My brother and I hit/slapped/punched/pummeled each other until we were far too old to be doing such a thing. My mother thought it would never end. I remember being 14 years old and going after him with a firepoker. He held my face in the snow until I sobbed when I was 15. I knocked his tooth out in a particularly feisty altercation. (A pattern, it seems…) In high school I learned very quickly to not fall asleep on the couch; BabyBro would take a running start and all 250 pounds of him would come crashing on my back. I was heavy and stubborn as an ox; he was the captain of the football team and outweighed me by….a lot. We definitely broke some things.
We never really got along and I cannot remember a time when we didn’t fight. I think being so incredibly different made us natural adversaries. He was popular, I was not. I excelled in school, he struggled. I was brimming with opinions, he was always a people pleaser. The fact that we were 11 months apart didn’t help. If I had a dime for every time a teacher said “I cannot believe BabyBro is your brother!”
Despite all the physical nonsense, the words were always more hurtful. He coined my middle school nickname, “The Beast”. I would walk on the bus and hear “Beeeeasssst”. Sometimes, it would take a Spanish flavor and morph into “La Beastia”. He also was the brains behind “Titty Mamma” and “Helen Keller” (as in my acne was so bad you could read braile off my forehead).
My retort? To all of this? It was always the same. “You were a mistake.” Now, let’s be honest; he was an accident. No one has a kid in January and actively tries to have another one by January, but that was what happened with me and my brother. Wires got…crossed. So, while my parent’s did want to have more than one kid, I speak the truth when I say they didn’t want him so damn soon. So yes, my only response to all my brother’s taunting was to remind him his existence was an accident.
As an older, more mature adult (stop laughing) I actually feel pretty awful about the years I spent calling BabyBro a mistake. I mean, you make a mistake on a math test or on a spreadsheet; a person isn’t a mistake. Then again, I like to think I am not a beast…
You wanna see a mistake? Look below, kids. This was my attempt at pasta from scratch…and, yeah. It was not so good. I tried to hand roll it and it just didn’t get thin enough. Now, it was entirely edible, but I would never serve it to a guest. It was thick and a bit gummy….just an all around disappointment. Such a sad mistake this was…but hey, accidents happen.
I’m 18 months older than my brother who’s 13 months older than our youngest brother. Our fights growing up were legen…wait for it…dary. And always 2-on1 (there was no Switzerland in our house). I don’t think we stopped beating the crap out of each other until we were in high school. Basically, we came to the realization that, if we kept it up, someone was definitely going to get hurt.
That is why we stopped…we were truly starting to hurt each other.
this one strikes a bit of a chord with me not only because i have come to heart you tremendously, and think this treatment by babybro is pretty nasty, but because i KNOW him. it’s weird to know that someone you are friends with has treated a NEW someone you are friends with like this.
hopefully for you both, bygones can be bygones…
Bygones are bygones. We were kids. Kids are mean little shits.
I finally got my mother to admit I was “unplanned” over Christmas. Seriously, I was born two weeks before their first wedding anniversary… no one’s buying that.
Love the honesty, lady. Kids are cruel as hell, but you ARE a beautiful and (more) mature woman now.
Unplanned but wanted I am sure. How did our parents not know about birth control???
What are siblings for if not to be dysfunctional and the endless source of Eugene O’Neill type plays?
On something completely unrelated but since I couldn’t locate an e-mail address, here is a link to your worst culinary nightmare. And it is sweeping the nation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/dining/28bacon.html?8dpc
That is wrong on about 10 levels.
We’re great now, but my younger brother once told me I was adopted. Shouldn’t have worked. But paired with the fact that the only copy of my birth certificate I could find in the house was issued 6 years after my birth, it got to me. He also once stuck a pencil in my forearm while we were fighting. But I’m sure he could tell some horror stories about me, too.
Whoa-are you one of these people who has lead in their bodies?
@jman: that ingredient was surprisingly idolized in 2008. i mean, salt never had a year like that. but anyway, that looks amazing.
I cannot get behind it. I will not.
Ouch. Siblings are usually the worst tormentors, aren’t they?
I cannot even print what my older sister used to call me; take a facial feature and add a racial slur to it. So so so not okay.
Oh well. I grew out of my facial slur, and she, well, she just grew. Karma, yo.
Oh snap. Loves me some karma.
Your relationship w/your brother sounds eerily familiar. Although, these days we get along just fine.
It took us foreeever.
We all torture our siblings. it is in the rules.
Your brother was not a mistake, he just came earlier than planned. As far as birth control, I couldn’t go back on the pill so soon after you were born and well, ok, he just came earlier than was planned, but he was never a mistake. I love you both so just knock it off before I send you to your room!
