Growing up with a brother a year older than myself, and a sister a year younger meant that there was always someone to play with. Playing games like getting tied to a tree while my older brother had adventures was a popular one until mum caught on. Playing dress ups with my sister was almost as popular.

Sometimes I really do wonder how my mum did it, she had 4 children who weren’t of school age, and one of them was a newborn. To add to her stress my dad’s job as an executive of a company that had contracts with different governments around the world meant that he was out of the country on a regular basis, two weeks here, a month in South America, two months here, two weeks going around Europe.

As a result of raising 4 children with part time help from dad meant that my mother attended a lot of play groups and mothers groups, there wouldn’t have been a week go by where we didn’t attend children’s hour at the local library. She rarely used a baby sitter, purely because there was just too much mayhem for her to feel capable of going out.

From a young age I had learned that older brothers exist for protection, if another child at play group was being cruel, he would take care of it, and push the bully over in the sand pit, this only had to happen twice before other children learned to play nice. This doesn’t meant that older brothers have to be nice to you, but rather just didn’t let anyone else be mean.

The new baby was different though, I mean, sure it was exciting and all that at first, and I think my reaction to getting a new baby sister on my birthday was really sweet. However she was not one of us, she was just too little, she couldn’t play with us in the sandpit, and she didn’t really do anything interesting. I wish I could write that I was the perfect big sister to her, but the truth is, she was barely even a blip on my radar, rating in importance somewhere below the family cat.

I know that is a horrible thing to say, but the thing is, I can’t just write “and thats another time when I was absolutely perfect”, but a lot of good that would do, when writing my story is meant to be cathartic. I wouldn’t be able to believe myself, or even worse I would have to be completely delusional to believe myself.