When I was in high school, I remember mentally tallying the days until I would be free from the death grip of my parents and move into my dorm. I salivated at the thought of living two and a half hours away - away from all of the annoyances that come with living at home with your family - the fights about having to eat the dry chicken mom slaved all day cooking, who will pick up the dog shit, whose turn it was to drive grandma to get her hair done and listen to her whine about the appliances that don't work in her condo (all of which really do).
Here I am four years later and against everyone's advice and my own sensibility - I am moving in with a member of my family as a senior. I can wave goodbye to opposite-sex sleepovers, cooking in my favorite boy shorts and peeing with the door wide open.
But I can blame only myself, since it was actually my idea.
Thankfully, my roommate with not be my mood-swinging mother or my extremely money-conscious father, but my own little brother.
My brother, who I lovingly call by his nickname Boof, (a moniker which is now tattooed in Old English lettering on his back) is attending MATC and living with me so he too can escape the death grip of the 'rents.
Part of me is scared. It's not that I don't love my brother, because I do. After all, he is literally a piece of me, and we all know how I feel about myself.
It's just that I never expected my brother to come into adulthood with me. I never thought that my little brother would one day grow up to be a man, a man douses his hairy armpits with Axe, a man who surfs the internet for porn, a man who wants nothing more than to one day become a world renowned rapper.
Now this man is moving into my windowless basement, and I am not sure how to see him. I only recently realized Boof was an actual person, and not just a childhood plaything frozen at age 5. It's hard to grasp that he is no longer a perpetual annoyance who I can regress back into childhood with and dress him up as a girl or play video games with until I throw a controller at his head.
Now, I can no longer protect him, as I have no upper-body strength. I can no longer beat him up, as I have no upper-body strength. I can no longer boss him around, make him hide for hours in a laundry hamper for no apparent reason, or force him to play Let's Pee in a Bucket and Pour it on the Neighbors.
But now we will be playing a game we are very much familiar with, one of my personal childhood favorites: House.
When we were little, my cousins, Boof and I would compete for each different role in the house. I wanted to be the cool daughter expecting a baby, that would pop out later that afternoon, and worked at the Fisher-Price McDonald's stand I got for my sixth birthday. My brother usually fought me for the same Rebellious-Pregnant-Teenager role in our make-believe-already-fucked-up family.
This time around our House is different. There will be no plastic food items, water babies to breastfeed, and I don't think at ages 3 and 6 we ever expected to shack up with a gay man later in
life.
Although it annoyed me that Boof used to drink the fluid out of my waterbaby, steal my dance recital outfits and declare himself the Cool Knocked-Up
Older Sister, I like to think now Boof was looking up to me and wanted to copy everything I did ... even if it required him having to wear my mom's lipstick, high-heeled shoes and have an inflated balloon for a pregnant belly.
And if that's the case, my brother really hasn't changed much since he was 5 years old. He's still following my path, tugging at the bottom of my play dress and asking if it's his turn to wear it.
If you know anyone who can get Boof a fake ID or a hook-up with some famous rappers, e-mail Ashley at aaspencer@wisc.edu.
