My little brother and his family drive me absolutely insane. I love them, I really do, but…insane. My brother is the only sibling I have, and so he “gets” me in a way that no one else possibly can. Some of the things that I do that drive other people (see: my husband) insane seem totally normal to my brother. There are things that I just don’t have to explain - he just knows where I’m coming from.
The truth is that he is now and always will be my little brother, and I really want to protect him and take care of him and make sure that he has what he needs. Unfortunately, he’s also in his thirties and married with kids of his own, and he’s free to make his own mistakes and ignore my advice just like he always has. And he does, and it drives me up a wall. I’m glad he still listens to what I say, even if he’s going to ignore it later, but it’s hard to watch him make mistakes that I see coming miles away.
We had dinner with him and the kids tonight to celebrate his two older kids’ birthdays (both on the 27th - the oldest will be six and my niece will be five) and catch up with him before he heads back to Georgia. Things have been really tough for him lately. Not my story to tell, by a long shot, but when a story starts with “The good news is that you won’t be deploying with your unit to Iraq; the bad news is that you might have MS or a brain tumor…” and pretty much goes downhill from there, you can see that life isn’t easy for them right now.
We’re as supportive as we can be - a lot of their troubles are of their own making, but they have plenty of troubles that aren’t. I think at some point you just give up; you feel as if nothing you do makes things better anyway, so why bother? Unfortunately it’s hard to argue with that perspective, and we’re pretty limited in what we could do to help them anyway. All I can do is hope that being here for them is enough and that their luck takes a hard turn for the better really soon.