Brotherly Love Written on August 1, 2006, by Jen.
When I was about eleven years old, I hated my brother, Fro. He’s always been the favorite, which is odd because he’s the middle child, and when we were little, we pulled each other’s hair and even got into a fist fight across the street once. While I acted like a third parent to my youngest brother, Jer, with Fro, well, we just never really tired when we were young.
If Fro was the prince of the family, I was the black sheep. At first, I fought it, but as I grew older, I learned to embrace it. It almost became expected that I would mess up, but the thing I always pointed out to my mother was that my mistakes were the mistakes that normal people made. I wrecked my dad’s truck, I couldn’t decide on what college to go to, I took it out on my parents when my first boyfriend and I broke up, and I didn’t get a job in the field I received my degrees in. I wasn’t drinking at parties in high school, I didn’t experiment with drugs in college, and when I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, I was going to Bible study.
While all this was going on, Fro was graduating from Duquesne and landing a decent job months after he graduated. Jer was going to Pitt Main as a senior in high school and figured out that he could graduate from college at age twenty. I was starting school again after already putting in almost five years and still trying to convince my parents that I was never getting back together with the Colonel.
Since everything with my family relationships has drastically changed so much in the past year, I’m seeing that I am very comfortable with the role I’ve taken in my family. My mom gives us advice that we need to hear, even if we don’t want to hear it. My dad continues to be my hero, the man who is capable of fixing anything and who has never made me feel like I’ve been wrong about anything I’ve done. Jer has become the glue that holds our family together, the one who greets me and my mom with a big hug everytime he sees us, the one who tells me he loves me the most, and the one I can go to when I want to know what my parents are really saying about me. And Fro. Well, we haven’t gotten to hugging and verbal ‘I love you’s, but sometime over the past year, Fro and I stopped fighting, stopped competing, and started being friends. I know he’ll never understand why I didn’t use my degrees (yet), but Fro’s got this way of looking at the world that is slightly different from mine, this knack of seeing exactly how to get exactly where he wants to go. I’ve found my brothers are starting to give me the same things I get from my parents, Fro will give me a swift kick in the ass when I need it and Jer, well, Jer will hug me when I cry and say something profound, make me feel like he’s seven years older than me instead of the other way around.
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