What’s your role in your family?

When I’m asked about my family I default to describing how I’m the second oldest of four children - three boys and one girl. We were all born rather close together with there only being a four year gap between the oldest and youngest. Maybe it’s because of this close packing that I never felt like the ignored middle-child that is shown all over tv and movies. 

I’ve shared a room with my older brother even before my family moved to Champaign from South Carolina when I was two. Within our shared room we didn’t put down a chalk line dividing my half and his-half instead we continued to share. We shared a bunk bed (I was and still am bottom bunk), a dresser (we split which drawers were ours), LEGOs, etc. Although we shared with each other for the most part without issue, what did cause fights was the messes we would make. I’m not a particularly organized person but seeing clothes on the floor or tripping over some random junk would make me so angry.

In some ways I helped balance him out, but in other ways we worked together to make our parents’ lives harder. Even though I got annoyed when my brother made a mess, it’s not as if I wasn’t guilty of being messy either. At the end of the day I was still a single digit year old boy. We both got each other riled up over our shared hobbies. When we would play computer games together we would yell at one another from across the house much to the annoyance of my dad and we would be sucked in by the same books and movies at the same time causing many library late fees. I like to think of myself as a relaxed person, but looking back I really was anything but relaxed when I was around my older brother. 

This fall my older brother moved away for college and I moved from the second oldest to the oldest child. One day he was there and when I came back from school he was gone. Because of sports, activities, and whatnot it wasn’t uncommon for someone to be missing from dinner or for me to not to see them for a day or two. A week or so later I was in the kitchen when I looked over and saw the clutter still on his desk surrounded by clean carpet that I truly noticed that he was gone. 

The little changes in my life slowly began to reveal themselves, many of my favorite pairs of socks “disappeared”, I no longer had to fight over where to park the car, no more being woken up at 6:30. The changes weren’t all positive. I found myself more in the role of chauffeur, a role that my parents had previously endlessly complained about being stuck in. When my younger sister said she needed me to drive her to practice, I found myself wanting to tell her to ask my older brother to do it. 

Of  course my brother wasn’t there and he won’t be there in the future. I relied on my older brother the most out of all my family. If I needed help with homework he still freshly remembered whatever topic I was studying or if I couldn’t find something he knew where it was. While I’ve always liked to think of myself as independent in the past, it’s discomforting to know that I can’t rely on him as much.