I think I said that…earlier than planned.
Luckily, sometimes when we torment our younger siblings (such as stabbing them in the face with a lead pencil. Yes. I did) they conveniently forget about such traumas and friendships flourish in their place. =-) Seriously…even though I know some mistakes carry long-winded ramifications, sometimes it’s the mistakes that make things ultimately better, you know?
Oh, could not agree more. I have learned from my mistakes, that is for sure.
I believe the expression to describe less-than-a-year-apart siblings like you and your brother is “Irish Twins.”
That firepoker incident sounds especially interesting.
Peter
Irish twins indeed. 1981 was a big year for MamaBear.
@Lilu: Our parents told us all three children were unplanned. Ouch! I was born 10 months after my parents wedding date. We confirmed it by seeing the JoP document.
I am the oldest by 3 years and 5 years. My brother as the middle child was kind of unhappy because he always got my second hand stuff. But he mellowed out at college because I was paying for half his new crap by then. Sis was fairly content because she’s a girl and had to get new stuff and when you got hand me downs, like the old family car, was happy just to have a car.
Lemm, I had a experience in school. There was a kid who was also Asian named Tom with the same last name as me and 2 grades ahead. Every teacher through high school always asked “Are you Tom’s brother? No? Well he was the best!” I’m surprised I didn’t get committed to the asylum after a few years.
Aww, Tony. You are the best. Sometimes teachers don’t think.
My favorite was beating my sister mercilessly while screaming, “Mom! She’s hurting me!”
Funny. Mom never came.
Man, mom hung her out to dry.
Siblings are SUPPOSED to torment each other, I have two brothers who were constantly beating the crap out of each other…my older brother had a fire hot temper as a kid and my younger brother couldn’t resist poking a sleeping tiger. To this day, and I’m 27 now, I still run past my brothers and give them a wet willy and then taunt them with “I’m a girl, you can’t hit me na na boo boo.”
Heya Ruby-welcome to the party. Yes, siblings exist for torture.
Keep at it. In no time you are going to be rolling out noodles like Lidia Bastianich! Have you watched that woman make pasta? Whoa!
She is so good…I am in awe of her.
They have excellent pasta rollers at Ross for under $20. Invest! I did and I love mine!
Hey Lola, welcome and thanks for the tip.
My sister and I used to fight viciously. The most memorable fight was one afternoon when I was 16 and she was 18. I had to restrain myself from beating her to a pulp (she’s 5 inches shorter and 30 pounds lighter than me) while she pulled my hair and bit me. I later drove to my best friend’s house and my hair kept falling out for a good hour and I had a bruise with teeth marks around it on my arm.
I have no idea how bad it would have been if BabyBro were a sister…he tended to instigate the fighting, so maybe I would have had a peaceful household.
I think I stopped fighting with my brother at a much younger age, but we used to bicker a lot when we lived in the same house.
I gotta say though, hurtful as your BabyBro was, the “Hellen Keller” nickname is pretty clever.
My brother-in-law makes pasta from scratch and is always amazing. He does it everything by hand, and it comes out perfect every time (for the record, he is NOT a cook, and aside from BBQ, he doesn’t do anything else).
Yeah, Helen Keller was smart…gotta admit. And I think once you have a feel for pasta, you can get it.
You need one of the these:
http://images.surlatable.com/surlatable/images/en_US/local/products/detail/397208v1.jpg
Indeed I do…a gal can dream.
My friend once dated a girl in high school that I nicknamed “The Beast.” She didn’t like that nickname very much either.
You are such a jerk.
hehe…reminds me of me and my brother years ago. I was the one hitting/slapping/punching back then.
Now I can’t even dream about it, he’s twice my size.
I miss the power.
besos.
He is also twice my size now.
My younger brother and I are 2 years apart. Close enough that we usually skipped name-calling and just started throwing punches when things got uncivil.
Second-worst beatdown I ever gave someone while I was growing up? My younger brother. (And I *still* feel guilty about that one.)
Worst beatdown? A kid my age who thumped my little brother pretty good. My brother may have been a little punk, but family’s family.
Yeah, you never, ever fuck with family. He had it coming.
My younger brother and I didn’t have too many of the same teachers, but when we did, they’d always compare him to me (since I’d been through first). One year, he got so tired of it that when they were filling out papers on the first day with names, addresses, etc and the teacher asked them to write down anything else they thought was important, he wrote: “I am NOT my sister.”
I felt bad that he thought he had to do it, but also kind of proud that nipped it in the bud that time.
That is pretty awesome and clever for a kid. Good on him.
