| THIS IS A READ-ONLY ARCHIVE FROM THE SORABJI.COM MESSAGE BOARDS (1995-2016). |
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the only thing i could ever win with was making fun of his voice cracking. mean and childish i know, but it pissed him off pretty bad. his face would turn all red and he'd start huffing and puffing. then he'd beat my ass into the ground. we're better now. now we fight with sticks. |
then my stepfather remarried & i ended up w/ a whole shitload of loud & bullying siblings, all older, all very mean-spirited & sadistic. fuck that shit. the day i got siblings is the day my childhood stopped. unfortunately, i was still a child & had to keep on living through the nightmare. i cannot see, for the life of me, why parents think it's cute to consider subjecting their firstborn child to siblings. a child needs intense levels of privacy--& plenty of it--just like any adult does. when i got siblings, my privacy was instantly vaporized. it was gone, never to be reclaimed again until i left home in my teens. some people think siblings are just groovy. i can't think of anybody, offhand, who didn't find their own siblings an excruciating, horrible, insufferable pain in the ass, but maybe i've just been talking to the wrong people. to me, my own siblings are just these fucking bullies i knew when i went to school. that's about all they mean to me. |
I was pretty content as an only child. I went to Catholic school, though, and met other kids who had 8 or more siblings. I couldn't imagine it. It just didn't sound like too much fun, wearing hand-me-downs and fighting for food, although some of them seemed to cope fairly well with it. Most of the people I've known who grew up with lots of siblings tend to talk loud. It's a weird thing I've noticed. I guess they have to speak up to be heard over the mob. There's a 15 year old kid staying with me right now who's one of 11 kids. He's not loud. He's just malnourished and emotionally traumatized, but that's another story. |
I got a lot of privacy from him and him from me, but almost too much, at least for my liking. My best friend is the eldest of 6 (5 girls, 1 boy), and I've always envied (there it is again) her large, close family. I've always wanted a sister, too. Alas. I never got any privacy from my parents. They used to take the door off my room as a punishment, since I didn't have anything else they could take away from me and they didn't hit me anymore. What made it hard was that my dad wouldn't give it back to me until I begged him for it. That burned so much. |
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My dad grew up with two brothers and two sisters, and the way he tells it, makes me kind of wish i had more siblings. There's just this bond between siblings who grow up in a family that isn't traumatic like Crimson's that I envy a bit. |
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The thing about my brother was that he had no concept of being even. Like, if he hit me and I hit him back, we weren't even, oh no. He would react as though I had jumped him without provocation and just erupt into total limitless violence. He had no limits. If there had been knives laying around in plain view when we fought, he would have stabbed me without a moment's thought. I learned very early not to hit him back when he started with me. He learned that he could hit me and I wouldn't do anything. Even today, he comes in and demands that I go somewhere with him (no "hey, do you want to go to the record store?" Instead, "we're going to the record store, get your keys"), and then he has the nerve to act shocked when I tell him to fuck off. Bastard. |
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have a half brother and sister but I've met then like once and they are way way younger than me. I also love my space and find it hard to share. |
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i'm pretty jaded, but something unraveled inside me when i saw dad on the ventilator w/ about a hundred tubes crammed into his body. he looked so frail. the only thing keeping him breathing is that machine. my god. my siblings & i have nothing in common. they just spook me, that's all. they don't mean to, they just do. they're normal & i'm not. i feel useless & frightened around them. i felt like i wanted to go running down the hospital corridors to get away. there were too many people around. i'm still recovering from having to deal w/ so many people. i don't like that sort of thing, not at all. the place was swarming w/ people. it scared the hell out of me. i was in a nail-chomping panic & trying not to show it, because nobody would understand. incidentally, my thanks to ren, K, pug, & pilate for helping me live through this. my siblings didn't do anything wrong. not at all. they were just being themselves, which means they were loud and abrasive, w/o even realizing it. what kills me is that the family sees me as a zero because i'm NOT loud & abrasive. a lot of them don't like me very much. i'm too quiet, secretive, & weird. it's time for me to do something i haven't done in a long time...sleep. |
