Categories: uncategorized
Date: 05 July 2010 09:39:33
I learnt to ride a bike. We spent a good chunk of Saturday getting my daughter over the immense hurdle of believing that she could actually ride by herself. She's ridden without stabilizers before, but not enough, or often enough, to build up her confidence, so on Saturday we invested the time to keep her going long enough to trigger that belief. Hopefully. We'll see when we next take her out on her bike. And naturally it got me thinking back to when I learnt. Standing there, bent over my daughter at the angle best calculated to cause back pain that just had to be endured because there was no way I would let go of her and risk demolishing the confidence I was so carefully building up, I found myself wondering if this was necessarily a parent's lot. And it came back to me that my parents didn't teach me to ride, my brother did. (Along, to be fair, with one of his mates). That is the only memory I have of my big brother doing something for me, of the sort that big brothers are supposed to do. (Oh no, wait, there is another dim recollection coming back to me: my brother took me to the cinema to see Star Wars when it first came out. That time, I know, was because my parents pressured him into it, because they weren't prepared to go. Draw your own conclusions about my parents from that. I wonder if the bike-learning came about in the same way). Most of my friends that have siblings have similarly low opinions of their siblings. Actually not many of my friends have older siblings which, I suppose, makes a big difference. But I wonder how this stereotype of what the good big brother (or sister) should be like came about. The big bro is supposed to be cool, an expert on life ready to teach you the most important lessons, and ready to tell you what to think about this band or that film or this movie-star or that shop, and so on. Yet I wonder what the big bro thinks about this, and what he thinks he is doing. It can't be too cool for the big bro to be hanging around with little bro (or sis). And it's actually quite pathetic if the person big bro gets to influence is little bro. If the only person that big bro gets to persuade about how great this band is, and how lousy that film is, is little bro, then something's not quite right, is it. And I suppose that's getting to the heart of it. Big bro teaches little bro as a way of bigging himself up. In having that captive, attentive audience, big bro persuades himself of his own importance. I could carry on, but baah, what do I know - I'm not a big bro. There's a thousand older siblings out there who'll tell me I don't understand. And a thousand younger siblings who'll start wondering if maybe I have a point but who'll then go and ask big bro to tell them what to think. It's a silly thing, but I'm starting to think that the world divides into younger siblings and older siblings. That your point of view on the world is shaped more by your birth position than many other factors, but that we don't often remember that fact. I wonder.