everyone around us had a dog. I wanted one. I wanted to be like my friends at school.
I got a little brother instead.
In the beginning, I couldn’t understand what they were showing me. “A little brother? What am I supposed to do with him? Can we eat him?” Yes, I asked my mom if we could eat my brother. He was not a puppy, he was stealing my mom’s attention, and he screamed — a lot. I was annoyed by his presence in our house.
My mom was trying her best to make me like him, and I finally gave him a try. I started to play with him, I thought he was dumb because he didn’t understand what he was supposed to do, but when he began to crawl, I was almost pleased.
One day I let him crawl unsupervised, and he got stuck with his head in the railing. It took us two hours and a lot of crying from my mom to let him out.
I was grounded, and I hated him.
A similar pattern developed as we grew older:
I was fourteen, and he was eight. He was my annoying little brother, the one with an incredible fantasy to make up excuses for his mischief. I didn’t want him around my friends and me. We shared the bedroom and fought every day about who should stay in it with their friends.
I was eighteen, and he was twelve. We still shared the bedroom. I was beyond pissed about his friends going through my bras and panties.
I was twenty-four, he was eighteen, and he started to go through some trouble. He dropped out of high school, went to live with a girl ten years older than him, got in a car accident that almost killed him. Twice.
It was at this point that I started to worry for him, but I realized I had zero influence on him. I’d never built a real relationship with him, I never paid enough attention to his life, and I realized that I couldn’t help him. We grew up loving each other, being happy for each other, but never building a real bond.
It worried me then as it worries me now. I know I love my brother, I can feel it, but I don’t know how to have a relationship with him.
I learned that loving someone isn’t enough; if you don’t share a real relationship with him, you can’t just intervene to save him. I’ve always worked to gain trust with the people I cared about the most, people I met during my life, but I’ve always taken for granted the only person that grew up next to me. It’s sad to say, but I’ve always expected things to just sort of work out between us, not realizing that a siblings bond doesn’t grow itself. Or, at least it doesn’t grow in a real friendship.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a healthy, loving family. We stick together in front of every difficulty we face, but when it comes to my brother, I can’t make the difference.
He’s since grown up, gotten out of trouble, married a good woman, had two gorgeous children. Our relationship is going smooth like two siblings that love each other, but I’m aware that I’m still missing a lot.
I’m not the one that he calls when he needs to talk; I’m not the one in his mind when he needs help. We never call each other. We don’t even text. We know what is happening in each others’ lives, but my mom is the glue that shares the pieces of information. I could be the one that picks up the phone and dials his number, but when I think about it, I don’t know what I should say.
Here’s the thing. I know this is my fault. The problem is, when I realized it, it was too late: we were too far away to start something that could last forever.
Sometimes I think about what I would do differently if I could go back in time, and the answer is always the same: I would change everything, starting at the beginning. If I would have tried to reach out to my brother, if I’d wanted to include him in my life, maybe he would have had an easier life. At any rate we would have been closer. When you are a child, you see life as an adventure, and sharing this adventure with your brother is the real magic that lasts forever. You learn together, you grow up together, you fall and rise together.
One lesson that I’ve learned through my relationship with my brother is that you can’t wait for something to change. You can’t expect that a relationship will work just because you live under the same roof, and because you are related.
Don’t hesitate to pick up the phone and have that awkward call you have been avoiding for a while. The more you wait, the less you can save of that relationship, and looking back, you will regret the time you wasted.
