- Drugs
It’s late at night and they’re all yelling again.
I think to myself, “Just focus on your video games. Focus on your music. Ignore them all. Block it out.”
My brother came home late again. He lied about where he was going. No kidding. I’m starting to question why Mom and Dad keep letting him leave the house. He took money he wasn’t supposed to. He bought more drugs. Dad is yelling about how he’s going to kick him out of the house. Same old, same old.
That’s how it was. I was maybe 12 or 13 years old at the time that these events began to regularly take place. My father would yell, my brother would yell, my mother would try not to yell. I tried not to yell. Oftentimes, however, I did.
I would join in and demand to know why my voice was not being heard. I would frequently interject with questions about myself.
“What about me?”
My parents spent more time paying attention to my brother’s drug habits than they did to me.
Eventually, my brother did go to treatment. And this made money tight. Treatment for addicts is not cheap. Neither are plane tickets to California. I felt shafted.
However, my parents still managed to send me to a private boarding school to help my grades in high school, and they are currently funding my college education. Best of all, my brother has been clean for more than two years now and it’s great to have him back again.
I hate to think about how it must be for other kids out there.
What if their parents can’t afford to send them to college? What if their older siblings never get clean? Did they also find themselves being the more mature sibling at some point? These are all questions I have asked myself before.
I theorize that there are many different situations out there, and many other young men and women who can relate to my story.
Addiction sucks for younger siblings.