I am here today to honor that most infamous member of the family unit. Some of you may have extensive experience with this particular family member. Others of you may have never had the pleasure of such loving relations. Some of you might even BE this family member. I am here today to give praise to the bossy, know-it-all, older sibling.
This is someone who, quite possibly, may have rubbed you the wrong way very very recently, thereby inadvertently sealing his/her fate as the honoree of your latest speech for which you were just struggling to find a suitable topic.
I’m not talking older sibling, as in a couple years older. I’m talking several years older. Perhaps as much as a decade and a year older. The kind of sibling that is old enough to hold your newly delivered infant body in their arms without your parents worrying about him or her dropping you on your head, although I wouldn’t put it past this older sibling.
This is the sibling that somehow blamed you, the innocent younger sibling for their nonexistent high school social life because they always had to baby sit you. The sibling who you were supposed to look up to and want to emulate, but did such a great job of torturing you day in and day out, all the while portraying themselves as the angelic, caring, protective older sibling to your parents, that they suffered not from having an adoring younger sibling such as yourself as their ever present shadow.
This sibling relished in bossing you around and calling you by all three of your given names at once, as if practicing to one day take your parent’s place as authority over your entire life. You know the one that knows everything and has the confidence and fortitude to chastise you in public in order to teach you a lesson. So much so that they carry this self appointed position as your very own Emily Post right on into your adulthood.
Cheers to you, bossy, older sibling. If it weren’t for you, we younger siblings of the world would probably be a little more well adjusted, a little more trusting of our fellow man, and all around happier people.
