I Had A Brother...

...for all of two days. Well, two days out here in the world, anyway.
That's right: I had a twin. Can you imagine two of me? I can't. (Nobody can be like me: even I have trouble.)

Monty and I were born way premature...not record-breaking, even in 1972, but eye-opening nonetheless: we were due April 10 but showed up February 6 instead. He was more premature than I was, by two minutes.

It was about the only race he won.

I don't know all the afflictions Monty had--cerebral palsy was just one of them--but he succumbed to them not forty eight hours after he came out. In cases like ours, if one of the babies dies, it's almost always the second-born. Not this time, although reading between the lines of scrapbooks my mom kept, it was touch-and-go with me for quite a while. I weighed just three and a half pounds at birth, and bounced from one hospital to another and back to the first, never making it home until March 25.

Monty never made it home at all.

Those around me are convinced on some subconscious level I've spent my life pining for my lost brother. I used to pooh-pooh that notion, but hindsight suggests they may be right. I was fantastically lonely through much of my childhood. Of course, I didn't know that at the time; you can't know how lonely you are until you experience not being lonely, and I didn't develop anything akin to a social life until well into high school. Until then, with exceedingly rare exceptions, my friends lived between the covers of books and just aft of my forehead and nowhere else. I found other kids vaguely threatening. It's possible, I suppose, that I was reserving space for a brother I didn't have.

But I grew up an only child. Those of you with siblings, try to imagine it: you won't get it right, just as I can't wrap my head around brothers and sisters, even to this day.
You know what I don't get? I don't get why brothers and sisters spend so much time at each other's throats. That drives me buggo. More proof of the void in my life, I think...I never really articulated why sibling rivalry, or just one sib beating the crap out of another for no real reason, bothered me so much. I'm sure I would have said that anybody beating the crap out of anybody bothered me--which was, and is, true. But when it's brothers and sisters chonging away on each other, somehow that's worse. I mean, you're treating your brother like shit...and I don't even have one. Anymore.
And just when I'd convince myself that sibling rivalry was an inevitable part of having siblings--that every once in a while, for reasons unknowable, you had to punch Bro in the gut, or push your sister down the stairs--I'd be confronted with the exact opposite. I've since been led to understand that it's axiomatic: I can beat up my brother, but don't you dare say so much as one bad world about him, or I'll kick your ass.
Admirable, I suppose. But I still don't get it. Do you really think your sister cares whether you're the one punching her, as opposed to some kid who lives down the lane? Ah, yes, that's my brother. He hits me because he loves me. Tell me how that makes any sense at all.

In all my life, I've run across exactly two sets of siblings who seemed to treat each other like human beings most if not all of the time. Interestingly, they were both twins. I went to school with twin brothers Dirk and Jeff in eighth grade. They were teased mercilessly--bringing matching briefcases to school probably didn't help matters much--but through it all they never turned on each other, at least that I saw...and their shared mellow personality suggests to me they couldn't have, even if they had wanted to.

Much later, I met (and fell a little in love with) Pam and Pat. Talk about identical--one wore mostly browns and the other blues and for all I know they switched every other day because I couldn't tell 'em apart any other way. They were each other's best friends, and it showed. I couldn't imagine either of them angry at anyone, much less each other.

But if I ask anyone else about their relationship with their brother or sister when they were kids, I get horror stories, some of them positively blood-curdling. Chasing your brother around the block, armed with a knife. Breaking your sister's hand. Drawing a bath for your sister and substituting Comet in place of bubble bath. Fights, name-calling, nasty pranks--most of this stuff I wouldn't do to my worst enemy, let alone a friend, let alone anybody I'm related to.

But it's normal. Why? It just is. If that's what having brothers is all about, maybe I'm glad I'm an only child.

Except I'd like to think there's more to it than that. Certainly there would have been in my house. And that's why, when you get right down to it, I miss growing up without Monty there. Things might have turned out differently. I imagine it would have been easier for me to make friends...but, then again, perhaps I would have adopted a "my brother and I against the world" mentality and shunned everyone else. Either way, my life would have been enriched.

If there's some essence out there who was once my brother...Monty, I shared a womb with you. I wish I could have shared a life.