Oh brother

Just this week I saw some of the best theatre I’ve seen in forever. All across the land, toddlers are throwing themselves on the floor, fastening themselves to the legs of parents and wailing with operatic passion.

We are already in the season of excess and there are just so many toys in the world and is there any good reason they can’t have all?

No one truly understands the immediacy and sharpness of the pain of a small person denied a plastic triceratops.

This is not my usual Christmas rant. (Not today, Satan.) I’m trying to put into perspective things other children want as opposed to what I wanted when I was young.

What I wanted beyond anything else was a brother. I wanted a brother like I was starving. Somehow, in a world that had shown me mostly women, I developed an obsession for this thing – sorry, this person – absent from my life.

The fault was, of course, entirely my parents’. They had proven they could supply children in great quantities, but their offerings were solely of the sister variety.

What I lacked in reasonableness I made up for in works of the imagination. I very specifically wanted an older brother.

I have a sister a mere seven years my senior. She’s a wonderful person. She was a wonderful person even when she was in her teens, and that’s saying a lot. So it’s not that I didn’t appreciate her, it’s just that I wondered why she couldn’t find it in herself to be a boy.

I gather there was a sort of balance I needed. My sisters read or limed with their schoolfriends or sulked about boys. I needed roughhousing and a degree of untamedness that I found wanting in my lovely sisters.

There was one cousin who was a reasonable stand-in. In him, I found both the feral and the safe. There were full-on wrestling matches, there was chasing and shoving, there was a wanton breaking of rules for no reason other than the rules were there.

Looking at it in these words, I wonder if I needed a brother or lion cubs.

Miraculously, no one was seriously injured. This all sounds like normal childhood material to many of you. But only consider: without him I would have had none of it.

When we got past the age of childhood violence, he was the kind of person I wanted to go to parties with. He had that bad-boy thing going on. I could try to define it in a dozen different ways, but at its core, it was just male energy.

Why, I asked my sister again and again, was she not more like him? Though impractical, I feel wanting the impossible is a perfectly normal thing. Soon enough you will appreciate the futility. But for a while you let yourself believe it’s possible.

In time, several of my sisters came upon marriage as a lifestyle choice. Here we have the introduction of a new species of human: the brother-in-law. And maybe that changed my life even more than the cousin. They were present, each had the trust and love of at least one sister, they knew about being brothers. And, not for nothing, “brother” is baked into the name.

And I discovered that brothering was more than just arm-wrestling and kickboxing. I was a youngest sister once again, but this time the older siblings came with a different body of knowledge and emotional range.

One was always kind and patient but made no secret of the fact that he found me indisciplined. One taught me to fish and to be fearless about new technology. I loved that the most Mr-Fix-it of them all likes getting flowers.

And then there was the one who stayed with me and calmed me when the panic attacks were raging. That was the brother who picked up the slack, who helped my mother see me through the midnight days when neither medication nor the heavens smiled on me.

My mother (probably like many others) always said she did not have sons-in-law, but sons. She did not have a craving for sons, but the men who moved into the family all treated her like a mother, so, I mean, what choice did she have?

But how she loved them.

I have brothers. It took a while and some disappointments (we say nothing of friends from your teens) but I got there. And they are everything I thought they could be.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.