Tomorrow my little brother graduates from High School. Even though I put together a college survival kit for him for Christmas and even though he and I have been making tentative spring break/thanksgiving plans together, I still haven’t really processed the fact that my little brother is graduating from high school tomorrow. Holy freaking crap.
My brother and I are 21 months apart, and we used to be really close. As evidenced by the adorable picture to the right, we got a huge kick out of wearing the same teeshirts and pretending we were twins, and that was only the beginning. Family friends Megan and David were slightly further apart in age than us, but their sibling cat fights could fill novels. I remember Vinny and I lecturing them. “Why do you guys fight so much? We never fight!”
And that’s how it was. We’d watch superhero cartoons together, played several of the same sports, and I would even *let* him play with me and Rachel had playtime at our house. (remember the goblin game, you guys??) However, I was two years ahead of him in school, and had a much harder time at the social game, and middle school was when everything started to fall apart.
I didn’t realize until the past couple years how horrible of a sister I became after I entered the sixth grade. There are plenty of excuses I could vocalize- I was horribly bullied (true), I went through puberty really early and thus was hormonally all over the place (true), I had very few friends at my new school (true), etc. All the excuses are true and all of them aided my failure as a big sister for a good chunk of our lives.
When it comes right down to it, most of our disintegrated relationship came down to me. I was as self-involved as they came, the smart kid with a superiority complex and an inability to recognize early enough that some people just didn’t want to be my friend. Whatever the specific reasons were, though, my brother and I effectively stopped spending time with each other almost as soon as I entered middle school, and we never really recovered.
Granted, he didn’t do much to help himself. My brother is very, very good at finding the one or two things that get under your skin and then exploiting them until you lose your mind, and this talent only escalated when I started ignoring him in exchange for sad poetry and black eyeliner. I know now that he only started acting like a brat (for the most part) because I altogether stopped spending time with him, which would have been unprecedented in his eight year old brain. Unfortunately, because we were kids, neither of us recognized these things, and so our lives began to grow in radically separate directions.
Thankfully, things started to get better during my senior year of high school. A lot of it can be attributed to our parent’s divorce (not that I’m saying it was a good thing, obviously), because we were all we had to talk to for a while there. It forced us to reexamine our priorities, and suddenly, all the petty fighting didn’t seem as important.
Things brightened further when we no longer had to live together for most of the year. In fact, I’d wager that we talked more after I moved to college than we did most of the five years one or both of us was in middle school. Something about not sharing a bathroom really did great things for our relationship.
It sucks that I can’t go back in time to try to explain to my eight year old brother that it wasn’t (entirely) his fault that I withdrew from our relationship. It sucks even more that I was probably the worst role model possible for a long time. But we can never go back, only forwards.
So here’s my graduation promise to my brother: I promise to think before I yell at you about a hygiene habit that bugs me, I promise to text you every once in a while to see how everything is going, and I promise to listen to you if you need to talk, even though you survived puberty without me and were probably better off for it. More than that, though, I promise to be the sister I haven’t been since we were kids. I can never take back those lost years where we hardly spoke or looked at each other, and I can never replace the screaming with words of encouragement, but I can promise you, Vincent, that it will never happen again. And that’s a promise you can hold me to.
