Black Sheep - My American Life

www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/89/sibling-rivalry

My sisters are six and eight years older than me. Even though I'm a boy, and they're girls, there's no real rivalry physically when an 18 year old thinks that their ten year old punk brother is being annoying. No real rivalry there.

Although we didn't really quite compete physically to see who was faster, stronger, or anything like that, their histories with my parents were always hanging over my head, because I wasn't them. I never had to actually compete with them, I just had to compete with the idea that they left behind.

I love my sisters, they are totally bonkers, but that's just my family, we're all bonkers. But compared to me, yeah. . . there's no real comparison, I'm 100% the black sheep to the family because I can never measure up to what they have done, and what they're doing right now.

Let's start with my oldest sister. She was a violin prodigy, knew how to play every instrument in a string orchestra, was the valedictorian of her high school, was a state swimmer, went to state for a variety of different things (like Girl's State), won a list of competitions and prizes that are really just annoying to go through, had a healthy social relationship, and was amazingly well rounded doing amazing in every class that she touched. That was just high school. College rolled around, she got her undergraduate in a crazy difficult degree (zoology), got married and had a kid almost right off the bat, and was doing the amazing job of having a kid and also working on her masters degree, and she farts rainbows and poops butterflies. Seriously, she can never do wrong. Her children are amazing, they run marathons as a family, they're well rounded, spiritually minded, and just everything that you'd expect.

Then comes my second sister. Where the first sister was a scholarly genius and could do no wrong, the second sister was a quick follow-up to her, but with her own twist. The second sister was also a state swimmer, a super scholar but only the salutatorian, was another musical genius that played the piano, organ, oboe, English horn, created her own reeds for those instruments, and then also did percussion during the marching band season. She was a social butterfly as well, financially minded, and super caring. For her extra kick to the teeth, she is super caring, loves to serve and work with children, especially students with learning disabilities (she loves teaching middle school special ed), is the ideal stay at home mom, and she even served her mission where she learned how to speak Vietnamese.

Then there's me.

In high school I failed almost an entire year of school just because I didn't want to do the work. I was never a social butterfly and kept to my good ol' social introverted ways (and still do). I was never amazing at music (mainly because I rarely practiced and didn't really care about it). For the majority of my marriage, I've been the secondary income and support to the family. I don't have much to show on my resume, and compared to my sisters anything that I could try to be proud of instantly gets outweighed by at least double because they did it better, and they did it first.


I recently got over the hump of understanding that DA is not going to sell any copies, so I shared the link on Facebook.

My parents are not on Facebook.

I have still not told my parents.

I know that I should be proud of it. I know that it's something that I should take pride in and point to and say, "Look! I wrote all of this! I created a world! I created people! I created everything! I have the power of creation, and I harnessed it to create something worth looking at!" but in the back of my mind I swear that my parents are going to compare me to  my sisters and say some back handed compliment like, "That's a nice little book. Why can't we get it as a hard copy? Did you not get a real publisher?"

No matter how hard I try no matter how fast I try to catch up to them, my sisters are always going to be six and eight years ahead of what I'm doing, and I will always be left in the dust. No matter how hard I push, I can't catch up because they have such a huge head start. The stupid part about that is that I can look at it as a third party who has no biases and realize that I'm still doing amazing things. That by other family standards I'm a star, but that's not who I'm fighting against. That's not the people that I'm trying to prove that I can be on their level, that I'm not the 10 or 12 year old boy that they knew me as when they left the house for college.

I am the black sheep in my family.

I'm a successful adult who has a job in the field that he studied, I'm moving into a home that I will own, I have a lovely wife and daughter, I have a masters degree, and I recently was able to publish my first book . . . and I still consider myself the failure of my family.