Hormones for Men

Older brothers are tricky things. They come so unexpectedly. One minute, you’re popping out new born into the world of fresh things, only to find that there is a curly haired monkey already attached to your mom’s arm, your mom’s back, your mom’s time. Well, that’s not true. You take your mom’s time oh so gratefully off that little curly haired monkey’s hands, and he oh so gratefully throws mud in your face. That two year prep period, that two year warm up, gives little monkey boy no real practice for what it feels like to be number two while still being number one.

From then onwards, monkey boy with his curly hair and monkey talons would always search for what had been lost, what had been his by birthright but never his entirely. And I would always be to blame.

My older brother and I have a tricky relationship.

When he was younger, when I was younger, we fought. And I don’t really mean the typical fighting that little boys are prone to do over broken trains and stolen games. It was like his existence and my existence were somehow the opposites of some powerful force that fueled us towards fighting ends. So, it started off as simply being he would fight with me. I did this wrong, and that wrong, and he wanted this and I wanted that. I became passive. I soon learned though to do the opposite. He hated ambient sounds; one of my first talents was whistling. He got angry at certain situations; those same situations made me laugh. He hated me laughing; I love me laughing. The tools of a relationship were slowly being sharpened into sickles and knives.

What hit was puberty. It often does. He hit it first, and with it came all the more stone furies and whirlwinds. I was that younger clinger that slowly drew from the coolness of his body. Pushing me away had always been natural, but now it was more like a throw.

But there were more social issues than just ours for him, and tangled things often only tangle more things. He hit puberty, and it hit back.

I entered puberty a few years later, as always, running a few meters, a few miles, a few years behind my brother. He and I got on as best as could. We would want to go one place, I’d want to go to another, and together we’d find some way, after argument ringing throughout the house, to come to some compromise; neither of us would go anywhere. The compromises of adolescences rarely feel fair to either party: ask your parents if they were ever ‘fair’ to you during those years. But soon, aggression mixed with anger. What fights had been simple, verbal, mixed, one sided, turned into more brawls between brothers, pushing, boxing, teeth clenching, yelling with rage.

I once stole his computer and locked myself in the bathroom to annoy him. He broke down the door.

I ended going to High School with him, and together we drove, silent, to school and drove home, silent. It was a mutual silence, agreed upon in provision B of our compact. As I saw more of his life, and came to understand the little tickings, his brutal friends, his struggles with classes, his struggles with life, I came to understand. Understanding wasn’t his skill, but it was mine and so I slowly started talking to him. The little, the small, the normal. And slowly, he talked back. Not much, never much but some. We would talk. And then we go home, and he would say one thing, and I would say the other and we would fight to feel the blood in our vein. But then the following morning, we would go to school together, and mention words.

As he went off to college, he changed, I changed, we changed. The little curly monkey grew up into an adult monkey, still always trying to climb back to his position of power, but not by knocking me away and down. Life had presented him with a new tree and it was his future. We would talk and talk together and when I would visit him, he still was his awkward self, but I was fine with that.

Now that college has rolled around for me, he and I talk weekly. His life and my life are not all that different. His tree is my tree, and together we’ll climb our own routes.

The fists and fights and screams, well they act as padding and we both sit comfortably in each other’s presence. Funny to think so, in light of past days, but brothers are tricky things.