A Baby Brother Post 1

True Stories: A Baby Brother:

In just a few short days, Franklin will acquire something he cannot return if he doesn't like. He will acquire something he cannot play with for one moment and then leave in the corner to collect dust while moving on to the next Toy Story sensation or Jake the Pirate Series. He'll be stuck with a new baby brother, to live with for at least the next 14 years or so, until he charts out on his own if he so chooses.

This, and my own natural personality that is inclined toward introspection and holds great esteem towards a certain young fellow in my life, got me thinking about MY baby brother and everything he has gone through in his 25 years. I don't really have his permission, per se, to write about him, but he is rarely online, so he'll probably never know. I can't imagine that he'd care anyway.

With that said, I will summarize that what will follow are posts about life from the older sister’s perspective alone. I cannot speak for my brother. I will, however, speak about how this older sister's perspective has changed through the years. I kind of alluded to why I am inspired to write about my brother, but the truth is I am inspired to write about him for many reasons, probably the most pressing being how much love and pride I have in my heart in regard to him. Only through getting older have I found more of an understanding of what life was like in HIS world and how everything that I always felt was happening to ME really affected HIM as well. Readers will see that progression in the stories as they shift from stories about how his existence impacts my life to reflections about how life impacted and developed him…and how, by the grace of God, he’s made it this far. My brother is a deep, compassionate, loyal, loving, sincere, and worthy man. Unfortunately, he does not realize any of those characteristics about himself. Instead he finds himself filled with the anxiety to be someone acceptable, worthy of love, or even just tolerable to others. I wish I could love him all better, but all I can do is love him with the love with which I’ve learned God loves me. Most people are not privy to experiencing a lot of real God-type love from the people in their lives, and that is much to the detriment of this society. The love of God is what is needed to heal us all from the darkest of pains and cycles of in which we rest and reside.

I can’t really remember the day my baby brother was born. I am told that my grandparents were visiting to take care of my sister and me, and that I was bent on wearing the same blue-jean skirt, sweatshirt, and blue-jean vest each and every day they were there, leaving my poor Grandmother to do the laundry every night. It was the era of Punky Brewster and mixed-matched socks, and I believed I could totally rock it.

My blue jean suit.

I don’t remember Mom being in the hospital or going to visit her there, but apparently the birth was really hard for her and the doctors told her she’d be crazy to ever get pregnant again after giving birth to Bryant. She heeded their warnings. I do recall seeing a picture of my sister and I, clad in our scrubs and face masks, me with a red sweatshirt, holding the tiny, squirmy, red infant. And that’s all I really remember until maybe he was around 2 or 3 years old and he couldn’t leave the house without carrying spoons in his hands, yes spoons. Mom said it was some type of oral fixation. I couldn’t make fun of him for it though; I sucked my thumb continuously. I also remember Granddaddy gave him this baseball cap that said “Lit’l Slugger” and he wore it religiously, and backwards.

Bryant, looking for spoons to carry for the day...

He loved baseball, football, and any sport that he could play in the living room with his daddy. We have videos of the two of them playing. Videos that Bryant doesn’t like to watch because he hates to see now how Dad would tease him as a child when they played.

And yes, Bryant followed me around doing whatever I did, which drove me crazy because I did no much understand at that age that imitation is the highest form of flattery. He stuck gum in my hair on the way to visit my Aunt Shelly one time, and Mom had to cut a huge chunk of my hair out to GET it out. I got him back by telling him that the water treatment plant on the side of the highway at exit 51 off of 1-20 in South Carolina was really a place where the kept all the dead bodies left over from the previous world wars, like the ones about which our grandparents told us and fought in. Yup, I told him, some of granddaddy’s friends were right inside those giant cylinder tubes. That terrified him, and he could barely look out the window every time we passed by (which was frequent). It made up for the gum and hair incident. Eight-year-old-me was satisfied.

I remember he teased me a lot as he grew older, into his 5 and 6 and 7 year old days. Dad provoked much of this, encouraging him to chase me around with G.I. Joe men who had their heads or legs missing, or to pull the heads off the dolls just to freak me out. Dad found this amusing. I assume he knows better now. I’m pretty sure I physically abused my little brother a lot during the time I was bigger than him. He threw a toy train at me one time and gave me a black eye. The bus driver pulled me aside before school to talk to me in private and find out ‘if Mommy or Daddy really did it.’ I appreciated her concern and bragged to Mama about it, hoping that it would get Bryant into more trouble. It didn’t.

I recall feeling that he didn’t get into trouble as much as I did, or that Mom loved him more and just got annoyed with me. And we have home videos of Mom’s tone of voice that proves that she would get frustrated handling me as compared to her angelic Bryant.

