I began my career as a parasite at a young and tender age.
Most lower-schoolers make or break playground friendships based on peers’ clothing (Limited Too: unacceptable), their aptitude for Wall Ball and Four Square (admission: I was crap at both), and the content of their lunchboxes (fruit roll-ups: ideal). My only requirement, however, was that any friend of mine had to have younger siblings.
My overtures were innocent enough. Once I identified my sibling-rich targets, I offered extra turns on the jump rope, doled out the Go-Gurts from my lunch, and gave playful pokes during naptime. Results were usually swift, and I earned many coveted play-date invitations.
My mother dropped me off at my new friends’ houses, leaving me after the time-honored parental injunction, "Behave yourself." She needn’t have bothered.
From the moment I stepped in the door, I was the perfect guest: polite, clean, placid. I never failed to say "please" and "thank you." I entertained my friends’ younger siblings, involved them in games, asked their opinions, comforted them when they cried. They grew to love me; they met me at the door with presents covered in Elmer’s glue.
Their parents came to love me, too, exclaiming that I was so patient, so kind, so understanding with the younger kids. Mothers wondered, pointedly, why there weren’t more children like me.
Perhaps because most children don’t have a little brother whose ashes sit on a shelf in their mother’s bedroom.
My baby brother David and I were both preemies, both born too early, both suffering health complications. I survived them; he didn’t. David died in the hospital when I was two years old, after a few short months of life. He will be buried with my mother when she dies.
I never saw David alive. As soon as I grew old enough to understand what the death of my brother meant, I became obsessed with other people’s siblings.
I hung on to my friends’ families like a tick, gorging myself on the bad blood shed between siblings. I treasured every insult, every favorite toy broken accidentally-on-purpose, every slammed door, every settled score.
I culled the results of my parasitic feedings as though I were compiling a case: Natanson v. Universe, the compelling argument as to why one girl is owed one little brother.
I felt sure that, eventually, the powers that be would realize their mistake, would realize these ungrateful tyrants didn’t deserve their younger siblings. They would see that I—so unfailingly good with kids—was born to be an older sister. In the end, they’d have to give my brother back.
I was wrong. No matter how approving or compassionate I was, it wasn’t enough for my friends’ younger siblings. It wasn’t my kindness or approval that they longed for, but their older brother’s or sister’s. I was baffled.
Now, I understand. The conflict, the sticky-fingered pinching, the hot tears: all indelible marks of belonging. Intimate knowledge of one another permitted these brother-sister pairs to irritate at will, to push exactly the right buttons at exactly the right moments—and, finally, to see these fights for the privileges they were. Their whole lives, they’d never fight like this with anyone else. And I’d never fight like that with anyone at all.
Today, when my best friend complains, "My little sister is such a brat," I commiserate disinterestedly. I feel no resentment, none at all.
Well, almost none.
