On Angst and Sit-Coms

My youngest brother is eleven and one-half years younger than I am. Given where our birthdays fell, he started kindergarten the same month I started college. I’ve written before how he took me for show and tell over my Christmas break when he was in kindergarten, and I got upstaged by his classmate’s golden retriever. Forty-some years later, I can now admit the dog was cuter.

Little brother in the “show and tell” years

Because I left home as he started school, most of my memories of this brother are of him as a preschooler. But here is a memory of him when he was in college.

My husband and I used to send our children out to Washington State to visit my parents at least every summer, and sometimes for other holidays as well. On these trips, the kids got to know my siblings, because both my sister and brother also lived in Washington State.

One time when my son was about nine or ten and my daughter six or seven, they were in Washington State for a visit. On this occasion, I traveled near the end of their trip to retrieve them and to see my family. It might have been a summer visit, or it could have been at Christmas time.

Shortly after I arrived, my parents held a family gathering. My youngest brother (unmarried at the time) was there, as were my sister and her husband.

My brother and brother-in-law had been plotting with my kids. They had my son and daughter poised to tell me something. “Go on,” one of them said, “tell your mother.”

I was ready for anything—from new cuss words to a song to a recitation of some treatise. Anything was possible when my brother and brother-in-law got together.

My daughter giggled too much to speak on cue, but my son intoned dolefully, “You need to be nicer to us, because we’re suffering from pre-adolescent angst.” He was a lot closer to the pre-adolescent stage than my daughter, so it was probably more appropriate that the statement came from him.

I don’t know whether the “pre-adolescent angst” analysis originated with my brother or my brother-in-law. One was a pre-med student, and the other a former philosophy major and attorney, so either of them could have cooked it up. Plus, they intended to egg each other on. And, in turn, to egg on the next generation.

They still do. The two of them riff off each other, and their bantering flows non-stop.

My son is now old enough to join in, and he’s the only other person in the family who even tries to keep up. His uncles taught him well. My younger brother could always come up with a line from a sitcom to fit any occasion, and my son inherited that gene. The only difference is that my brother’s lines came from The Brady Bunch, and my son’s from Friends. It’s a generational thing, I’m sure.

My little brother and sister and me in the “evil big sister” years

My brother-in-law told me that he’d learned I was “the evil big sister” more from this youngest brother than from my sister. So maybe I owe an apology to my baby brother. But frankly, he has some apologizing to do also after his “instructions” to my children. Plus, I had to clean him up one time after he upchucked in his bed when I was babysitting. And during the years when the eleven years between our births mean we are two decades apart, he never lets me forget it.

Still, the years between us matter far less now than they did when we were kids. I’m looking forward to a vacation we are planning for next summer with my brother and sister and their spouses.

This weekend, my brother celebrates his birthday. And this year, we are only one decade apart.

Happy birthday, younger brother! What would The Brady Bunch have to say about this occasion?