I Just Don't Get It...!

That’s just the way it is, I guess. I don’t have any brothers. Or sisters too, for that matter. But then, you know that, don’t you? I figure you know quite a bit about me. On the other hand, I thought I knew a lot about you. I understand now that I don’t know as much about you as I thought I did, once. I imagine you just think you know me, actually.

I thought that was neat, you having two brothers. Especially that they were so much older than you. You, their kid sister, so they could do nice things for you. Take you places, buy you things, help you out with your homework. Maybe there was a little bit of envy there. I often thought how it might be if I had a brother or a sister. Especially a sister. How maybe it would be really nice. I’d have some company, kind of. It’s lonely, sometimes, being the only kid in the house.

My grandmother told me that it doesn’t always work that way. She said to me sometimes siblings get along well with one another, and sometimes they don’t. She said take her, for example; she took very little notice of her younger sister, and to this day they aren’t all that close. As for her brothers, well, they were all years younger than her, and they were just kind of there, she hardly noticed them.

I don’t know how it would be if I had a brother or sister. Either older than me, or younger. I’m not certain if I even have a preference. I suppose someone older could be kind of a help, a guide, someone to talk to when Mom gets pissed off with me for something. That would mean I’d do an awful lot of talking to an older sibling, if they allowed me to. If they were interested in hearing me. I don’t know if that older brother or sister would be sympathetic, or whether they’d just laugh at me.

See what I mean?

And then, too, if I had an older sister would she even be interested in me ... or think of me all the time like being a pest she couldn’t get rid of? I’ve got friends who talk about their kid brothers or sisters like that. They talk about what a nuisance it is, how they just can’t get away from them, how they screw everything up, at home. I don’t think I’d be interested in trying that one out.

But, say, if I had a sister maybe a year older than me? A year isn’t all that much difference in age, is it? So say there was her, and then I came along and we grew up together, wouldn’t it make sense that we’d play together as kids, and then got to like one another and spending time together, and confided in each other, and were best friends?

I asked one of my friends if that was what it was like with her and her older sister. She just looked at me like she hadn’t exactly heard my question. Then she laughed, and I understood that she had heard what I’d asked. Her laugh was the answer.

So I guess I’m just day-dreaming about something ridiculous, anyway.

And I guess, Erin, I’m trying my best to understand what’s happened to you. I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re feeling. I mean here you have a complete family, your Mom and Dad are there at home, even if they’re both busy, working all the time. They’re there some of the time. And then when everyone is together, you’re all there…together. I know I’m not saying what I really mean, but it’s hard to put into words.

So there’s you and your Mom and your Dad, and there’s also your two big brothers. One’s married now, I know, and the other one’s going to university. I know your family. We’ve been friends for years, after all. I’ve slept over at your house, had dinner together with you and your family. I’ve been around your family for years. I’ve even gone to church with your family, even though I don’t believe in God.

Neither does my mother. And she’s a single mother, left my father years ago. She’s really busy all the time, since she’s got to earn a living for us. She refused to take any money from my father. My grandmother said the arrangement they made, even though she signed papers written up by my father’s lawyer, was that he would have no visiting rights with me, in return for not paying child support. I can’t understand that, actually.

Is money that important, after all? You’ve got a father, a biological father and he’s not interested in seeing you, ever? He doesn’t even know what you look like, after all these years. He’s just kind of happy not having to pay child support. That really, really bugs me.

There’s no photos of him at home, but I know what he looks like. My grandma has lots of family photographs in her house, and there are some photos of him and my mother, in their frames, sitting on pieces of furniture there. There are more pictures of him in some of the family albums, but I’m not all that interested in looking for them actually. I don't remember much about him, it was so long ago. But I don't believe I want to remember anything about him. He's out of my life.

Anyway, this isn’t about me, is it? All right, it is about me, partially. I am involved, after all. Since I am - or was your best friend. Erin, I loved being your best friend. I want to continue being your best friend. You have no idea how hurt I feel that you keep shoving me away. I’m … disconsolate … that’s what I am. That’s what my grandma said, when I told her about all of this. She’s upset for me. I can always count on her for that.

But you’ve got family all over the place, even if they’re kind of distant in relationship; they live close by. My only two uncles live in Toronto and Vancouver, and I only get to see them maybe once or twice a year, when they come visiting. And neither of them has any kids, so I don’t even have any cousins.

Your family, even though they live close by, kind of ignore one another. You’ve got two cousins, girls your age, but you’ve always told me they’ve been mean to you, and you just don’t like being around them. I could see where you were coming from, but I found it puzzling, anyway. I’d have made an effort, I’m sure, to get my cousins, if I had any, to like me. I think. But then, what do I know, I don’t have any.

