My brother and I are only 21 months apart, so for most of our lives, he went first and I followed soon after. School, swimming lessons, learning to drive, off to university. I`d watch him go, and take mental notes, and I`d be along, two years later. We were a little competitive, but different enough in interests and personalities that it never got out of hand. I confess that when we both graduated and started our first jobs, we compared salaries for a while. I`d be ahead by a few thousand, and then he`d catch up. But then he had a period of unemployment and comparisons became unseemly – good thing, because now I`d have to double my pay to get anywhere near his. While he was unemployed, he went back to school to get his executive MBA, to add to his engineering degree. Which was, as it turned out, a sound financial decision.
While he was unemployed, he was also having his children. He`d already married – aged 26, if memory serves. They bought a nice house and had two kids in quick succession, a boy and then a girl. I was actually in the air – enroute to my new assignment in Australia – when my niece was born. My sister in law had looked uncomfortably pregnant at the airport, and sure enough, a few hours later, while I was over Hawaii, Becca had made her way into the world. Distance made no difference. I adored my nephew and niece. Is there anyone so bizarrely devoted as the first-time, childless, aunt? I sent boxes of goodies for them in the mail. Stuffed kangaroos and koalas, Australian hats and swim suits, stickers and toy cars. My brother would videotape the opening of the presents, and send me the videotapes in the mail so I could watch their surprise and delight. Skype had yet to be invented.
There we were, my brother and I, two years apart in age and our lives rapidly diverging. He with the house and spouse and kids, and I with the world travel and interesting job. I was happy. He was happy. No one was keeping score, and neither of us wanted what the other had, really. Not then, anyway.
Fast forward nearly a decade, and I am just starting to catch up on the things my brother has nearly done. I’ve just bought a house, his is paid off. His kids are 11 and 12, mine are 1 and 3. He has serious conversations – and plans – for retirement. I really, really do not.
His family and mine are together a lot, now that I live in the same country again, just five hours away. We spend Christmas together, and Thanksgiving, even Easter, some years. There are often two weeks in the summer when we holiday together, sometimes under the same roof at his cottage, sometimes just daily. I am the guardian of their children according to their wills, and they are the same to mine.
The cousins, nearly a decade apart in age, adore one another. My daughter worships my niece. My nephew, Russell, has a gift for babies. When the families are together there are times when I am blissfully child-free – a rare and valued occasion for the late-in-life single mother – as the cousins disappear together to the basement, or the yard, out of eyesight and earshot of their grateful parents. Becca drags out her outgrown, but not yet shunned, girly toys – little pets and dolls, horse stables, webkinz and craft supplies. My daughter follows Russell across the summer landscape, picking raspberries in his shadow, gaping at the fish he catches, more respectful than with anyone else. Big kid play is adapted for short attention spans of a preschooler and toddler, and the older cousins tolerate all of the selfishness and unfairness doled out by the very young.
Last weekend my niece and nephew raked and raked a pile of leaves for Claire to jump in. And raked again and again, as the jumping and rolling and burying went on into dusk, even as the baby joined in with inexpert steps. I’d peek out the kitchen window from time to time, to make sure everyone was happy and safe, no one melting down as bedtime approached. But I needn’t have bothered. The cousins are responsible; they collect discarded clothing and toys, they replace lost shoes, they coddle and mollify when the little ones balk or demand.
The 10-year gap in ages is very nice, in the babysitting, cousin-worshipping sense. The big kids are not too old to be uninterested, and the little ones are not too fragile to be entrusted to preteens. Both my niece and nephew know they are worshipped, and they take it with good grace, flattered and flushed with the combination of responsibility and adoration that descends when their little cousins arrive. They are older when my little ones are around.
For their part, the little ones get carted to hockey games and soccer matches and school plays to watch their big cousins do big-kid things. When Claire heads to skating lessons, she thinks of Becca playing hockey, and she goes a little less reluctantly. Russell is distinguished by his love for all vegetables, and Claire diligently assures us she loves vegetables, too, though she still eats very few.
All of it is heartwarming to see. And yet it is less than it could be, sometimes, and I think of my closest cousin and me – two weeks apart in age, and very close growing up. My kids don’t have that. They don’t have any cousins their age, and they never will. And our families – my brothers and mine – are at very different stages in life, with very different schedules. Mine rise at dawn and need to eat within an hour. We’re often having lunch before my brother’s family has breakfast. Dinnertime is often a struggle – if we host, they are not yet hungry. If they host, mine are ready for bed and long past needing to eat. I sneak snacks into the jaws of my mewling tots at 5 and 6 and 7 pm, while they are just warming up the barbecue at 8. My kids are crashing for naps just as theirs are ready to play. And so we juggle our routines and schedules, and eat a lot of small disjointed meals, and get by.
But often I wish I could roll back the clock 10 years, and have our babies be babies together. I’m tired of being the only one whose kids wake at dawn and have to be hushed. When their kids were babies, on family vacations, everyone got up at dawn with the little ones, delighted with their morning delight. I’m tired of having the only tantruming children at the dinner table – though I remember a few tantrums a decade ago, I’m not sure anyone else does. My kids invariably seem overtired just when the big cousins are ready to have fun, and when the card games and adult conversation come out at 10 pm, I can scarcely stay awake. When my brother’s kids were little, they seemed the priority. We tailored family vacations to them and their interests, their timetables, and their attention spans. Mine seem the afterthought, 10 years after everyone else’s attention has turned to bigger things and the novelty of parenthood has long since worn off.
I hear the bitterness in that, and I wonder how it must have felt for my brother and sister-in-law, bringing the first children into the family, upending the typical routines and traditions, introducing the demands and details of new parenthood into an extended family that hadn’t seen a baby in a quarter century. It couldn’t have been easy. There must have been mealtimes that seemed like disasters, bedtimes that defied sanity, dawn alertness unwelcome by most. But I don’t remember any of that. I just remember two little people loved by us all, and feeling far, far from ready to be a mother myself. Not wanting the demands, the responsibility, the relentless pace of early childhood, the excel spreadsheets with mortgage payments mapped out (my brother, the MBA engineer). Wanting it someday, but feeling unready, more than 21 months behind my big brother, more than a continent removed from the family project he’d begun in his mid 20s and I would not start for another 10 years.
So as I watched the big cousins and my little kids in the pile of leaves this week, I couldn’t help but wonder whether it would be more fun if there were four little kids in the pile of leaves, in the lake, at the dinner table. If I hadn’t waited so long, would it have been better for my kids and their cousins? Would they have been closer, lifelong friends, summer siblings sharing toys and interests and adventures? Or would it just be more chaotic, with more meltdowns and more competition, and less adoration and hero worship?
Wondering is pointless, I know. The road not taken wasn’t taken for a reason, and the path we’re all on is the right path for us. Someday, God willing, my brother’s children and my children will be grown and having children of their own, and my brother and I will be aging together, once again at the same stage in life, no longer young, no longer on diverging paths. We’ll be siblings, parents, grandparents, ageless. And his children will go on to great things and good lives, and mine will follow soon after.