Dear Little Brother,

On September 3, 1986, you were Born in the wee hours of the morning.  I met you after school that day, swaddled in hospital linens, all fuzzy head and navy blue eyes, and I fell in love for the first time.

When you were very small, I took care of you.  I was quite convinced that you had been born into a family with not one but two mothers, and I took my maternal responsibilities very seriously.  I fed you and bathed you and read to you, and was usually pretty patient and mature about the whole thing, except for the time you burped up formula all down my nightshirt, and then you were your mother’s son and I was a screeching, indignant eight year old, stripping in the kitchen, running for a cloth to clean up the mess.

You used to wake me up in the morning by sitting on my stomach and laughing hysterically, and you did funny toddler things like sit in my laundry basket or my bottom desk drawer.  I took you places and we did things together, and when you were Older we manipulated our parents into buying us a good $20,000 or so worth of pizza.  We even invented a sacred, coded promise, known only to us and our parents and used even to this day despite the fact that I am 37 and you are 29.  We were a good team.

As I got older, and became a teenager and then a young adult, our different ages and genders and personalities created some distance between us.  And I became someone you barely recognized, stormy and melodramatic and entirely unpredictable.  I was becoming more Bipolar, and more difficult to be around.

Moving away to university and getting Married only made things worse.  Suddenly, you were a seventeen year old who thought he knew everything, I was a twenty four year old with bills to pay who KNEW she knew everything, and a giant case of bipolar disorder and sibling rivalry pushed us further away from each other still.

Now you are getting married, to the most wonderful girl you could possibly have chosen. Both of us have grown up and realized we don’t know as much as we thought we did, and that understanding each other will take a lifetime.  We are building now, I think, a relationship based on respect, on maturity, on friendship, and listening to each other.

I just want you to know that however far from you I seemed to go, however angry I may have gotten, you were always in my heart.  You have always been, and will always be, my baby brother.  Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, I am always on your side.  I loved you from the moment I laid eyes on you.  And I’m glad you are giving me a second chance.

All my love always,

Adele