y'know, spider: the thing about white guys and affirmative action is that it seems to be more about vengeance than equality. of course, if i say that, i have a bad attitude. if i say anything opposing affirmative action, i'm a cruel, heartless, bastard cro-mag. and by the way, it's open season on non-jewish white guys. call us the worst possible things you can think of. it's encouraged and we deserve it. reverse discrimination is a bitch, too. i think the word you were looking for is icon. he sounds like a bastard. to hell or sierra leone with him. arrogant idiot. |
What I meant was: you have a person/group of people who have been oppressing (an)other(s) for quite some time. When the oppressed retaliate/make strides to better their position, the oppressor(s) don't understand that this is how the oppressed are getting their dues...they see it as aggression or threat. So then *they* retaliate. Which is wrong. My brother's not that bad anymore. Since he moved out two years ago, he's pretty fun to be around. |
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As far as siblings go,its always good to get the last laugh.My older sister has always been a social climbing bitch, president of the yatch club etc.--la-de-da- so when my niece is getting married, my bitch sister is throwing the gala afair of the decade,the Goldwaters are coming,and she's having the reception in her back yard,catered by the best,and her mistake was telling me how proud she is of the putting green she has in her back yard,admittedly,grass is very difficult to grow in Scottsdale,and she had some kind of special putting grass she was very proud of,so I showed up with a bag of rubber dog poo,and snuck out just before the guests arrived from the church,and Peggy Goldwater[the senators daughter] and I scattered the rubber poo under all the fancy tables, and stuck some in the little putting holes,and my mean,bitch sister was mortified.Peggy and I go back a long way,we had mutual friends,and had gotten into and kept quiet some of our misadventures,and she owed me. She didn't like being involved in the poo business,but I convinced her that it was all in fun [mine!].I still chuckle when I see the look on my sisters face when she saw all the poo.{Shamefully,I told my sister it was Peggys idea}Paybacks a bitch-----my sister made me eat a cockroach sandwitch when I was a kid.And I don't even want to tell you about the horrible game of London Bridges she made me play. |
I have forgiven him for most of the shit, when my parents split and my dad went crazy, my brother was at a very vulnerable age. He has suffered immensly (psychologically anyway) for witnessing that. When my dad left he told him, at the age of 11 years "Youare the man of the house son". To a 11 year old thats immense pressure. My sister has never done much with her life and has settled for being a housewife. I think she is happy, but at times i wonder if she doesnt want more. I on the other hand have had opportunities my siblings never had. College being the biggest one, however my sister barely made it out of high school and my brother never graduated hs. I stuck it out (under better conditions, granted) and have made more for myself. fuck, now i need to go smoke, i wasnt prepared to deal with bring all that up again. |
She did it so often that my mother thought I was lying to get her into trouble. The thing she said that made her stop was when she punched me in the stomach once and apparently I passed out. I don't remember this! Anyway - I don't hold a grudge for it because it wasn't so so bad, just unexpected, I guess, from an otherwise quiet and well-behaved little girl. Doesn't help my head much, but it's forgotten for the most part. |
I like having sisters, though. I kind of always wanted a younger brother, but only a year or maybe two, so that I'd have someone to drag places none of my friends would go to. Oh well... |
it's tough. my relationship w/ my family has been a very strange one. it hasn't been smooth sailing. things have always been somewhat difficult between us. my family members are of a certain personality type & i'm just something else altogether. i don't fit in, & am painfully aware of the fact. i don't understand my family. they might as well be alien life forms. your faux dog-poo story cracked me up. you mentioned having sent me a card...i didn't get it. i'm sorry i missed it. spider, thanks for your kindness. & thanks to anyone else who's said gentle & comforting things. the levels of emotion i experienced were very surprising. i don't give a rat's ass about much of anything. it's hard to make me care. i'm surprised at my own vulnerability & weakness. i felt helpless & frightened. not a good thing. people are supposed to be strong in a crisis, not turn into quivering bags of jello. but i'm coping better now. |
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i'd LOVE to hear your accent. i've got a pretty odd one, myself. |
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"Double standards are all around us now: ... *The belief that all-black college dorms are progressive but all-white ones are racist" ... *A quarter century of feminist yawning over feminist Mary Daly's ban on males in her Boston College classes, though a male professor who tried to bar females would have been hammered into submission in one day." How many hundreds of years passed with dorms being all-white and classrooms all-male? So the tide turns in the other direction and the heretofore-privileged classes start complaining about discrimination? Ugh. |