We say our names differently

I met my two younger brothers a few weeks ago. Most people know who their siblings are because they grow up in the same house with them, or at least in the same vicinity. But at 32 years old, I met two new brothers — bringing my grand total of brothers to four.

Our family is like a complicated word problem. There is me and the brother that have the same mom and same dad. There is the oldest one who has the same mom and a different dad. There are the younger ones who have the same dad and a different mom. I’m in the middle.

It’s weird realizing you’re actually the middle child at 32. I was raised as the youngest. And I act like the youngest. I don’t actually know how to be a big sister. I asked for tips from my friends that have younger siblings. Based on my experience, being an older sibling means paying for things, driving people places, and occasionally being mean for no reason and stealing your younger sibling’s food. I don’t know if any of that applies when you become a big sister at 32, though. I did pay for things, but I’m not mean, I don’t typically steal food, and me driving is not recommended even under the best of circumstances.

When I was 17, I found out that I had two younger brothers. I knew very little about them, only their approximate age and that they lived with my dad in Pittsburgh. I wasn’t even really curious at that age, too full of anger still at my father for abandoning me. At that time, I didn’t even have the emotional wherewithal to put together that he didn’t just abandon us, he chose another family entirely. Usually a deadbeat dad is a deadbeat through and through. Not mine. Mine was a selective deadbeat and his behavior in that realm only applied to me and one of my brothers. It only applied to his first-born children.

Looking at it with 15 years of maturity on me, the main thing I feel is deep sadness for my mother. My mother who loved a man, married a man, had children with a man who in the end was never actually all that interested in any kind of life with her. My parents story and my origin story, inextricably linked as they are, remain a relative mystery to me. I think they loved each other. I know my mom loved my dad. I know that my brother and I were a result of the fraught union. I know my dad never lived with my mom and instead lived with his two cousins —one of whom was actually his wife? Fiancé? From Nigeria. She was also my godmother.

Yes. My dad, while legally married to my mom, had his second/additional wife stand up in a church before God, hold me in her arms and witness the washing away of my original sin. My mother stood by watching, not knowing at the time that this woman would later become the mother of his second family. The family he chose.

My brothers, the ones I just met, are lovely people. Curious, smart, interesting. They don’t seem to hold anger toward me or my brother, and overall meeting them was absolutely incredible. I was so nervous. The older one arrived before the younger one and while I waited for him at the train station I felt all loopy. But not mentally, my heart felt loopy. Like someone was washing it on the delicate cycle — not so rough that it hurt, but enough movement that I had to steady myself.

Meeting family is one thing. Meeting someone who shares a parent with you is another. You look at things differently, checking for family resemblance, both physically and behaviorally. The weirdest thing though, was that they had stories about my dad.

They know my dad. They grew up with him. They do not know a life without him. They do not know a life where he wasn’t physically present in their lives. He drove them places. He helped them with their homework. When the younger brother wasn’t sure if he could make the trip to Chicago, he had his dad buy him a last minute flight. I would never, ever ask my father to buy me anything. Have never depended on him for anything.

When I was 8 years old, I was sitting in the middle of the living room floor playing with an Etch-a-Sketch when my dad called. Every once in a while, he’d call. My mom answered and talked to him for a few minutes. Then he asked to speak to me. My mom held her hand out to me, with the phone grasped loosely in her fingers, and I looked up and said, “No, I don’t want to talk to him.” She communicated this message to him, and he replied that she had told me to say that. Which is comical beyond measure. What really happened was that at 8 years old, I realized that he was full of shit. And I was not having it.

The realization I had at 8, I saw playing across my younger brothers’ faces while they were in Chicago. How must it feel to know that the man who raised you, also abandoned two other whole human beings? I can’t imagine the feeling. What I do know is I felt remarkably calm. My story is mine, and it’s kind of incredible. We’re each intertwined with each other in some way. In many ways. We do share mannerisms and behaviors. We look alike. But we were shaped by very different narratives from the same source. Even individually, my relationship with my father and my brother who shares both parents with me is different. Markedly so.

I don’t speak to my father. I didn’t even realize I didn’t speak to him anymore until the younger brother asked me the last time I spoke to our dad and I paused, thought about it, and came up with sometime in 2016, I believe. Three years. I only spoke to him on the phone a couple of times a year prior to that, but when my life started shifting. When I left my husband, when I began learning who I was on my own as an adult, when I moved to London, I didn’t bring him with me. It wasn’t deliberate, it was like a reaction. Like someone hit my knee and it jerked up involuntarily. My life pushed him out for me, on my behalf certainly, but without my knowledge.

My brother is named after my dad. I’m named after my dad’s mother, my grandmother. And all four of us have the same last name. But we say it differently. Long ‘e’ versus short ‘e'. We have the same. last. name. And we don’t even pronounce it the same.