Siblings

I'm the youngest of five children.

I remember an incident with my oldest brother when I was 13 and he was 18.  It happened in June, near the end of the school year, when we were both a bit worn down.  It happened on an afternoon when the rest of the family was out of the house and we were alone together, otherwise the incident wouldn't have happened.

I was bored, so I was watching a rerun of The Brady Bunch on our TV.  It was an episode from the first season where they were out camping.  My brother came along and started talking about the show's "mind-rotting stereotypes that are getting around your mental block." (He had a tendency to talk down to me.) Then he changed the TV set's channel to UHF, where you couldn't get any shows, pulled the dial out of the set, ran downstairs and locked himself in the bathroom.  When I banged on the door he said, "Grow up!" (Who was being immature?) I got rather upset.

The thing of it is, the show wasn't so important to me.  I was willing to talk about it.  But for him, this wasn't the time for talk, it was the time for power.  For what it's worth, when I reminded him of this incident in recent years, he was ashamed of himself.  But at the time he had something to prove, at my expense.  Sometimes teenagers dealing with younger kids have a semi-mature attitude.  They implicitly say: "I'm older and wiser than you, so it's your behaviour that's the issue rather than mine.  It's up to you to earn my respect and not vice versa!"