Twins Ten Years Apart

Mum holds the bairn while a diligent older brother looks on - 1964

Most boys probably want a bicycle for their tenth birthday. A bike or hockey equipment or airplane models or some other boyish-type nod to their boyishness, especially when one already has a younger brother and two little sisters.

When he turned ten, my older older brother got a baby sister. In truth, we all got her, but for him, as good a soul as he is, it would be fair to imagine he was a little dismayed. Until that day, September 21 had belonged solely to him. From 1963 onward, his birthday was a shared event.

It was also closure, in a way. My parents started their family on September 21, 1953, and finished production exactly ten years later – a notable credit to my mother’s organizational skills. Five kids in ten years. Nice and neat and tidy, unless you count the log jam with my older sibs, who were born within four years of each other and were known collectively by my wee sister and me as “the Big Guys”. I shudder to think how they referred to us when the parents weren’t looking. Managing a litter takes some doing, but Mum and Dad pulled it off like professionals. Sure, we indulged in the usual sibling scraps, vying for position and attention within the pack, but to this day, whenever we see each other and no matter how much time has passed since the last meeting, we always embrace warmly and pick up right where we left off. There is great affection among the kids in our clan.

But back to the ten year twins.

Today, my wee sister turns 50. That means my older older brother is 60. She is here on the west coast. He lives on Prince Edward Island. When we all lived in the same house, he was the best older older brother in the world and she was … well, she was “the bairn” and 50 years later, she still is. I’m less sure how she feels about that than how my folks must feel knowing their youngest is now a half-century old and their firstborn is this close to qualifying for CPP. Physical age means nothing, though, except when the aches and pains set in: get the gang in the same room at the same time and we fall into line in the order in which we were born. He has four younger siblings and she has four older siblings. The three in between love them both from different vantage points, but I’m pretty sure we’re all glad we have them.

I know I am.