Erin, I do so very much miss you. I realize now that this isn’t new, this distancing from me, this hostility I feel and see from you. It’s been happening for a while, and it disturbed me and perplexed me and I didn’t know what to do about it. For a while I thought I’d just drop you as casually as you seemed to be doing to me.

It didn’t work for me, Erin. There’s a dark little worm inside me, squirming around, making me miserable, and that worm is the disquietude I’ve felt about our relationship, about its having suddenly seemed to dissolve, and I couldn’t figure out why. It’s worse now, your hostility toward me is more aggressive, more overt. You’ve progressed from speaking nasty things about me to the other girls when I haven’t been around to actually doing it in my very presence; I can hear you whispering about me and when I turn around, I can see that odd smile on your face.

What, exactly, does it mean? You can’t possibly have decided, after all these years, that our friendship was meaningless. We both invested a lot of time and emotion in our friendship. We’ve done things together, helping one another, that most people would never credit. You’ve told me things you told no one else. I confided to you things that I would never even speak about to my mother.

And yet, you said not one word to me, gave me no hint of what was really happening with you. To you. Instead, you told some of the girls at school we’ve always liked and hung out with. But not me. I had to learn from someone else. I couldn’t believe it. I felt horribly for you, and felt sad for me, too. I tried to let you know that I now knew, so it was all right. I was determined to do what I could to help you overcome this dreadful thing that happened to you.

And I tried, and I kept trying, but you kept slamming my words right back at me. That really devastated me. I didn’t want to say anything to my Mom, because I knew she would tell me that I was doing something wrong. She would defend you, saying that you had been traumatized, that your psyche had been damaged, that you needed understanding and patience from your best friend. That this was no time to abandon you, that I had to stand by you and do whatever I could to extend my friendship, to help you heal.

She just won’t hear what I want to tell her, she doesn’t actually hear what I’m saying. She’s so fixated on what you’ve gone through that she sticks to that, and won’t hear about my pain. To her, I’m just being selfish and self-absorbed.

I’m not!

My mother says she knows me better. She says I am being selfish. That I’m concerned with the way I feel, not the way you feel. That I’m missing the connections. That I’m taking offence because I feel you’re not responding to me the way you should, the way a best friend should. She says I’m expecting too much of you under the circumstances, because of the trauma you’ve suffered.

I’m trying to understand that, Erin. I’m trying to get my head around the fact that you’ve had six years of your life to tell someone what was happening to you, and you just never got around to it. My mother said that I couldn’t begin to imagine such a thing because I’ve never lived it. I guess she’s right there. But I still don’t understand, anyway, Erin, why you never, ever said anything to your mother. Or your father. Right, I forgot, you aren’t into telling your father all that much.

I’m trying to get it through my thick head, that same head that hears you calling me stupid all the time now, how it could possibly be that for all the years we’ve known one another, you’ve lived with this. There was never any hint that there was anything wrong with your life at home. I thought that your family was normal, in the sense that mine isn’t, since you’re all together, father, mother, kids.

Well, there’s nothing normal, obviously, about what happened with you. Migod, since you were seven years old! How could you stand it? I know you love your brothers because they’re your brothers. They seem nice enough; they were always nice to me. But your brothers … doing that kind of thing …

Remember when we were in grade six and they began that sex education course with all of us? I was so mad, remember? I really, really resented that they were taking us kids, just in grade six - we were only ten and eleven, after all - and making us learn all that stuff. Who wants to know about it? Won’t there be enough time to tell us about stuff like that when we’re older? I thought, back then, that maybe when we were in grade eight, or beginning high school, that would be a more appropriate time.

You never really responded when I spoke about that. You just shrugged your shoulders. And told me to just forget about it. I remember that. I remember how kind of distasteful it was to me to hear about that stuff. I hated it. I tried to talk to you about how I felt, but you weren’t interested in discussing it, you said. No wonder. Now I know why.

There wasn’t too much they could teach you, after all. I don’t mean that in a hurtful way. It’s not your fault. You were only a kid, and you were kind of trapped, weren’t you?

I mean your brothers are a whole lot older than you, you looked up to them, you trusted them. Your parents trusted them too, to kind of keep an eye on you when they weren’t around. And they weren’t around a lot of the time.

And me, I envied you, having big brothers who were around so you weren’t lonely or anything. Guys you could kid around with sometimes, that kind of thing. Because you’d be relaxed around them, you knew them so well….