My sister and I represent the opposite extremes of family planning: I was born nine months EXACTLY after my father finished grad school and got a job.
My sister was born 7 years later, after my parents were comped a bottle of champagne and an upgrade to a suite with a hot tub by the resort they went to on their 12th anniversary.
Damn you, Scottsdale Cottonwoods Resort. Damn you to hell.
Wow. That is…some forethought.
I went through most of elementary school with a boy named Kirk in my classes. He had a brother named Eric who was one year older and attended the same school. The boys looked enough like each other that they almost could be taken for twins, and their names were similar enough to be easily confused. Most of the teachers in the classes I had with Kirk had had Eric during the previous year.
You can guess where this is going. Teachers incessantly called Kirk “Eric,” sometimes making the mistake more than once a day. A couple of them never seemed able to get it right. Kirk was pretty good about it, but it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to realize that the confusion wasn’t good for his sense of identity.
Peter
That has to be hard. As if finding yourself is not tricky enough when you are in high school…
Awww, Irish Twins! My sis and I are the same way… a year and nine months apart (to the DAY… I try not to think about it) and used to fight like cats and dogs.
She was the dog, obviously.
The cats are meaner, I hear.
I’m an only child, which means instead of sibling beatings, I talk to myself, an affliction common to my kind.
Homemade pasta is sort of the holy grail of the home cook. Almost every home cook I know, particularily if they don’t come from a traditional italian background, tries and fails at homemade pasta. It’s even more irritating because Mario Batali had a Food network show years ago and he could whip up a batch of beautiful hand made pasta in under five minutes.
I know-that is why I made it. He made it look like a freaking snap. What an asshole.
If you feel “prettyh bad” about calling your brother a mistake, why are you publicly calling him an “accident” on your blog, where anyone can read it? I know I’ve been typecast as some rude “troll,” but I guarantee I would ask you that question to your face any day and no one would accuse me of being rude.
Oh…commenting from another IP. Tricky! Gotta block you on this one as well.
Look dude, my mom has no issue with this. She commented! It is a family joke. We have been emailing this morning and no one in my family takes offense to this. This blog is about my journey, my faults, and my growth.
Have a nice day.
this post made me laugh. my little bro is seven years younger so while we never had any real fights. however we were both wrestlemania fans so i had some fun bodyslamming him on his bed, while he (tried to) clothesline me. he got to be a little taller than me when he turned 16 so that naturally stopped. now we just talk smack about our favorite baseball teams.
i found your blog through arjewtino’s; good stuff. i like any blog with food, humor, and talk of cleavage.
Welcome dan-E. You have come to the right place.
I’ve never heard of Irish twins, but the phrase is making me giggle. My 3 sisters and I are all spaced 18 months apart, corresponding to my dad’s returns from deployment (he was in the Marines).
We had some pretty viscious fights, too…but we always presented a united front outside of the family. I think that comes from the constant relocation.
Right, we always banned together when we really needed it.
what he said to you was WAY worse than what you said about him.
i think all siblings are horrible to each other. that’s why I’m glad I never lived with my sister.
I think it all evened out, really.
5 older brothers. Need I say more?
Holy CHRIST-you must have taken some beatings.
My brother and I would fight so long and hard that we would call “Break” and go drink a 16oz Coke. We would then immediately start back at it. Ahhh…good times!
Fighting as sport-love it.
I made some homemade raviolis and pasta is no fucking joke. I don’t have a nifty pasta machine either. Rolling pins are for the strong at heart.
My sister was a really annoying but adorable child. We got along better when she erupted in acne and got braces. You have to level the playing field. Nature finds a way.
I shall try again. I will not be defeated, god dammit.
My brother hit my in the head with a baseball bat. I got back at him by giving him a wedgie.
Damn, he won out on that.
You definitely came out the loser here…sorry.
Awwwww . . . chin up on the pasta front . . . you can make pasta at home without a machine, but the only good form it can take, in my view, is lasagna noodles, because they’re supposed to be thick. It looks like you were trying to make pappardelle, which you do need a pasta roller to get thin enough.
So yeah, three large eggs and two cups of all-purpose flour is all you need. Beat the eggs a bit. If you have a food processor, put the flour in the food processor, turn it on and then add the eggs gradually through the feeder tube. The texture should transform from flour to a course-sand-like appearance to larger orbs and finally come together into one big ball, at which time you turn off the processor. If it fails to come together as a ball, add water by the half teaspoon, with the food processor running, until it comes together. Once it forms a ball, knead it for about two minutes on flour-dusted surface for about two minutes.