I once tried to get him into the BIGGEST trouble I could think of. I concocted a plan to have him do the one thing I knew was VERY BAD because Mom told us NEVER to do it. I told him that he should stick one of our dinner forks into the electrical socket on the wall. I didn’t REALLY plan on letting him hurt himself. (Nor did I think about how this could backfire).  I just knew mom usually kept those plastic thingies in the holes so that we didn’t put things in the sockets and that if we did, we’d get in trouble because it was dangerous. SO, my plan was to put the fork in his hand, tell him to put it in the socket, and scream for Mom or my sister right before he did it so that he would be CAUGHT red-handed and get some REAL punishment for doing a BAD thing. I’d blame the WHOLE thing on him. HE took the plastic thing out. HE PUT the fork in there. I’d definitely win because obviously I’d know better than to do a stupid thing like that.

The plan backfired, however. My sister walked in beforehand, as I was setting up the big event. I tried to play it off and blame it on him anyway, saying he was about to do it, but she didn’t believe me, of course, because (in my opinion) she didn’t like me AT ALL (she probably did. She at least loved me, but it was complicated, and that's fine. She was a kid too). She said she was telling Mom and Dad. I remember it was a Sunday, and that night we had a performance at church where I had a staring role. I begged her not to tell them before the performance because I wanted to enjoy my time on stage acting and singing. She said she’d only wait until I got to church, but that she had to tell them before I performed because she couldn’t wait any longer. It would be too much. I guess it makes sense. It was a dangerous situation. It didn't make sense then. Then, it sucked. I just wanted them to love me and be proud of ME the most for one second, and it didn’t work.

The whole time I knew they were pissed. Afterward, Dad didn’t say a word to me; he didn’t even look at me. Mom may have said good job, but what I remember more was the ‘get in the car.’ I had yet to realize why all of this was SUCH a big deal. I just wanted to get him into trouble. And nothing happened. BIG DEAL? Sheesh.

That night at home I learned that if he’d really stuck the fork in the socket, he would have died. Honestly, the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. I hadn’t thought he’d ever get that far. I wasn’t thinking that way though. I had no intention of letting him stick the fork in the socket, didn’t they believe that? Mom said that didn’t matter, that an accident could have happened. I said, ‘No! I was right there. I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t going to let him. It was just to get him in trouble. No accident would happen.’ Dad, however, didn’t even believe my honest defense. He called me “Evil” that night. I remember sitting in my room crying, in the middle of my bed, hating myself because apparently I was “evil”…and I hadn’t known it. But I guess it made sense. That’s probably why my sister didn’t like me that much and found me annoying and why I felt like my parents thought my brother was an angel but that I was a devil-child causing trouble. It made sense now. Evil. That was me.

Mom came upstairs later and brought me dinner. She told me she knew I wasn’t evil, that Dad was wrong, and that she forgave me. Bryant was in the bathtub. He heard us in my bedroom, so he gotten out and walked in there, naked as a jaybird with his boy-parts ALL showing, and he was crying, whipping his eyes, saying he loved me and that I wasn’t evil. In hindsight, I see he was a sweet little kid that felt bad his big sister got in trouble. He really was kind, but at the time I was just thinking ‘COME ON KID! GIVE ME ONE SECOND WITH MY MOM WITHOUT YOU HAVING TO STEAL THE SHOW!! AND for goodness sake, PUT SOME CLOTHES ON!’ I guess that’s the mind of a child, a bratty one at least. All these years later, it’s hard for me to really believe I wasn’t a terrible child and he wasn’t the innocent angel. Because he really was sorry I was getting into such trouble, and I really was annoyed that he was hugging me and didn't think I should be getting into trouble. Doesn't that make me a bad kid? I guess I still wonder. I mean look at the innocence and love in his eyes, and I was just annoyed with him. How awful.

Daniel (our cousin), Bryant, Me, and Danny (our other cousin). Notice how Bryant has his arms around us all, holding us all together...even at a young age. He just wanted to give love.

Mom used to say that a lot, actually, that she thought Bryant was an angel sent from heaven that God was going to take away one day in order to get Dad saved. That both scared me (because I didn’t want my brother to die) and infuriated me (why couldn’t I be the angel? Why wasn’t I good enough?) At the time, all these things my parents said to us and did to us probably seemed right and good to them…and that’s what scares me the most. It makes me think I never want to have kids because who knows what type of whacked up thing I could possibly say or do to them without knowing! I say that only partly serious. Please realize the drama in the statement and do not send me hate-mail or mail to ‘set me straight.’

Anyway, this is all I have time for today. I’ll pick up next time on the years when Bryant and I teamed up…and then things will start turning from being about me to being about him…that’s when I started to really learn about him…and really love him. Till next time, that's all for True Stories!