As I’ve mentioned before, I have two siblings: A sister who is five years older than I am and a brother who is six years older than I am. I have a completely different relationship with the both of them and I’m going to talk some more about that in this post.
I’ll start with my sister. My sister is pretty much my best friend. Even though I annoyed her and she annoyed me when we were younger, we still spent a lot of time together back then. I remember my sister was always doing my hair. Because I couldn’t even make a proper ponytail myself, my sister always did this whenever it was needed. Sometimes she did other cool stuff with my hair too. People I hung out with always liked the haircreations she made and they wanted my sister to do their hair too. And so she did regularly.
My sister always collected a lot of stuff. She collected little lipsticks, nail polishes, hairstuff and soaps. She had loads of soaps. Little soaps in the shape of flowers and butterflies and other animals. She also had soaps and little shampoo bottles my dad brought from hotels he sometimes stayed at. I remember drinking half of one of those shampoo bottles, because I wanted to taste that smell. I don’t have to explain to you that that made me pretty sick, haha. One day I was browsing through my sisters lipstick collection when I decided to try some stuff out. So, I painted on my face with her lipsticks (she also had blue, yellow and black lipstick) and I painted on the wallpaper in our bedroom. That wasn’t really appreciated by anyone in the house.
My sister and I didn’t only share a bedroom together, we also shared a bed together for years. There were two beds in the room, but I guess we both preferred sharing a single bed. Every night my sister would pinch my butt, because it reached her half of the bed. Even though it happened every night, it always took me by surprise and I regularly hit my head against the wall when it happened. We always had little fights about this, but still wanted to keep it this way. Maybe because it gave some sort of safety. Being together in a house that didn’t particularly feel safe.
We never really played outside together. Or inside our house for that matter. My sister spent a lot of time studying. This was mostly our main reason for being annoyed by each other. She wanted the entire house to be quiet and I did my best to accomplish the complete opposite. I watched tv pretty loud or I listened to the radio or cd’s. She would burst into the room and turn the sound off. I would yell at her, saying she was being a bitch and that would annoy her even more. At some point we had internet and I would spend days chatting on msn. I really kinda claimed my dads laptop. Nobody else could use the laptop, cause I would make a huge drama about it. I don’t know if I was addicted or if I was just escaping reality. Anyway…my sister sometimes had to do assignments for school. I would ask her how long those assignments would take and I would clock it to the minute. It would always cause another fight, because our computer wasn’t that fast. My sister always needed a bit more time. Not even that much, but I would go mental on her because of it. I would be mad and say my sister was a liar and she tricked me. I was annoying and mean, but maybe it was just a way to get some attention? We never stayed mad at each other. I don’t even remember if we really said sorry or if we just acted like it didn’t happen.
Even though we never played together at home, we did play together at my grandma’s house. I’ve mentioned it before, but we always played with our pretend pharmacy. We had so much fun doing this and had so much fun recording with the cassette recorder. We would use funny voices and we pretended to be complaining customers or just weird customers with weird health problems. My sister and I had a lot of inside jokes. I can’t remember any of them unfortunately, but I know we had a lot of those. We also had a lot of weird childish songs we sang together. Nursery rhymes, songs about friendships.. Sometimes we did little dances whilst singing those songs too. Even though we annoyed each other a lot, we also had a LOT of fun together. And my sister always felt safe. She cared. She was there. With all the important events in my life, good and bad, she has always been there. And she still is. That means the world to me.
Unfortunately the relationship with my brother is totally different. I guess I never really felt connected to him. When I was little we did spend a lot of time together. But it was mostly wrestling and fighting. We had one common interest: Annoying my sister when she was studying. Besides that we were two completely different persons. I think my brother had the biggest impact on my self-esteem. He called me fat a lot. I can’t remember if he actually said those words, but he made a LOT of comments about food, eating a lot, being big boned, making a lot of sound whilst walking etc etc. He would say those things and laugh really loud, as if it wasn’t mean if he did the laughing.
