Hero Worship

     The water running off my older brother’s hands in the sink down the hall from the kitchen was always slightly brown. I watched in awe as the dirt tinged water washed down the drain and wondered how I could color it that way, in what ways I could manipulate my small world to somehow have it coincide with his. I worshipped those hands, that boy, from the small altar of the powder room and that feeling of awe at being in his presence has remained to a lesser degree, even as life has made equals out of us, young families with children, spouses, and mortgages. His laughter at something I’ve said is still a ticket into a world in which I’ve always wanted to live. 

     One of the joys of parenthood, I have found, is seeing things in your children that remind you of yourself. However, when I see my daughter, Claire, adoring at the temple of Gavin, her older brother, it somehow slowly breaks my heart for her. While Christmas shopping, she found a wall hanging of African animal masks for him at Goodwill. She was so excited to give it to him, so sure he would love it, that I almost cringed. I saw myself at her age, handing over a pair of air tube dice covers for my older brother’s BMX bike that I had bought with my own money that I thought would finally make him really think I was cool. He threw them across the driveway after opening them and I can still feel, viscerally, my heart breaking into pieces in front of our house.

     On Christmas day, the present opening extravaganza began. I knew which present Claire had lovingly wrapped for Gavin and mercifully, I didn’t have to wait long for him to open it as she was more excited about the giving than what she had received. She shyly handed it to him and said, “Here, Gav, I got this for you.” I held my breath as he tore open the paper. He smiled and said, “Wow, Claire, I love it.” No gift Santa brought her that day would equal the smile she had when he hung it on the wall next to his bed.

     Sibling love is a unique kind of love, reserved for people we remember before we can actually remember anything. Their voices, their laughs recall a time before memories have hardened into things that can be analyzed, judged as being detrimental or beneficial. Therefore, love of a sibling is never questioned because it existed before that separation of emotion and judgment.

     Older brothers seem to embody this love beautifully; they are usually bigger, stronger, faster versions of our smaller selves. How can we measure up when we are fundamentally always behind? How can we not idolize them when from the first, their lives are presented to us as something to which we can look forward. They seem perfect to us and we never, even as adults, quite take them off of that unrealistic throne. It is true hero worship and it continues in varying degrees, as far as I can tell, for a lifetime.

    I have a younger brother too, to whom I feel very close, despite infrequent phone calls and an even larger geographic distance. I am not slightly afraid of him as I am my older brother. He and I created our own language, sang fifties songs in the back of an old BMW on a horrific family road trip, and secretly adopted animals wild and domestic whenever we could. He was often a partner in crime, always someone fun to be around and someone, to whom, I could be my true self because his acceptance of me was not paramount to my happiness.

 I wonder, now, if the hero worship I felt for my older brother and that which I see Claire feeling for Gavin is somehow detrimental to both the adored and the adorer. I wonder, as an older brother, if it’s hard to live up to such blind devotion; if, ever, resentment builds at never being seen as real, but instead as someone larger than life.  In reality, no life is that large, no hero without flaws and, in the end, seeing someone as they are enables us to love them truthfully.

 Only recently have I begun my journey to honesty with my older brother, to let him see me as I am and not only show what I think he wants to see. Now that I am able to truly see him, flaws and all, I see that he is someone who is worthy of all of the love and affection I have stored in my heart since I first met him. He is no longer a hero on a pedestal, but someone who stands beside me, someone with whom to walk through life. Being a younger sister has been a heartbreakingly beautiful journey and I am grateful for every single step because it has led me to the truth of my brother and it is this: he is, and always has been, one of my best friends.