No one can get under your skin and trip you up quite like a brother or a sister. I have a brother, myself. He’s two years older than I am and we gave each other no end of grief as children. To be a younger sibling can feel like constantly being in someone else’s shadow. It’s unnerving. They always get to do things first and somehow it feels like you’re never old enough yet. When my brother was in middle school, our parents gave him the job of mowing the lawn and I was SO jealous. I have no idea why I was so jealous, but I wasn’t allowed to so I wanted to do it – badly. It makes you crazy, you know?
And there’s a meanness that goes along with childhood sometimes. Once when I was really little, maybe 4 or 5, my brother was tormenting me for one reason or another and then, in a fit of smugness, he announced to me, “I will always be older than you.” My little kid mind swarmed with retorts. It couldn’t be true. Surely one day, if I worked REALLY hard at it I would catch up, right? Slowly, I realized that he was right. No matter what I did he would always be older than me. That’s a lot for a kid to process.