I Can't Stand My Sibling

...and my sibling can't stand me

Two adorable gentile children bearing no resemblance whatever to me and my sibling digging up a cadaver on Will Rogers Beach, Santa Monica, CA, in the 20th century.

My sibling’s possibly being smarter than I (he said grammatically), who had never skipped a grade, made me tense. I’m eight and a half years older. When I was around 14, my sibling got to skip second grade, and that was awful for me. I wanted athletic ability, good looks, and self-confidence, but had only smarts, which at Orville Wright Junior High School were pretty nearly worthless. I could have tried to find others like myself to bond with, but I wanted to be seen only with pretty, self-confident, athletically precocious classmates. One fucked up, ferociously self-loathing kid, your narrator! I was a perfect little shit to my parents, so why should hem [hereinafter hem means either he, she, her, or him and hes either hers or his] have expected better?

In my early 20s, when I was reviewing concerts for a Major Metropolitan Newspaper, I took my sibling to see one of hes favorite groups at the Fabulous Forum. I was acutely ashamed of not being accompanied by a leggy blonde, and was pretty aloof with my sibling, sharing none of hes excitement. Over 50 years after the fact, that remains in the Top 20 of the many, many things for which I’d like to punch myself in the face.

My sibling had a rough time of it in high school. Classmates who disagreed with my reviews would take it out on hem.

We got on pretty good terms for a while when I was in my early 30s. My sibling was generous with me, and saved my life the night I suffered the only panic attack of my life. (Waiting for a red light to turn green in West Los Angeles, I suddenly felt my heart trying to explode out of my chest. I managed to pull my car onto a side street and to run as though from the devil to the semi-nearby apartment my sibling shared with hes spouse. Spouse wasn’t at all pleased about my having interrupted their dinner, but my sibling calmed me down and drove me home). When I was between girlfriends, hem not only set me up with someone hem thought I might click with, but also lent me hes car to take Miss Click out.

Neither of us is patient. When my sibling drove our parents over to my first wedding three years later, hem got bored around 45 seconds after I’d kissed the bride, and left, with our parents in tow. We didn’t stop speaking. Not even close.

My sibling had a second disastrous marriage, and then a disastrous live-together relationship with a cocaine casualty. I’d seen it coming in both cases, but my sibling didn’t want my advice. Then hem found…Abraham, I guess, and became hyper-Jewish in spite of our having grown up in the most secular Jewish home in all christendom. My sibling began sprinklng hes speech with Yiddish. It was like something from a bad Woody Allen movie. My sibling married an athletic gentile co-worker and became a dog-lover. We’d grown up in a pet-phobic home.

Our mother died. I spent all afternoon at her oppressively pleasant seniors’ residence or whatever they called it sobbing. My sibling arrived after work, pronounced our mother too ugly in death to look at and, impatient to get home to her dogs, began tossing her belongings into plastic lawn bags. I could hardly believe my eyes.

I’d moved from England to the state in which my sibling lived. Hem invited me over for Thanksgiving. (Mrs. Mendelsohn, who prefers the legal spelling, had remained in England), and then uninvited me when I asserted a little too emphatically that hem really needed to do something about hes dog waking up the whole neighborhood at two every morning with his implacable barking. But we continued speaking.

My sibling put the money we’d inherited into an investment account. When I noticed an error on one of the statements and tried to resolve it, the investment firm wouldn’t speak to me because the account bore only my sibling’s name. When I related this to my sibling, hes former co-worker spouse wondered, in an email that my sibling accidentally-on-purpose sent to me, “Can’t he fucking do anything for himself?” My sibling didn’t think I deserved an apology. We didn’t speak for several months.

When my sibling eventually extended an olive branch, I accepted it. My sibling’s the only other person on earth who knows what it was like growing up in our crazy-making family home, with a dominant parent whose madness was always everyone’s primary concern. But my sibling refused to discuss it, for fear of being…triggered. For years, my sibling would declare hemself cured appoimately annually, made whole, by psychotherapy, usually in a way that suggested I, rather than Dominant Parent, was the principal cause of hes painful feelings of inadequacy. I always noted the the-lady-doth-protest-too-much quality of hes claims of wholeness and happiness.

It was hard for me to decide whether hem had had it easier or harder than I as a kid. In some ways, their quickly approaching their forties when hem was conceived might have made our parents a little better at parenting. On the other hand, my sibling didn’t have only them to contend with, but a snide, cold, aloof brother as well.

(I’d been astonished when informed I would be getting a baby brother or sister, as I knew enough about reproduction to understand that some form of physical intimacy was involved, and one of our parents had never been shy about expressing how repulsive hem found the other.)

I became very close friends with someone we’ll call — well, how about Friend? To my immense regret, Friend and I had a falling out. One of us found the other implacably needy, and one of us thought the other a malignant narcissist and sadist. I tried to confide in my sibling about the friendship’s demise, but hem wasn’t having it. It made hem feel…triggered.

Three years passed. Friend and Hem became extremely close, as Friend had become with others in my life. This time, past just-past New Year’s Day, it was I who extended the olive branch. My sibling and I exchanged felicitations and small talk about a great many subjects via a series of emails. I had previously told my sibling that I had no desire to disrupt hes relationship with Friend, but that it was important to me that hem understand that there were two sides to the story of my and Friend’s estrangement. Hem’s reply:

If you only wanted to open up conversation with me to talk about [Friend], you have the wrong [sibling].

Shame that you haven’t yet learned how to not be so self serving and perhaps witness the world outside of your own orbit.

See you in the afterlife, sibling.