youthmystique

When I was about 8, I wanted to wear glasses even though I didn’t need them. My brother, my mom and my dad all wore glasses and I guess I wanted to be like them. I wanted to feel older.

I used to play a restaurant game with my grandparents. It was fun to make imaginary dishes and “serve” them to my grandparents.

Of course when you’re younger, you can’t wait to get a car and cruise around town.

All of these wants, wants to grow older, turned out not to be as fun as I had imagined. Having glasses can get you teased at school. I don’t remember getting called a geek while I first started wearing glasses in middle school, but it didn’t exactly help my self esteem. I recall my brother calling me a nerd. Pretty sure he did.

I ended up working in several restaurants when I was a teen. I worked as a smorgasbord, Friendly’s and a pizza place near my house.  I was a waitress at two of those places and learned I didn’t like serving people. It was difficult to remember what people needed or wanted. It wasn’t like the restaurant game at all I had played with my grandparents. If I got the order wrong, it meant hardly a tip, an attitude, someone complaining to the manager. And I hated getting the tables where you couldn’t see the people. Some hostesses would seat people in a corner and you couldn’t see that they were there. Of course that put people in cranky moods.

Getting my driver’s license was fun. Getting my first real car was pretty sweet too, but putting up with car payments and car insurance wasn’t. It felt good to finally have a nice car and a car to call my own.

A lot of kids nowadays are wishing to be older, just like I had when I was younger. But unfortunately some kids turn to irresponsible decisions: unprotected sex, drugs, etc. It’s sad to see. Sometimes I wish we could stay young forever and not have to worry about responsibilities. Then again, as you get older, you finally discover the real you; not what others want you to be.

I am the baby of the family and I have an older brother. We are six years apart. Whenever we talk about starting our own families, we always say we want to have our kids closer together.

For a long time, I didn’t enjoy being the younger sister. My brother would tease me about the Boogeyman and could do an exact impersonation of Freddy Krueger. (I’m still scared of Freddy to this day and I’m in my mid-20s!)

Of course I was the little annoying sister. I’d sneak into my brother’s room while he was doing his homework. I would try to kick him. I would break his toys by accident when I was really little like 4 years old.

When my brother was accepted into college, it was hard for me. Although he would tease me, I didn’t want him to leave. He chose a school that was about five or six hours away. I remember after we­—my mom, my dad and I­­– got him settled in his dorm room we waved goodbye with tears in our eyes, we started on our six-hour journey home. I laid down in the backseat of the van with tears streaming down my face. I wanted to be tough, but I just couldn’t.

My brother would come home mostly on holidays. He’d take a train or bus. I remember I would cry after he would board the train or step on the bus. It was horrible being an only child in those years. I missed playing Mortal Combat on Sega with him.

One good thing college did for our relationship is bring us closer. We would catch up a lot on breaks and even do brother and sister things like mini-golf or movie nights.

I can honestly say I like being the younger sister now. There’s a mutual respect between us on top of a lot of great memories. Luckily, he married someone I could become close with too. It’s great to have family members you can talk to when you’re having a bad day.