I'm the older sibling

Our daughter has three Uncles, and, for the foreseeable future, no Aunts. Two of the three are my wife’s brothers and until June, both are still teenagers. The third Uncle is my brother Mark who is 3-¾ years my junior. I don’t want to apply any undo pressure on him, but he is our daughter’s best chance at an Aunt out of the three by the end of this decade.

My daughter will grow up in a similar situation as mine. She will be the oldest sibling. She will be the one responsible for looking after the littler ones. She will be looked up to by them. They will be following in her footsteps for most of their childhood.

My brother and I got along as well as two brothers with nearly four years between them could. I would stick up for him when my friends started to pick on him, then beat the crap out of him if he ate the last Soft Batch chocolate chip cookie. He once chucked a Hot Wheels car at my mouth and chipped my tooth, and I once smacked him upside the head with a King Kong Wiffle bat. Still, we played around-the-world on our backyard hoop together and we played Name That Tune by humming songs to each other at night until Mom or Dad heard us carrying on and told us, for the last time, that it was time for bed.

During my High School years, we did less and less together. It’s an inevitable part of growing up as siblings. We still did things together: we played street hockey with the neighborhood kids or snuck onto the local golf course; but we didn’t do all the same things we used to either. It wasn’t until my last semester of college that we really spent a lot of time together as young men.

Mark got accepted our university’s main campus as a freshman by trading his summer vacation for a summer semester. That was my last semester at school. I lived off campus in an apartment and the school required him to live on campus. Still, we hung out quite a bit that summer, biking and playing tennis a lot. I haven’t really played tennis much since then, and I miss playing with him.

While he was still going to school, my girlfriend (and future wife) and I would visit him from time to time. Unfortunately when he had an internship in Philadelphia, we never got a chance to visit him and he has never let us forget that. Since graduating, Mark has transplanted himself in Washington D.C. We try to visit him there each summer, but with the pregnancy and then our daughter’s birth last year, we didn’t get down there.

When our daughter was born, we asked him to be her Godfather. Mark graciously accepted, although he’s still trying to get used to the duties of an Uncle/Godfather. He hasn’t seen her all that many times since she was born, but it surprises me how good he is with her. Mark wasn’t around babies much, but he seems quite at ease with her. He’s even asked to change her diaper!

My brother is a complex guy sometimes. He can be a little overly-sensitive and he can be downright obnoxious too. But, he is my brother. I wouldn’t trade him for anything (although, if you’d have asked me that at age 12, I’d probably have traded him for an Atari 2600). I hope my daughter will be able to say the same when she’s the big sister.