When I had EMDR therapy a couple of years ago, I was asked to give a description of a situation that made me feel completely useless. A situation that made me feel ugly and worthless. The situation I described was the following: It was summer holiday and we went camping. My brother was hanging around with his friends and he was constantly throwing insults at me. And his friends would laugh, because they laughed about anything my brother did. At some point I was just walking from the cafeteria towards a playground. My brother was sitting on a terrace with his friends and suddenly he called me from a distance. He said: ‘Meg!’ and the moment I turned around, his friends started waving and laughing and they all said at the same time ‘Everytime a good time’. I don’t know if any of you remember this, but it was a line McDonalds used at their commercials. It wasn’t the first time he made a McDonalds joke, he made them ALL the time. But this one hurt. So much. I can still see them all sit there with smiles on their faces. I wanted to disappear.
Another negative memory of my brother was also on summer holiday at the camping. There were two outside swimming pools at the camping. One was shallow and one was normal. When I was still little I was fine with swimming in the shallow one. I only went to the normal/deep one with floaties on and never went alone. My sister or dad had to be there. I remember my brother being in a "funny" mood and showing off to his friends. He picked me up out of the kiddie pool, carried me to the normal pool and just threw me in. Without floaties, without someone there, without me knowing how to swim. I was terrified. I reached the side of the pool. Nothing happened. Nothing went wrong, but I was exhausted from the panic that it caused.
When I was in high school, I started to become more alternative. I was wearing a lot of black clothes. I wouldn’t say I was really gothic or emo or whatever, but it was definitely different. Always wearing black pants, mostly with dresses in stead of shirts and I dyed my hair red or purple or black. My brother was always pretty mainstream. We didn’t go to the same high school, yaaaaay, but I know he was one of the popular kids on his high school. One day we were in a fight again and he made a comment about my looks. He did that all the time, but the message was different this time. It hit harder. He yelled at me: ‘Why can’t you just be normal!’. For me that confirmed that the way I saw myself, was the way others saw me: Not normal, weird and unworthy.
I never told my brother anything. When I was younger and I did tell him stuff, he would always find a way to use it against me. We never really had a bond. The only time that I really cared about him, was when he had alcohol poisoning. It was summer holiday and he was having a party with friends at the camping. They were drinking a lot of stuff. Like a lot a lot. I remember them drinking beer, mixed drinks and loads of Flugels. My brother became drunker and drunker. He was loud and rude and broke stuff. I remember him trying to use a plastic garden chair as a bed. It broke straight away. He broke another garden chair, but I can’t remember how. He went to the cafeteria and broke a couple of glasses and he was singing annoying songs and talking about people from our hometown (none of the camping friends knew them). At some point he was too far gone and he laid on the ground. He started vomiting and paramedics had to come. It was so scary. My brother wasn’t allowed to sleep on his back that night, because it was too dangerous for his health. My dad had to sit or lay against him, so my brother wouldn’t roll on his back. The day after he had a huge hangover, but he was pretty fine. He spent the whole day apologizing to half of the camping.
Now that I’m writing this down, I’m wondering if this incident is maybe one of the reasons I don’t drink. I really don’t ever want to lose control the way my brother lost control that night. I don’t want to lose control at all.
When my brother left home to live on his own, we didn’t really have a reason to keep in touch. My brother visited my mom and dad every week, so I saw him when he was there. Since I left home to live together with my boyfriend, I see my brother even less. It’s not that we hate each other. But there is just nothing there. We tolerate each other, but that’s it. I don’t even have his phone number and I forget his date of birth regularly. Is it the 15th or the 16th? I really wouldn’t know. When we’re both at my mom and dad for whatever reason, he doesn’t bully me anymore, so that’s nice. And he tries to show interest when we’re there. But it’s not very deep. More like small talk. My brother feels more like an acquaintance to me than a brother. I wish we had a different kind of relationship from the start, but I don’t need it to change now. It’s just the way it is and I’m fine with that. I’m sure he is too.
