Friday, January 27, 2006

Long Time, No See

It has felt like ages since I last posted anything. I suppose it has been. I could fill the page with excuses but I've recently discovered that I hate making them. It makes me feel cheap and dirty to enter into something with excuses in hand, bailing me out before my boat even springs a leak. So I've made a decision to be honest with my failings.
I have not had this blog on a high priority, and I think that was appropriate. It still isn't really high up there but I don't think I can create it and leave it to become covered in dust so here I am.
This past month I have done a lot of things. I started another term of art school. I auditioned for a play and landed a big and multi-layered role. I learned that I'm the only virgin in my family and realized that I think I've been a bad sister to one of my brothers. And that going to counselling cannot be optional for me.
I've also started to be more open with one of my friends. She is the person I've known the longest of all the people I live around now and sometimes I wonder how our friendship has survived. We believe the same basics but I think I'm much more liberal than she is. And I know she has had a - how do I put this into words? I sometimes think she is more legalistic than I am but it's more that her family has more solid beliefs than mine has had. I've had to think things out for myself in a different way, and sometimes that means that what I believe and what she believes are quite different.
It was pretty hard for me to tell her about my struggles with my brother. Both of my brothers have made choices in the past year that I was pretty sure would never have happened in my friend's family. I wasn't sure if she'd judge my brothers and my parents, or myself, because of what I was going to tell her. I was surprised. I really should learn one of these days that assumptions are a bad habit. I'm still pretty sure that her brothers wouldn't make the sort of choices my brothers have but she was able to relate without judging me or my family and what she had to say helped me a lot. Plus it became apparent that she's had to deal with siblings making difficult choices and maybe not picking the right thing to do.
One thing that has been hard for me since I started school again is the realization that I basically don't have a relationship with one of my brothers. He's next in age to me. (I'll refer to him as 2, and to the youngest as 3.) I don't think it should surprise me that we aren't close. I know that if (and I hope he eventually does) he goes to counselling I'll probably factor in somewhere in the mess of stuff he will have to deal with. My youngest brother and I have always clicked, and when we were children we teamed up together against 2. I argue more with 2 than I do with 3, and the arguments are messier and horrible.
I wish it wasn't this way. When 3 does something I think is stupid, like smoke pot, I can at least talk to him about it. We can have an open conversation where he knows what I think and I know I can't make his decisions for him. But if I try to have that conversation with 2 (and I have) it ends half an hour later with us yelling or at the very least, pointing fingers at each other's screw ups. We end up further apart then we were before I started.
I don't know what to do to fix this and I don't know if I can. That scares me. A lot. I want to be close to my brothers. I want our children to be the kind of cousins who know each other and are friends; I want to know my nephews and nieces and to have my children know their uncles. I want to be friends with my brothers and somehow we've grown up and grown apart and I don't know when or how or what to do.
And no amount of excuses is going to fill the void.