Many people take their families for granted, including me. I’ve always been a rebel,and my first rebellion was against family, a concept I considered outmoded. Boy, was I wrong. My baby brother Brad is one of the most accomplished, resourceful, clever, funny and generous people I have ever met. I’m incredibly lucky to have him.
When my little brother came along I was pissed because he got more attention than I did, and as far as I was concerned he continued to get more attention than I did even when he grew up. Number one, he was a boy, and to add insult to injury he was the younger child. Worst of all, when he was born he needed more attention because he was a goddam baby. The trifecta of injustices visited on me.
So I performed subtle hostile acts like diapering my favorite teddy bear in the same way that my mother diapered him and then throwing the teddy bear into the Hudson River in a kind of Satanic ritual. Bye, bye, baby.
Of course at the time I didn't know what I was doing, but with the perspective you attain after a lifetime of therapy I realize what that all meant.
Later I went on to hate him because he was always jumping in with my friends at my girl parties and doing things like asking to play with us. It was embarrassing to be visited by your baby brother. It didn't help that for the first 10 years of my life we shared a bedroom so he was also impossible to get away from. Today if you put a girl child and a boy child in the same room Child Protective Services would be on it immediately. But that was the 50s.
As we grew up I began to be jealous of him because I was fat and he was thin and because when our parents sent us to camp he liked it and I hated it. He was athletic and I was a nerd, which means he fit in and I didn't. Later, he wasn’t doing well enough in school so he got to go to private school and I didn't. He got all the treatment boys got back in the late 50s early 60s.
I got diet pills.
I tried to establish my own beachhead in the unfamiliar territory of childhood through academic excellence, and indeed I did that so much so that I got into Cornell. I finally thought I’d escaped him and his athletics, his personality, his numerous friendships in our neighborhood.
But waddya know? Three years later, here came my little brother following me to Cornell. Lacking the grades to get into the College of Arts and Sciences, he got a job for a summer on a farm --you heard that right, a farm--a kid from Riverdale working on a farm. It set him up for entrance into the College of Agriculture at Cornell, which was easier to get into. He took the same courses we took in the fancy part of Cornell, except he took agricultural economics and a couple of other specialized courses required by the Ag school.
Once there, he also got into the “right” fraternity. He was, I now realize, incredibly clever and resourceful.
Although he hung by his thumbs through courses like statistics he also maneuvered his way into law school. When my father died, Brad was in law school going to take after my father's practice when I had refused to do that.
But as soon as he didn’t have to be a lawyer for my dad’s sake, he got out of law school and with a very courageous gesture began to pursue a successful career as a photographer. This took him around the world, and allowed him to meet people in the media business while I moved to Phoenix, got pregnant and built the dome house. Me, the rebel. Married with children. Him, living the high life and hooking up with models all over the world. Doing coke in far away photo shoot locations.
Our lives diverged.
But then he decided to get married and have children. He picked out a woman I never would've expected, not a model but a cancer nurse, sold his fantastic loft in New York that I loved staying in when I visited the City from the wild west hinterlands, and bought a house in New Jersey.
This reversal to me was completely incomprehensible. He became a Little League coach, a soccer referee, a dance dad and all kinds of other things I never expected. He also became very funny, a constant jokester with his kids and mine.
When he got divorced, he became even a more active dad and went back to school to become a middle school civics teacher.
This is where I cannot give him enough respect.
I don't know how he did it, and indeed how at age 76 he still does it and loves it. He fully believes that children need to learn about how the government works to become citizens. He goes to all kinds of summer school classes to keep up in the field and learn new things. He's an enormous history buff, too, and he's totally committed to those middle school kids, who half the time are not even grateful.
I will admit that every once in a while he gets an incredible letter from a kid who was in his class or from the parents of a kid who was in his class saying the kind of thank you we should all be giving teachers like him. He knew that middle school kids needed men in the classroom and they weren't any, so he stepped up.
I’m so glad he is my brother.
Love this post Francine! I love your little brother's big sister!
Another nice story. Kudos to your brother.