If you don’t have a food processor, put the flour in a pile on a cutting board, make a hole in the middle, and gradually add the egg, mixing with a fork until all of the egg is incorporated and you can knead by hand for about 10 minutes.
Once the dough is done, wrap it tightly in plastic and let it relax in the fridge for 30 minutes.
Then roll it out using a rolling pin or wine bottle as thin as you can get it. For lasagna, there’s no need to boil it. Just build your lasagna with the fresh egg pasta and bake.
These are such great tips. Thank you so much. The recipe I used did not suggest relaxing the dough. I think that would help a ton.
When I screw up anything dough-like I blame it on the humidity.
Your treatment of your baby bro is pretty benign I’d maintain the “mistake” mantra after all it is the role of #1 to keep #2 down. Even in adulthood (kidding people), hell my sister was 12 before she finally realized she wasn’t actually found under the large rock in the garden.
I can’t wait to see Take 2 of your scratch pasta.
Yeah, I am certainly not the first person to call their younger sib a mistake.
Ay. I often think my family dynamic is so different than most because there are 4 of us kids and we are all so close in age. We are more like the Kardashians…bff who torture each other in a loving, schmoopy way.
So when we fought it was like “I hate you! You stupid MORON” and then five minutes later. “I’m sorry-love you—wanna go to the movies?”
The massive fighting in my family came from my 3rd sister and the youngest…my brother when they were very little. Me and my other sister would just stare in awe of their fighting. They are great pals now though.
Although none us ever got to use the “adopted line” bc we all definitely look related…or the “accident” line because my dad wanted SEVEN kids and my mom four. So we knew even if not planned, each one they were like “yeaaa! a baby!”
Ah, that line reminds me of that Meryl Streep movie where a dingo ATE her baby. That was horrible.
Wait…there was a movie where someone ate Meryl Streeps’s baby?! How awful. Awfully hilarious.
My sister’s name is Skye, I used to tell her she was named after the kind of terrier, because, um, she looked like one.
Then again, she’s much bigger than me, so she won every fight. Tradeoffs, I guess.
I never knew there was such a thing as a skye terrier. I like learning things.
A Cry in the Dark. Its a sad movie about a real life case in Australia where a woman claimed a dingo ate her baby while on an outback vacation… but the authorities said she made it up and put her on trial. But it really wasn’t her. She didn’t do it (if I remember correctly).
Her famous line was “A dingo ate my baby!!”
She had a great accent…very spot on.
I have heard that line before. I just didn’t know MS uttered it. Wow. That Meryl, she sure is a chameleon.
Is it odd that I find this hilarious? Only because I have three older brothers and the way they would wrestle to the point where they’d get rug burns was always something that amused me. Of course now that we’re older, we’re much more mature with eachother. Ahem.
Oh I am sure you are the picture of maturity.
I think it’s kind of sad that ansel is being banned. I really enjoyed his insightful commentary, plus dissent keeps it spicy!
I went back and forth on this George, but there have been other comments that just weren’t kosher in my book. I think there is definitely dissent here-and sometimes I think he has valid points-but the way he goes about expressing his opinions is unacceptable in my book. Also, he says he would say some of this stuff to my face but he uses a fake email address and accesses me through proxies. To me, that is cowardly and the antithesis of owning your words.
Serious parenting question here.
Is there any intervention your parents did/tried/could have used to dampen down the hurtful words and assaults?
Hey jz, welcome. My parents did try to stop us; we were always punished if caught and separated when hitting each other. We were definitely grounded, shown consequences to our actions, etc. I truly believe if people would not have compared us as much we would not have had such a contentious relationship. In retrospect, I don’t know what more could have been done.
Let’s face it, not everything turns out well. Sometimes it’s as simple as the particular type of flour. Did you roll this out with a pasta maker machine?
I used a rolling pin; I think this is where I failed.
Siblings are always truly horrible to each other when they’re young. It’s inevitable. The lovely thing is, you’ve both grown past it.
We have, thankfully.
You summed that up very well. Sibling relationships are tough, my five brothers and I fought a lot. Strangely it did lead to us respecting each other more in the long run. It appears this has happened with your BabyBro too. For the record my younger bro by three years has always been much bigger than me. I always refer to him as YoungerBro and not LittleBro for that very reason. He was also a football guy.
5 brothers. Wow, I cannot even imagine.
I too got into physical altercations with my younger bro for far longer than is socially acceptable. Sometimes they were all out, throw downs. And on several occasions, baby teeth were knocked out. This, however, was usually looked on as a positive thing, since it meant an early visit from the Tooth Fairy.
Which now seems a little messed up, now that I think about it…
I think it is fiscally quite smart.